Course Descriptions
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HIS 1006H-S Historiography “From Below”: Comparative and Critical Perspectives
M. KASTURI
“History from below,” encompassing various approaches of writing a radical “popular” or “people’s history,” has had an extraordinary influence on recent historiography. Yet from its inception, 'history from below' has had to grapple with the problematic relationship between power, politics and the production of historical narratives. This graduate seminar will seek to assess the powerful appeal, contributions and the contradictions of this diverse school of historiography. We will attempt to achieve our aim by focusing on scholarly and political projects from the colonised and decolonising world endeavouring both to retrieve the histories of “marginal” groups and to write history from the perspective of “the South” (South Asia, South East Asia and Latin America). In this regard, the course will first introduce a number of foundational approaches on the subject, including peasant studies, the British Marxist history, cultural studies, and the “new” cultural history. We will then analyze how scholars from South Asia, South East Asia and Latin America, including the Subaltern Studies Collective, have critically engaged with these paradigms. The course also will draw attention to some of the more recent methodologies and strategies proffered by scholars still grappling with the dilemmas, possibilities and limitations of writing “history from the bottom up,” in regions deeply marked by imperialism, nationalism and globalization. Students working on regions outside those formally covered by the course are welcome.
F. IACOVETTA
This graduate seminar on Canadian history within comparative contexts will focus on three major areas of study - gender history (including sexuality, memory history, food); labour and working-class history (including recent feminist works on race and gender identities); and migration and immigration (including “transplanted” and more recent transnational approaches). The focus will be on the Canadian past, particularly the 19th and 20th centuries, and on Canadian studies but these will be studied within comparative North American and broadly international contexts (The latter will require reading some of the key US, European and other international works). The goal of the course is to provide students who are interested in pursuing graduate work in Canadian history, or social, labour, gender and migration history more broadly, with an opportunity to become more fully immersed in the literatures dealing with three major areas of current research and debate. They will also be encouraged to undertake comparative and international approaches to their own research. Students will read theoretical works (including those informed by Marxist, post-modern, critical race, feminist, and cultural studies approaches) and discuss methodology (for example, writing social history with case files) but the emphasis will be on empirical studies. In dealing with each of the three major themes of the course, the readings will highlight such topics as migrant, immigrant and racialized workers; male and female subjects; female activism vs male activism; gendering migration and workers’ internationalism; working-class sexualities and juvenile delinquency; moral regulation and state repression.
Students will be strongly encouraged to undertake a major research paper using some primary Canadian sources. Alternatively, they may choose to write their major essay on the historiography of a major topic, such as Asian workers in the Americas.HIS 1115H-S World Car
S. PENFOLD
This course takes a global approach to the history of the automobile. At one level, it examines the history of an important commodity by combining several analytic frameworks and issues (technology, business, labour, geography, social life, and culture). At another level, it tries to introduce some of the possibilities and challenges of doing BIG history (transnational, comparative, global) by focusing attention on a commodity that has spread (unevenly) across the globe. As much as possible, readings will be drawn from across the world’s regions – at some points, we will bring different geographies into conversation, while at other times we will drop down into a particular time and space. Possible topics include the triumph of the internal combustion engine, Henry Ford and mass production., Ford’s imperial vision, global commodity chains, auto unionism, the car in urban space, highway modernity, cultures of safety and risk, and the car in so-called “command economics”.
HIS1116-S Canada: Foundations to 1867
H. BOHAKER
This graduate course aims to give students a solid grounding in the major themes and issues of Canadian history from 1500 to 1867. This time frame invites us to think about what properly falls under the rubric of Canadian history and what theoretical frameworks are useful for approaching this fascinating and complex field (or should that be “fields”) of study. Weekly readings pair classic texts with recent scholarship and at least one primary source to promote lively and engaged discussion about the places and peoples that would become the nation-state of Canada. While intended to prepare students for the comprehensive examination field in Canadian history, the course is open to anyone with an interest in the history of “Early Canada” and the challenge of writing historical experiences of this period into a cohesive national history narrative. Participation, primary source analysis and historiographical review essay make up the components of the course grade.
HIS1142Y-Y Canadian Foreign Relations
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course - HIS405Y1/1142Y)
J. ENGLISH
In the first term the course takes an in-depth look at topics in Canadian foreign policy, after 1945; including the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the second term the topics will depend on the subjects students choose to write about for their major research essays.
HIS1201H-F The Materials of Medieval History
J. GOERING
Required course for MA students of the medieval area in the Department of History but open to others. The course is concerned with the discovery and critical use of the materials of medieval history. It includes exercises in the use of published source collections and bibliographical aids. Exclusion: HIS1997H.
