Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Explore early collecting practices of the Renaissance studiolo. See the different objects collected from illuminated books, antique coins and gems to bronze medals by Pisanello and paintings by Giotto, Bellini and Jan van Eyck. Looking at early collections including those of Piero and Lorenzo de’ Medici and Isabella d’Este, trace how objects were displayed and used in the studiolo.

This one day course will consider Celine Sciamma’s importance as a filmmaker by exploring in some detail a number of her key films from her debut Water Lillies (2007), to films such as Tomboy (2011), her breakthrough Girlhood (2014), and her more recent popular successes Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Petite Maman (2021).

Dr Karine Chevalier is a lecturer in Film studies. She is also a filmmaker. Her main research interests lie in the field of Transnational Cinema, French and Francophone Cinema, Visual Arts and Aesthetics, Postcolonial Studies, Intermediality, as well as Screenwriting and Filmmaking, with a specific focus on Violence and Resilience, Creative Voices, Digital Storytelling and Multiscreens, Alterities and Minorities, Moving (auto)Portraits and Masks.

Marking VE Day, this study-day explores how artists across Europe and beyond captured the Second World War. From propaganda to protest, exile to endurance, we’ll see how art made sense of destruction and victory, shaped public memory, and continues to frame how we remember this defining conflict.

Godard’s definition of cinema is particularly apt for documentary. But today, the form is at a crossroads, with attacks on the BBC’s recent Trump Panorama attracting questions about ‘objectivity’, with a confusing spectrum of styles - from first person, self-shot, iPhone filmmaking at one end to mega budget, celebrity-fronted or -focused storytelling at the other. Is documentary up to the challenges of an era where facts themselves are in doubt – or is it the last hope of an otherwise overly massaged media, reflexively accused of ‘fake news’? When is factual filmmaking no longer factual? Reality television and co-called ‘constructed reality’ increasingly call into question the veracity of documentary protagonists who are increasingly cast – and paid – to be entertaining. Through the lens of current and recent releases, we look at animated documentary, activist documentary, archival documentary, and autobiographical documentary among other recent developments - and ask if the form has a future - and if so why it matters.