Summer courses in humanities

Discover the history, politics and intellectualism that fuelled the Italian Renaissance. Explore the art of Giotto and his peers from a new perspective.

This course will look, decade by decade, at the leading figures of the generation caught up in the turmoil of the Revolution whose lives and poetry together form a veritable seismograph of the unfolding tragedy. Their extraordinary interrelationships and the originality and power of their writing constitute one of the richest periods in the history of Russian Literature.

The experience of living in Berlin in the early 1930s had a transformative effect on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood. In this course, we will discuss Isherwood’s masterpiece, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), and his autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976), which reveals the real people behind the characters of Sally Bowles and Otto Nowak, and shines a light on the queer culture of Berlin Isherwood was unable to write about in the 1930s.

On this in-college literature course we will take the temperature of the contemporary poetry scene through close readings from the 'Forward Book of Poetry 2025', which showcases poems from the best collections recently published in the UK and around the world.