Explore History, Culture & Writing

Post-Reformation Europe saw endemic warfare and plague. It was also an age of absolutism where royal courts reached their apogee as centres of patronage and splendour.



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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a key text in philosophy. Exciting and influential, it is also a dense and challenging read. This reading reading group aims to help you grasp its arguments and ideas.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

The 1950s was the beginning of the end for the Hollywood studio era, a golden age in place since the 1920s. The fifties are more difficult to pin down than the 1930/40s due to explosive diversity in both subject matter and cinematic technology, the profound influence of WWII, the development of European neorealism and the first signs of the French New Wave. An emphasis on teen culture emerged, represented by the brief career of James Dean. Film stars became anti-heroes. The moguls who founded Hollywood began to disappear. The studio business model was doomed. Hollywood reacted both defensively and creatively, going for broke—and producing some of the finest and most enduring films in its history, films that transformed the culture, from Sunset Blvd. (1950) to Some Like It Hot (1959)—both by Billy Wilder. From The Asphalt Jungle (1950) to The Misfits (1961)— Marilyn Monroe’s first and final films, both directed by John Huston. From Here To Eternity (1953 Fred Zinnemann) to A Place in the Sun (1951 George Stevens, part of his American trilogy). Fifties’ films reflected a darkening America. (See related courses on Fifties Musicals, Melodrama and Film Noir).

Explore the history and legacy of Akhenaten.

The Western Mediterranean, known as ‘Greater Greece’, preserves some of the loveliest art anywhere in the Greek world. Come and discover the role of these colonies in politics & warfare in the Mediterranean.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club 2, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic



year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.







Please note that this course will screen a new and different set of films to HF211 Cultureplex Cine-Club, which will run with the same films screened last year. If you took the Cultureplex Cine-Club course last year (2023-4), please ensure that you take the Cultureplex Cine-Club 2 courses this year.

Literature provides a very effective springboard into the understanding of the developing notions of selfhood and human nature in the history of ideas and philosophy sharpens our understanding of literature within the broader context of this history.

This year-long poetry masterclass is open by selective application to a maximum of ten students. You will receive inspiring tutor instruction and rigorous constructive feedback on your poems as you prepare them for publication and performance.

The Late Bronze Age is a story of collapse, from New Kingdom Egyptian to Hittite Anatolia, from the Assyrian Empire to Babylonian turmoil. Mycenaean Greece is a part of this and the Coming of the Sea Peoples is a terror that echoes through the pages of history. Come learn about how the world as we knew it ended!



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Existentialist themes of anxiety, anguish, dread, freedom, melancholy, loneliness, death and absurdity pervade the arts from the era of Romanticism onwards. What is the cultural significance and consequence of giving expression to such concerns?



NB: no classes on 6th and 27th May.