Culture, History & Humanities classes in London and online

This four-week course explores peacebuilding in post-conflict societies, examining key concepts, case studies, and practical tools to understand how diverse actors rebuild and sustain peace after violent conflict.

This course will introduce and discuss the fiction of distinguished British author, Pat Barker, delving into her first novel and a later work as a means of considering her premise that ‘looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer’. Hailing from the Northeast of England, Barker unflinchingly depicts situations and characters that pull no punches as she looks the world straight in the eye. In doing so, she offers readers who wish to accompany her, at times, a mirror reflecting what polite society’s gaze often evades or a window into a bleaker outlook.

A tiny meeting house, converted from a chapel, stood at the back of number 18 Denmark Street, Soho, until the end of the 19th century. The Eclectic Hall regularly hosted a range of political radicals and counter cultural commentators, often attracting sell-out crowds. Using this venue as a prism, Sarah Wise investigates the shifting currents in ‘Soho radicalism, mapping the various currents of political radicalism packed into this tiny area of central London; and giving an idea of the audiences who came along to listen, and the atmosphere of attending such meetings.

In this six-week Cultural Studies course, we look at friendship and love between women and the path towards emancipation and social equality that female solidarity opens up. The patriarchy has cunning ways to appropriate women for its own purposes and continued dominance, by sowing discord, division and envy among groups that are not straight and male. But connection, community and care can be sites of the struggle to remake the world, as countless examples from past and present demonstrate.

Explore the astonishing range of poetic responses to a hundred years of warfare, acts of witnessing, endurance, defiance and condemnation by writers across the globe: Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Britain, Apollinaire, Brecht, Milosz, Celan, Akhmatova and Stepanova in Europe and Russia, Darwish and Zhadan in the Middle East and Ukraine, and many others.

How do they describe the indescribable? This online course will look at the myriad ways poets - combatants and civilians - responded to the century of total war and are responding to its legacy now.

Explore how African, Caribbean and diasporic artists in 20th-century Paris used visual art and modernist aesthetics to express identity, resist colonial narratives, and engage with the political and cultural ideas of the Négritude and Pan-Africanist movements.