Arts and humanities courses
Arts and humanities courses. We don’t just teach, we inspire.
Exploring the depths of culture, philosophy and history has never been so accessible. Learn from experts in the field and create an everlasting bond with some of the world’s most impactful reading material. Our comprehensive arts and humanities courses offered at the University of Sydney provide students with unending knowledge that touches our roots while building towards the future.
Don’t be intimidated by our knowledgeable faculty – they know their stuff but they also understand that everyone starts somewhere, which is why we welcome inquiring minds without prejudice. Step up to unleash your inner scholar and get energised by mind-stimulating discourse amongst like-minded peers. Meet friends, form opinions and come out of it with a cultural experience you won’t soon forget!
Sign up now for your very own inspiring experience. We offer groundbreaking opportunities to unlock your intellectual potential, turning everyday people into more thoughtful citizens able to appreciate their pasts and consider their futures more deeply. So say farewell to mundane education and open your world through art and humanities today! Learn arts and humanities in Sydney with arts and humanities courses from the University of Sydney – your premier provider of short courses in Sydney and online.
Featured courses
Meet your facilitators
Antony Cirocco
Antony's film and television projects over the last 13 years have included producing and editing over 300 TVC’s. Every film or TV project he has worked on since 2005 has either been nominated for,...
Robert Gay
After gaining a BA, Dip. Ed. from the University of Sydney, Robert trained as a lyric baritone in London and Munich before turning to the field of music education. He has taught music history...
John Merchant
Dr John Merchant is a graduate of the University of Sydney in Zoology and Psychology (Honours). John’s career has spanned welfare work, school counselling and school administration. John is a...
Andrew Urban
Creator & interviewer, Front Up (SBS TV) Channel Host, World Movies Channel Presenter, Movies This Week, Ovation & World Movies Channels Founder and editor, urbancinefile.com.au A career...
Featured Articles
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History. See the future. It’s in the past. Join us for this history course as we explore the career of Sir Arthur Evans and his contributions to historical understandings of Crete in the Bronze Age. We will particularly investigate the perspectives of modern archaeologists and revisions of Evan’s legacy. British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans is widely credited with the discovery of the Minoans of Bronze Age Crete, but some scholars would argue that Evans did not ‘discover’ the... View History Course: Sir Arthur Evans and His Quest for The Minoans.
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History. See the future. It’s in the past. Join us for this history course and learn how armies, tomb robbers, terrorist organisations and some of the world’s most distinguished museums have all contributed to the illicit trade in antiquities. The problem is complex and the solution is not easy, but in recent years there have been some spectacular successes in the repatriation of cultural property. We begin by considering the notions of possession and ownership of antiquities and... View History Course: Looting, Theft and the Illicit Trade in Antiquities.
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History. See the future. It’s in the past. Join us as we explore the Augustan city of Rome and the buildings that have survived in the densely packed sprawl of modern Rome. We will discuss how these buildings were constructed and their functions in everyday life. Finally, we will decode the propagandistic meanings of the buildings’ statuary and decorations. Because Augustus built a house on the Palatine, that hill became the site of the imperial palace built by his successors.... View History Course: Augustus and the City of Rome.
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Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. What is history? A possible definition is: History is change over time. But what kind of change are we talking about? Given that history is everything that has happened, what kind of selection processes are used to ‘make history’? Aristotle believes that what is important is not “the thing which has happened, but rather what might have happened…and may happen again”. In other words, history must... View Philosophy of History Course: Herodotus to The History Channel.
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Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Poetry is the oldest form of literature; its roots go back well into human history and it was developed to high levels of literary reverence, in all major cultures. Philosophically this fact makes poetry a central aspect of the human condition. In this course we will consider a range of theories explaining why humans find poetry a compelling form in which to construct cultural meaning and personal... View Philosophy of Poetry Course.
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Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Join us as we explore the present interest in republicanism throughout constitutional monarchies such as Australia, renewed with the death of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Republicanism has a long philosophical history, and we will draw on that history in the course. In political theory and philosophy, the term ‘republicanism’ is generally used in three different senses. In the first sense, republicanism... View Philosophy Course: Republican History, Concepts and the Future.
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Music. Learn, enjoy, appreciate. This new course is dominated by the radical figure of Richard Wagner, who as Kapellmeister to the Saxon court composes Tannhäuser and Lohengrin before falling foul of the authorities with his involvement in the Dresden Revolt. In exile in Switzerland, Wagner embarks on his ambitious but impractical Ring of the Nibelung project, setting three massive texts to music before suddenly breaking off to compose the even more intense (but comparatively... View Music in the German Lands Course: 1843-1865.
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Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Hegel is a towering figure in the history of philosophy. At the core of his social and political thought are the concepts of freedom, reason, and self-consciousness. In this course, we will look at how Hegel’s philosophy influenced areas of thought from Marx to Freud and even Frederic Nietzsche, right down to the identity politics of the present. We will discuss how Hegel took political theory in... View Philosophy Course: Hegel.
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Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. This introductory course crosses many fields including sociology, cultural theory, linguistics, ethnography, psychology, and evolutionary theory. Anthropology, though its own distinctive field and its unique history, has drawn from and contributed back to many of these areas. During this course, we will take a cultural/historical approach to track the philosophical ideas which underpin anthropology, from... View Philosophy of Anthropology Course.
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In Part II of this series of courses on Music in Europe in the late Nineteenth Century, we continue to explore and weave together the various nationalist strands of orchestral and operatic music composed in this period, by now universally being referred to as the Fin de Siècle.
We not only see how Brahms dominates the German musical scene after the death of Wagner, but how his protégé Dvorak has established himself as a force to be reckoned with, both in England – composing a series of major orchestral and choral works for the annual English music festivals – and also further afield, accepting a specially-created and highly-lucrative position as head of a new musical conservatory in New York.
We see Saint-Saëns’s neglected opera Samson et Dalila finally take its rightful place at the Paris Opéra, where it rapidly becomes part of the repertoire, and note the huge success of Massenet’s Manon at the Opéra-Comique. We also pay homage to Fauré’s gentler vocal muse through his delightful collections of mélodies and chansons.
Through this decade, the Russian school is dominated by Tchaikovsky, particularly his late sequence of masterpieces comprising the Pushkin opera The Queen of Spades, the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker, and the final symphony, the so-called Pathétique. Rimsky-Korsakov also dazzles with his breathtakingly voluptuous orchestration in his ‘symphonic suite’ Sheherazade.
Verdi rounds off a remarkable 50-year career with two magnificent operas based on his beloved Shakespeare – the tragic Otello, and the comic Falstaff – both featuring brilliant librettos by Arrigo Boito. Meanwhile, in the early 1890s, the young Italian school revel in the violence of the new verismo style, launched by Mascagni with Cavalleria rusticana and confirmed soon afterwards by Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
In the final lecture we encounter the music of newcomers Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss for the first time.
View Music of the Fin de Siècle Course: 1884 - 1893.