Summer courses in humanities

Celebrated within international film culture and renowned for a willingness to experiment formally, French cinema has long sought to challenge and delight audiences, but it has also always pushed the boundaries of the permissible and the acceptable. From the violent eye-slice in Un Chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali 1929), to the darkly satirical Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard 1969), cinema in France has continued a long tradition of artistic and social dissent that can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, the Comte de Lautréamont and Georges Bataille. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a series of films appeared in France that the critic James Quandt famously labelled the ‘New French Extremity’. This one-day course will explore some of these provocative films, directed by filmmakers such as Gaspar Noé, Virginie Despentes, Catherine Breillat and Marina de Van, among others. It will consider the historical, cultural, social and political context for this phenomenon and seek to examine a number of these films in detail.

Please note that some of the films studied on this course contain explicit sexual content and depict graphic violence. While care will be taken in the presentation of sequences from these films and in the discussions around them, please be aware that some of the material will be challenging and difficult.

This one-day Literature course will give you an introduction to texts from across centuries, languages and national borders, both within and beyond the English-speaking world. We will focus on two African literary classics: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, giving you an understanding of these texts and a new appreciation of the world’s rich literary heritage in all its diversity and complexity.

Explore how several key ideas underpinning modern mathematics and science first emerged in South Asia during this one-off lecture. These ideas often developed within philosophical, religious, and practical settings, and were later rediscovered or formalized independently in the West, sometimes centuries afterwards.

Neurosis may have disappeared from psychiatry, but in cinema, it thrives. This course explores how film portrays anxious, obsessive, and self-sabotaging characters grappling with repression and existential doubt. Through Freud’s psychoanalytic lens, we’ll explore some of cinema’s most fascinating neurotics.

Mary Wild is a film lecturer and podcaster with an academic background in psychoanalytic theory. Her research interests include cinematic representation of the unconscious, surrealism, mental illness, feminine subjectivity, the horror genre, and auteur studies.