Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

This short literature course brings together work by perceptive observers of London life in the 1960s, including Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing. These writers explore a city in flux, a place of shifting gender roles and social ambitions, where dramas of everyday life unfold in flats and offices, in pubs and parties. Reading Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, and a selection of short stories by these and other writers, we’ll explore the social and psychological landscape of 1960s London.

Building on foundational concepts, this course moves into the investigative mechanics of criminal justice, examining how biology, psychology, and forensic evidence shape modern legal outcomes. Join this rigorous investigation into the intersection of forensic science, psychological profiling, and criminological theory.

Already a director of note, the critical reception of The Lodger and Blackmail saw Hitchcock recognised as a major filmmaker, one whose style was best demonstrated in the suspense film, the cinematic form with which he would subsequently always be associated. Explore two key early works from the 'master of suspense', their striking use of montage and, in one, a bold to approach to sound.  

Somewhere between the crowd-pleasing spectacle of Hollywood and the esoteric European cinema lies Christopher Nolan, the London-born writer-director who has now become the blockbuster auteur and champion of celluloid cinema as a five-time Academy Award nominee known for his complex narratives, intimate plot twists, and the nature of time and memory. From his made-on-the-cheap indie debut Following (1998) to his most recent blockbuster Odyssey (2025), Nolan views cinema as a magic lantern and a time machine, opting for narratives that shuffle time like a deck of cards. His breakthrough was Memento (2000), an amnesiac thriller using a reverse-order narrative to reflect Guy Pearce’s inability to create and store new memories. Memento’s spiritual successorcame two decades later with Tenet (2020), a head-scrambling big-budget thriller in which contrapuntal time frames form a perfect palindrome.

Spend the day discovering the history of Southwark known as the ‘sin bin’ of medieval and Tudor London. The morning will be on campus and after lunch we will walk and talk.

Who controls the future of AI? Explore the politics, power and global inequalities behind artificial intelligence and debate what’s at stake for democracy, human rights and society in a rapidly changing world.

Discover Victorian Britain through Gilbert & Sullivan’s operas. Explore how satire, song, and parody exposed the absurdities of class, empire, politics, and society: what it reveals about Britain and its transformation in the 19th Century.

What is morality and what is it based on? Is the mind a ghost in the machine? What can I really know? This is a beginner’s introduction to how philosophy tackles questions like these and many others.

This 6-week evening course will take learners on a cinematic journey through China’s “reform and opening up” era, from the end of the Cultural Revolution through to the mid-2000s.
“Opening up” involved a series of economic and societal reforms to rebuild the country after the tumultuous Mao years. Each week will explore different generations of China’s cinema - beginning by setting the context with the Golden Age and Model Revolutionary Operas, then deep diving into the reform era of the 1980s - 2000s spotlighting Fifth Generation films such as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Sixth Generation films such as Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006), and films of the more recent 'urban generation' and new documentary movements.
Each session will map China's evolving cinematic journey against the nation’s local and global progression into the modern super-power that it is today.