Summer courses in humanities

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.

Explore the work of Van Eyck in relation to Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelites more generally; consider how this 15th century painter influenced artists some 300 years later.

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.

This online course offers an introduction to the concept of the 21st century British dramatist as a social observer, enabling a deeper understanding of how playwrights can illuminate and comment on social issues. Join us to find out how playwrights Polly Stenham, Jez Butterworth and Phillip Ralph have interrogated a variety of societal ills including a miscarriage of justice, dependency issues, class and the façade of contentment amongst the upwardly mobile.

In July 2025 a major solo exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray, considered to be one of Australia’s greatest artists, will be held at Tate Modern. This course aims to introduce British audiences to the oeuvre of this remarkable artist.

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.

An introduction to the art of Louise Bourgeois, its feminism, both erotic and abject. We explore Bourgeois as a sculptor, printmaker and performance artist, looking at how she was influenced by psychology and biography.

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.

The course is an introduction to Indian Religions. Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism all have common aspects, but also some fundamental differences in philosophy.