Exclusion: HIS1997H
HIS 1210H-F Gregory of Tours and the Sixth Century
A. MURRAY
Seminar on the sixth-century as seen through the historical and hagiographical works of Gregory, bishop of Tours (573-94). Gregory was the most prolific western historical writer of his age, authoring a large history in ten books, most of which deal with contemporary events, and eight books documenting the miracles, past and present, of the saints. Gregory is the major source for early Merovingian politics and institutions (secular and ecclesiastical) and for the cult of the saints in Frankish Gaul. In the last decade and a half his work has been the subject of major revisionist studies exploring the premises of his writing and has stimulated a rich secondary literature contextualizing the social, political, and religious life depicted in its pages. Gregory’s writings will be supplemented by selected works of contemporary western and Byzantine authors.HIS 1215H-F Social Change in Medieval England, 1154-1279
M. GERVERS
A research seminar devoted to the study of social and economic change from the accession of Henry II to the passage of the Statute of Mortmain under Edward I. Subjects of inquiry will depend upon the interests of the class, which among other things may include: 1) social status and responsibility; 2) the means available to obtain, hold and transfer land; 3) the distribution of wealth and the value of property; 4) trade, industry and markets in town and country; 5) the feudal and manorial “familia”; 6) employment opportunities; 7) food production and transportation; 8) record keeping and literacy; 9) technology; 10) family ties; 11) crime and justice. Knowledge of Latin and modern European languages is highly desirable.
HIS 1223H-S Humanism and the Renaissance
K. BARTLETT
This seminar will investigate the central place of humanism in the development of the European Renaissance. Beginning with the emergence of humanism in fourteenth century Italy, the class will investigate the influence of humanist ideas on various aspects of the political, social and cultural worlds of Renaissance Europe, north and south of the Alps.
HIS 1234H-S Readings in Early Modern French History
P. COHEN
This course is designed to help prepare students for examination fields in early modern French and European history. It proposes to survey historiography studying the political, religious and social history of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of particular interest will be the institutions of the Renaissance monarchy, the causes and consequences of the Wars of Religion, historiographical debates surrounding the development of the absolutist state, the social history of war, and the intersection of social change, political history and religious life. All assigned course reading will be in English. Students will write one short book review and a longer historiographical essay.
HIS 1265H-S Atrocities and Memory in Postwar Europe and North America
R. WITTMANN
This course will examine how Europeans and North Americans confront the memory of both Nazi mass murder and the Allied bombing of
HIS1268H-F Holocaust AND WORLD WAR II
D. BERGENThis course introduces graduate students to major issues in the study of the Holocaust and World War II. The focus is on connections between these interrelated events. Readings include classic as well as recent works from a range of disciplines and methodological approaches. Special attention will be paid to different national, political, and historiographical contexts in which the Holocaust and the war have been examined by scholars, beginning in the 1940s and up to the present. We will also investigate the postwar confrontation with the Third Reich, comparing social, cultural and judicial responses to Nazism in West and East Germany. This course will therefore provide an overview of Nazi Germany between 1933-45, an in-depth examination of the genesis of the Holocaust, and reflections on Nazism's lingering presence in the two Germanys. Readings will include, among others, works by Hannah Arendt, Saul Friedlander, Gerhard Weinberg, Istvan Deac, Jan Gross, Omer Bartov, Christopher Browning, Zygmunt Bauman, Mark Roseman and Goetz Aly. Oral presentations and the long paper (which may be either a study based on research in primary sources or an historiographical survey) will give students an opportunity to explore areas of particular interest to them.
HIS1269H-F(J) The Social History of Medicine in the 19th and 20th Centuries
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course – HIS 423H/1269H)
E. SHORTER
The seminar, designed to inform students about developments in this new scholarly field, will include topics such as the evolution of the doctor-patient relationship, the impact of medical care upon health, the evolution of such medical specialties as internal medicine, neurology and psychiatry, the relationship between culture and the presentation of illness, and the history of medical therapeutics.
HIS1270H-F(J) History of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Illness
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS 489H/1270H)
E. SHORTER
This course introduces students to some of the main issues in the history of psychiatry. Classroom discussion will cover such topics as changes in the nature of psychotic illness, the psychoneuroses, disorders of the mind/body relationship, psychiatric diagnosis and the "presentation" of illness.
HIS1271H-S MODERN POLITICAL TRIALS
M. MARRUS
What are political trials? According to one recent definition, these are trials in which the outcome "depends on an evaluation of the defendant's political attitudes and activities." Among other things, this seminar course will test that definition, and begins with the hypothesis that there can be other sorts of political trials, in which courtroom arguments speak to issues of political importance in different societies. Many different circumstances, it should become clear, contribute to making trials political. To examine these propositions, we will look at European and North American trials in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The approach will be interdisciplinary, and will draw upon legal, political, cultural, historical and social analyses of the various trials selected for the course. Note that this seminar is delivered in conjunction with the Faculty of Law, from which half of the students in the course will come.
