Join us for a special ‘In Conversation’ event with acclaimed artist and former City Lit student Charmaine Watkiss, who’ll be interviewed by cultural historian Michael Ohajuru in celebration of this year’s Art History Festival. This lecture is part of the 2026 Art History Festival organised by the Association for Art History.

Philosophy of religion is where philosophical methods meet far-reaching religious doctrines. Join this introductory course to explore some of the big questions that go to the very essence of what it means to be human.

This study day will delve into the main political and cultural events that characterise the history of the Umayyads and the Abbasids.

A whistle stop tour of almost 1300 years of Islamic Empires, meeting some of the remarkable women that created Islamic history along the way.

Question what you know, explore what shapes society, and see the world beyond the textbook.

In the 1930s, audiences were introduced to a new type of comedy style blending Hollywood social commentary with a battle-of-the-sexes. What was new? Eccentric romance, rapid-fire dialogue, gender relations as near combat, and farcical slapstick-a cycle of films known as screwball comedies, a distinct time capsule of the decade and one of the most transcendent genres of the classical Hollywood period. More modern films like the homage of What’s Up Doc? (1972 Peter Bogdanovich) or Silver Linings Playbook (2012 David O. Russell) attempted the speed & spirit of films like Bringing Up Baby (1938 Howard Hawks) or The Lady Eve (1941 Preston Sturges) but screwball’s effervescence is difficult to recapture. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) the Coen Brothers attempted a sequel to Preston Sturges’ great Hollywood satire, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but screwball is tied to a time and a place. The time was the Great Depression, when audiences needed escapism. The place was Hollywood and an industry making full use of talking pictures, finding writers from the New York stage (or Dorothy Parker’s Round Table) who would seize the opportunity to get smart talk into the films. But over and above all that I think the real reason for screwball was Hollywood’s need to fast-talk its way around the new Production Code censorship of 1934. No coincidence then that in that same year Frank Capra made It Happened One Night (1934) and Howard Hawks directed Twentieth Century (1934). Both shared an unorthodox portrayal of romance and cynicism. A new genre was off and running.