Summer courses in humanities

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.

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.

Ranging from sixteenth century love sonnets via bawdy Restoration verse to a Victorian eroticised poetic narrative, this course examines how the language of love and desire, and the poetic representations of gendered bodies, provide an idiom that can be used to express both conservative and more subversive cultural ideas.

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.

Join us for an exploration of the ways we experience global literatures of our time. Inter-generational memory is the focus of two prize-winning novels, The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang and The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak. Unearthing the painful truths of history in the context of culturally/politically divided Korea and Cyprus, the authors deal delicately, and brutally, with love, the environment, patriarchy, resistance and the metamorphosis of the female body.