Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Explore the material culture of imperial China and its influence on modern and contemporary visual cultures.

Are you brand new to creative writing? Do you want to build your confidence in a supportive environment alongside other beginners? This gentle short course guides students taking their first steps on the path to becoming a creative writer.

Glimpse into the visual culture that surrounded one of Europe's most infamous queens, Marie Antoinette. This lecture will look at the art commissioned by the Queen as well as the art and propaganda that was used to vilify her. We'll complicate her history by examining that art that surrounded her.

Learn about the Harlem Renaissance and some of its core painters, sculptors and photographers. Explore the goals and aspirations of the movement and how it impacted the art and culture of the United States and beyond.

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form – narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound – alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.

This one-session course explores the rich and complex iconography of the Virgin Mary in Italian art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a focus on the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. Through close analysis of paintings, the session examines how artists visualised Mary’s purity, divine role, and celestial triumph, and how these images communicated debated theological ideas and devotional practices. Key examples include works by Vasari, Titian, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, and Ludovico Cigoli.