Courses

As an introduction to graduate studies, the course uses a select list of ‘great books’ about diverse times and places in order to discover and describe what good historians do as they research and write. The course focuses on students’ cultivating skills, including reading strategically, deriving synopses, approaching primary sources, and writing proposals for research projects.

The historical profession is changing. Historians today must be prepared to adopt new forms of scholarship and public engagement, both within and beyond the academy. Blending experiential learning with a rigorous exploration of the many uses of a graduate degree in History, both historically and in the present, this course introduces students to the diversity of careers historians pursue today.

Explores the theory and practice of slavery in Greek and Roman antiquity, from the Bronze Age until the later Roman empire.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Explores aspects of the so-called expansion of the role of the state in Canada at all levels following the Second World War, and since the 1980s, its supposed contraction.

This course examines the experiences, identities, institutions, and politics of Black Canadians from the late 18th through to the 21st centuries. The course builds on recent historical scholarship which explores the processes whereby Black communities were formed across the territory now called Canada; how racialized identities intersected with gender, language and ethnicity to shape Black Canadians’ experiences with work, family and cultural expression; the legal regimes which perpetuated racism and discrimination against people of African descent; and the forms of collective action and cultural expressions Black Canadians produced over time. Weekly seminar discussions will consider how Black Canadian history articulates with global trends in Black histories.

This course offers a historical examination of the multiple, overlapping processes through which Asian identities and regions were constituted. It will also examine new directions in Asian studies in an era of intensified global flows, transnationalism, and the presence of Asian diaspora in Canada and elsewhere.

This course examines the relationships between people and their environments from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It considers the global ecological consequences of industrialization and the growing human footprint on Earth from a historical perspective, drawing from the field of environmental history.

Examines selected themes in the history of women and gender during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a comparative perspective. Themes may include historiographical debates; gender, race and colonization; slavery and abolitionism; marriage, separation and divorce; citizenship; women and pre-industrial labour; the industrial revolution; early feminist movements. PRIOR TO WINTER 2015: course credit exclusion: GS/WMST 6405 3.00.

This course aims to give students a broad introduction to the diversity of women’s experience in different countries by examining selected themes in the history of women during the 20th century. PRIOR TO WINTER 2015: course credit exclusion: GS/WMST 6406 3.00.

Women’s History. An overview of women’s history with particular attention given to Canadian women’s history and the emergence of feminist movements. Course includes a discussion of feminist historiography, and the use of archival materials.

Examines transnational historical processes and events, focusing on temporal and geographic scales outside of traditional national histories, and on linking the local and the global. It considers how global forces affect societies, and problematizes core historical assumptions.

This course will provide an in-depth exploration of the challenges and possibilities of historical research on forms of media.

This course explores critical debates and interdisciplinary research methods employed in the study of material objects. It draws on case studies and theoretical work on material culture, display, and representation to consider the influence of the ‘material turn’ on contemporary scholarship and on historical and curatorial practices.

Contexts of Victorian Science. This course focuses on nineteenth century British and European science and its social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Adopting the contextualist approach to the history of science allows us to raise a series of provocative questions: in what way did all of these different contexts shape the nature of nineteenth century scientific thought? How were scientific facts socially constructed? What was it about the nineteenth century context that led many intellectuals to reject Christianity and embrace science as providing a new, privileged form of knowledge? Included among the topics to be covered are the discourse of natural theology, the politics of geological controversy, Scottish philosophy and phrenology, radical working class Lamarckianism in England during the 1830s, the plurality of worlds debate, science and gender, the professionalization of science, English scientific naturalism and German scientific materialism, the literary structure of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Darwinian theory and its ideological uses, and late nineteenth century physics and psychics. This course will be of interest to students of British, European, social, and intellectual history.

An examination of the different ways in which epidemics are defined, deployed, promoted or criticized as objects of scientific knowledge. A diverse set of examples illustrates the various ways in which epidemics serve to reconfigure biomedical knowledge.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

Supervised reading for individual students or small groups, the separate sections of the course being devoted to the several fields of study and examination.

This course deals with important problems in Canadian history, and it emphasizes the critical examination of the historical literature concerned with those problems. The topics normally included are the interpretation of Canadian history, the foundation and development of New France and British North America prior to Confederation, the nature of Canadian nationalism, regionalism and continentalism, political parties and the political process, the political economy of Canada, external relations, French-Canadian society, and French-English relations. When appropriate, attention is paid to relevant literature in other disciplines. Normally open only to Ph.D. Candidates. Open to M.A. Candidates in exceptional circumstances and with the permission of the Director.