Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

As much of the continent was moving towards independence, racial segregation was becoming enshrined and institutionalised in South Africa. How did a small minority impose this system on society and how was it brought down? Tutor: Oren Gruenbaum.

This course explores the intellectual genealogy and political evolution of Islamic political thought in the modern era.

Discover some of the most compelling voices in Spanish Literature over six centuries, from the first novels and the Baroque era to the national and regional conflicts of the modern period and their impact on the imaginations of whole generations of writers. Spend eight weeks exploring ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’, Cervantes, de Castro, Lorca, Goytisolo, Marias, Almodóvar and many others.

Short stories offer a brief window into a variety of other lives, places, and situations. This literary form has remained popular in Japan over several centuries, with topics as diverse as natural disasters, the beauty of everyday life, hellish curses and the consequences of fame. We’ll explore the history of this medium through a selection of short stories by some of Japan’s most popular short story authors.

Bold, passionate, provocative, and revolutionary: just four of the adjectives that can be used to describe the writers studied on this course. Focusing on Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954), Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984) and Annie Arnoux’s The Years (2008), this course will explore how French female writers have approached writing the experience of modern women throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll think about issues of power, autonomy, sexual awakening, and adolescence in each of our key novels. We’ll also contextualise these novels in the history of women’s writing in France from the philosophy of de Beauvoir to the bold feminist Francophone literature of today. 

Discover the legend that began it all. Journey back to third millennium BCE to discover what is commonly referred to as 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.

A concise introduction to the politics of neoliberalism: what it is, where it came from, and why it remains the dominant—and most criticized—economic and political framework today.