Courses

For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.

For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.

Provides MA students with the core tools for interdisciplinary Humanities scholarship. It introduces basic techniques and methodologies of conducting, presenting and publishing research, with an emphasis on qualitative methods. Students practice, and reflect on, the process of planning, carrying out, and presenting research in ways that are adequate for specific contexts, topics, and problematics in the Humanities.

This graduate seminar, crosslisted in Translation Studies and Humanities, examines the intersections of travel writing and translation through perspectives that help to see these activities as intertwined, co-constitutive, and often involving parallel processes with shared concerns in practice and in terms of theories brought to bear on their analyses.

For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.

For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.

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.

Examines how empire has figured in the works of dominant seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘Western’ social and political thinkers. Issues about race, civilization, progress and modernity, and imperialism, colonialism, etc., are critically assessed discursively, ideological, socio-politically.

Introduces students to the conditions of emergence and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe to its most recent global iteration of World Literature. Students will experience how expanded understandings of cultural translation and textuality have radically altered and expanded the Eurocentric character of the discipline. Questions for investigation includes: How have the aesthetics and politics of Comparative Literature changed over the past two hundred years? What factors have influenced those changes? How is World Literature related to Comparative Literature? How do both relate to colonial, post-colonial, diasporic, cultural and translation studies and digital humanities?

This course begins by examining the Moses story as found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Subsequently, we will look at how the image of Moses has changed throughout the ages both within a religious context and within the arts.

This course explores the history of category religion and its deployment in the colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise of secularism in Europe was a process of defining certain discourses, practices and experiences as religious and isolating them as distinct from social and political aspect of life, a worldview and orientation. This way of knowing and ordain the world did not easily translate into the cultures colonized by European powers. Looking at case studies from Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, this course will explore how religion became a vector of colonial power in the hands of missionaries and others and a means of resisting colonial hegemony for colonial subjects. Furthermore, it will investigate the ways in which contesting the meaning and definition of religion became a way of negotiating the limits of colonial authority. Key texts would include Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Secularism and Religion Making, Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Penny Edwards Cambodge.

For Philosophy to prosper, Descartes speaks of the need of philosophy to emulate geometry, and Hume talks of the need of philosophy to emulate Newtonian physics. These respective claims are misleading, inasmuch as their methodologies, in fact, vary, according to the work and topic. With Descartes, we focus on his Regulae and Meditations; with Hume, his Treatise of Human Nature and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

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.

Examines the literary, musical, and visual cultures of modernism to create better understanding of the forms, meanings, and significance of interdisciplinary art practices.

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.

Provides PhD students with advanced tools for interdisciplinary Humanities scholarship. As the only mandatory course in their degree, it ensures that students are well versed in conducting, presenting and publishing research, with an emphasis on qualitative methods. Students practice, and reflect on, the framing of research topics and fields as well as the design and conducting of courses.