Summer courses in humanities

In order to reach heaven a medieval Christian had to spend time in purgatory being cleansed of sin. Come and find out what purgatory consisted of and how you could fast-track you way through it.

Journey through the evolution of the fascinating idea of conscience over the past 2,000 years. Explore ancient and modern understandings of this universal phenomenon, drawing on insights from psychology, sociology, philosophy, theology and neuroscience.

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.

Edith Wharton and Henry James had a keen eye for a well-designed and tastefully decorated house and both brought us depictions of splendid interiors in their novels set in ‘the Gilded Age’. We’ll discuss the changing tastes at the turn of the century, and how both authors used interior decoration to reflect the moral turn of their characters and the age.

Whether you are new to poetry or an experienced reader of verse, this course will enable and enhance your enjoyment by exploring the techniques that poetry uses to affect our response and create meaning. Exploring rhythm and rhyme, voice, mood, imagery, language and allusions, we will focus on a diverse range of poetic examples to examine how this powerful form of literature works to create emotion and connection with the reader.

This course will explore the Dada movement, focusing on Duchamp and Höch as key examples, considering such issues as social and political context, theoretical interests, material experimentation, and artistic influences.

Study sculptors from the Renaissance to the Post-Modern, including Donatello, Bernini, Canova, Rodin, Picasso and Whiteread, considering styles, materials, and techniques of key works within social and cultural contexts.

Nowadays there are so many ways to watch film - smart phones, tablets, TVs - just as there are so many different spaces in which we encounter the moving image - cinemas, galleries, our homes, to name but a few. This day-long course will broaden and deepen your critical awareness of the diverse formal and experiential possibilities of cinema, both as they have developed in the past and as they are transforming in the contemporary moment. It will do this by reflecting on two questions: ‘what is cinema?’ and ‘where is cinema?’.

What is the role of poetry ‘off the page’ in public spaces? Can a poem change the way we might re-encounter cultural history? Do statues serve as ‘informants’ from the past? We read poetry by Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay and Dorothea Smartt commissioned for bridges, pavements, monuments, even super sewer ventilation shafts to identify the challenges, revisions and celebrations that emerge from exploring the place of poetry in public spaces.

Why do we value art? For the pleasure it gives us, the emotion it expresses, its truthfulness, its form? In this introduction to the philosophy of art we will consider various approaches to these questions and others.

Discover some key literary movements and novels that influenced the Italian cultural scene in the 19th century, through the study of three writers: Alessandro Manzoni, Giovanni Verga and Tarchetti.

This course is an interactive introduction to philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) focusing on ontological (‘what is AI?’) and epistemic (‘how do we know?’) aspects of recent revolutionary advances in AI from both philosophical and computer science perspectives. We will not focus on ethical aspects of AI in this course which are covered in a separate course.