Contemporary Culture Courses in London

In the 1990s, films by Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf announced Iranian cinema on the global stage as one of the most exciting national cinemas around. But even now, the history and culture behind these films, as well as the many other masterpieces of Iranian cinema, remain too little-known. This course shall give an overview of the wider story of Iranian cinema.

This module will examine a crucially important but often neglected area of film history, namely the responses to and against colonialist legacy made by many different strands of filmmaking around the Global South, from films like The Battle of Algiers, to Latin American Third Cinema, via Sub-Saharan African filmmakers such as Sembene or Mambety, in order to enrich the canon of world cinema.

This Culture course will give students an opportunity to explore the variety of ways that embodiment has been thought and theorised. Across six weeks we will cover a variety of influential approaches to embodied life in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including biopolitics, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, affect theory, science and technology studies, feminism and queer theory.