University Level and Above
Alongside my university teaching, I offer independent online seminars in philosophy, criticism, aesthetics, and intellectual history.
These courses are designed for serious students, artists, writers, researchers, and professionals seeking a level of intellectual engagement now increasingly rare within institutional education. Classes are taught in small groups and organised around sustained discussion, close reading, and conceptual development rather than passive content consumption.
Courses typically run for 4-8 sessions.
Teaching Approach
Courses are conducted as live seminars, not prerecorded lectures. Emphasis is placed on careful reading, sustained discussion, and the development of articulate, independent judgment.
Participants are expected to engage seriously with texts and ideas. The atmosphere is intellectually demanding but conversational, combining historical depth with contemporary relevance while allowing space for exploratory and associative thinking. Because groups remain deliberately small, sessions allow for a degree of direct exchange and conceptual precision rarely possible in large classrooms or mass online education.
An examination of ideas about ‘kitsch’: the mechanical ersatz culture specific to industrial civilisations and ‘mass’ society.
Drawing on figures including Clement Greenberg, Hermann Broch, Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, and others, the course asks what it means to make critical judgments when faced with simulation, cliché, sentimentality, and administered aesthetic experiences. Themes include industrialisation, consumer culture, immigrant assimilation, globalisation, and the shifting meanings of related terms like ‘camp’, poshlost, schmaltz, cursi, and ‘naff’.
A historical investigation of our experiences of space and time in the digital age.
Beginning with Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘flow’ in television, following its transformation in Fredric Jameson and David Foster Wallace, and relation to Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Baudrillard, the course examines what older media forms can reveal about contemporary habits of perception.
This seminar explores the ‘fossil record’ of media: what consciousness in the present shares with apparently obsolete cultural forms.