Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Suitable for those who have completed the first course on the Epic of Gilgamesh. Continue your journey back to third millennium BCE to discover the world’s oldest surviving work of literature, the story of the king Gilgamesh and his epic quest to conquer gods, monsters, and even death itself.

This 6-week evening course will take learners on a cinematic journey through China’s “reform and opening up” era, from the end of the Cultural Revolution through to the mid-2000s.
“Opening up” involved a series of economic and societal reforms to rebuild the country after the tumultuous Mao years. Each week will explore different generations of China’s cinema - beginning by setting the context with the Golden Age and Model Revolutionary Operas, then deep diving into the reform era of the 1980s - 2000s spotlighting Fifth Generation films such as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Sixth Generation films such as Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006), and films of the more recent 'urban generation' and new documentary movements.
Each session will map China's evolving cinematic journey against the nation’s local and global progression into the modern super-power that it is today. 

The policing of the late-Victorian and Edwardian West End of London was a hugely controversial issue with regard to vice and to the elusive and strangely named phenomenon ‘The White Slave Trade’.To what extent were these allegations founded in fact? How safe were the glamorous shopping streets of London for women and girls?

Explore the history of Section 28 (1988-2003) in three online workshops. We examine its political origins and effects and how it shaped LGBTQ+ rights and collective memory in Britain.

Explore four major collections by the revered Austrian poet whose search for a restored unity of art, self and world has, for many, constituted a healing message in the midst of our pressurised modernity. From despair to affirmation, from “Whoever has no home will build none now” to “our existence’s wondrous abundances”, discover how Rilke’s journey is marked at every stage by a formal brilliance and intellectual power that invite and reward the closest attention.