Online subject tasters: Arts and Humanities

Everyone has an accent, but how do we tell which one we are listening to? Despite the very real consequences of attitudes to different accents, it is still not really clear how people work out who has which accent. 

In this session we will consider how we listen to speech, from the attitudes we hold, to the accent features we pick up on as we hear people talking. 

This will allow us to think about the social meanings of language and equip us with ways of challenging negative language attitudes in everyday life.

• 5pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.20pm - Lecture
• 5.50pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

For human beings, death is the ultimate mystery. We all know that we will die. We will lose people close to us. But we know nothing concrete about what comes afterwards. 

And that’s where poetry comes in. 

Poetry attempts to represent our feelings, face the horror of death, and imagine what might happen in the afterlife. The Romantic poets were intimately acquainted with loss. 

This talk discusses their poetry about death to think about what we can learn from them and includes William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, John Keats’s early death and his poem, This Living Hand, how Percy Bysshe Shelley reacted to Keats’s death with his elegy, Adonais, and finishes with a section on little-known female poet, Letitia Landon, and her poetry about her legacy living on after her death. 

This talk teaches us how to live, and die, like a Romantic poet.

• 5pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.20pm - Lecture
• 5.50pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

In this talk, Dr Rutter will be discussing Shakespeare's Othello in relation to recent work on race in Elizabethan England, as well as the way black people are depicted in other texts of the period.

• 5pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.20pm - Lecture
• 5.50pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

Over the last two decades, historians have begun writing the history of the 'Global Cold War'. 

Rather than treating the Cold War as merely a conflict between two superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - it is now widely acknowledged that the Cold War was a truly global conflict, drawing in actors from across the world who were capable of shaping the wider international system. 

This lecture will explore how the history of Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century fits into these global histories of the Cold War. Latin America's Cold War had a particular set of local dynamics, fundamentally shaped by the region's proximity to the United States and the long history of US interventionism in the Western hemisphere. Nonetheless, in this period Latin Americans on both sides of the Cold War ideological divide were able to challenge US hegemony. 

This lecture will highlight the crucial role that Latin Americans - from Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to lesser known figures - played in shaping the global Cold War.

• 5pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.20pm - Lecture
• 5.50pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

After the Second World War, the care of people diagnosed with mental illnesses changed profoundly. The huge and remote Victorian-era asylums were increasingly seen as outdated and hit by scandals of poor care. There was a revolution in how doctors and the general public thought about mental illnesses. 

This was traditionally put down to new psychiatric medication being developed in the 1950s, but was also due to: the new welfare state and National Health Service, new ideas about how personal relationships and family life could impact mental illness, patients' rights groups growing out of wider social protest in the 1960s, and the ever-widening boundaries of psychiatric diagnosis. 

As the nature of mental health and mental illness was transformed, a profoundly unsettling set of questions lurked: what does it mean to be normal, who decides, and what should anyone do about it?

• 7pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 7.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 7.20pm - Lecture
• 7.55pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

Get ready for a captivating deep-dive into the vibrant world of contemporary East Asian popular culture! In this talk, we’ll uncover how film, television, and music not only entertain but also serve as powerful tools for revisiting the past. Through a nostalgic lens, these cultural forms invite us to reimagine national histories and challenge traditional narratives. We’ll explore how memory and media intersect—revealing popular culture as not just a reflection of history, but as a compelling force in rewriting it.

• 5.30pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.35pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.50pm - Lecture
• 6.20pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes.

Lots of people think that freedom is valuable. But what is freedom? And what's so good about it? Do lockdown regulations take away our freedom? How about laws against drugs? Or laws requiring us to wear seatbelts? If these laws do take away our freedom, does that mean there's something wrong with them? And maybe it's not just rules that tell you what you can't do that limit freedom. Are you really free if you have no money, or lack access to healthcare, or can't afford to get an education? These are important questions for all of us, and this session will show how ideas from political philosophy can help us to start answering them.

• 5pm - Welcome and housekeeping
• 5.05pm - Overview of the school/department
• 5.20pm - Lecture
• 5.50pm - Time for questions on the topic/student life with a student ambassador supporting. 

Please note all timings are approximate, but the session will be no longer than 90 minutes