HIS 1272H-F Topics in Twentieth-Century European History
J. JENKINS
This course is designed to further the preparation of students for examination fields in twentieth-century German and European history. We will read major (new) works on the century’s central period and events -- the two world wars, the Holocaust, the rise of fascism, the Cold War and the reconstruction of Europe, colonialism and decolonisation -- as well as exploring the larger processes of transformation that span the century as a whole. These include the development of the modern social welfare state and the growth of a mass consumer society, the legacies of war and violence, ethnic nationalism and its discontents, and the strength and weaknesses of democratic political culture (with an emphasis on histories of gender and sexuality). Particular attention will be paid to Germany within Europe. We will also examine works which attempt to connect the two halves of the century – the histories of war and violence with those emphasizing democracy and reconstruction. These works seek to establish an overarching paradigm for the twentieth century, whether it be territoriality and the rise and fall of the nation state or the creation and destruction of political community.
HIS 1282H-F Comparative Totalitarian Culture
T. LAHUSEN
The purpose of the course is to historicize the concept of totalitarian culture by examining the relation between propaganda, entertainment, and mass culture, in the context of how both Germany and Soviet Russia related to Hollywood. Primary materials to be considered are German and Soviet films of the1930s and 1940s.
HIS 1286H-S Categories of Imperial Russian Social History
A. SMITH
In this course students will examine the different schemes of categorizing the population of Imperial Russia: by ethnicity, by religion, by social class or estate, and eventually by profession or nation. It will begin with an event from the end of the Imperial period, the first national census of 1897, then look back to see how the categories included in that event developed over the preceding centuries. It will examine how social estates developed, and how alternate forms of social stratification did or did not develop to challenge those estates. It will look at the role religion played in categorizing Russian society, and the ways that the Russian state viewed religion synonymously with nationalism. And it will investigate the ways that ethnic and national differences became more recognized as important sources of social division, too, related to, and yet separate from these other forms.
HIS1289H-S The Cold War Through its Archives
R. JOHNSON
Reviews the history of the Cold War in light of formerly-secret archival documents. Examples include the US White House Tapes and Venona decrypts; massive declassification of records in the ex-Soviet bloc; and parallel developments in China, Cuba, and other Communist states. Archival discoveries have cast new light, not just on individual episodes (e.g., Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but on the origins, strategies, and driving forces of this 45-year conflict. The focus will be mainly on the superpowers and their alliance systems.
HIS 1296H-F Stalinism and After: Beyond Cold War History
L. VIOLA
A historiographical survey of the political and social history of the Soviet Union covering the years from Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan Revolution (1928-32) to Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 (with some coverage of the immediate post-revolutionary years and the remaining years of Khrushchev’s administration). Major emphasis of the course is on historiography, interpretation, and an introduction to sources. Key topics covered include collectivization, the great purge, the gulag, WWII, postwar Stalinism, and Khrushchev’s rise to power. This course serves as basic preparation for a minor field in Twentieth-Century Russian history, and, for students majoring in Russian history, a useful prerequisite for In the Soviet Archives.
HIS 1297H-F National Survival in Eastern Europe
A. ROSSOS
An examination in depth of topics relating to how the various peoples of Eastern Europe formed their national identities; how they tried to organize their domestic affairs; and in what international context they sought to operate in order to survive as national entities and later to preserve their newly won independence and territorial integrity.
HIS 1411H-F Theory and Practice in Early Modern British History, 1500-1800
J. MORI
This course will consider the secondary literature, materials and methodologies relevant to "hot topics" in early modern British history. Primary sources will be used wherever possible and students will be given a choice of topics to study. These include, but are not restricted to, sexuality, aspects of empire, political culture and history of science. Some background in early modern history is desirable.
D.
A transnational and crossnational analysis of Irish nationalism in the Atlantic World from the 1790s to the 1860s. Special attention is paid to the United Irishmen in the United States, the Young Ireland exiles of 1848, and the Fenian movement in Canada and the United States.
HIS1510H-S Readings in Early American Political and Intellectual History
Y. EYAL
This readings seminar introduces M.A. and PH.D. candidates in history to some of the classic and recent literature in American political and intellectual history through the civil war. It is broad enough to serve as a field seminar for graduate students preparing major or minor fields in early U.S. history. Topics include the settlement of British North America, colonial politics and the causes of revolution, founding the new republic and establishing the federal constitutional system, and sectionalism and the outbreak of disunion. Students will meet for discussion of these texts in a two-hour weekly seminar. They will produce a book review drawn from the “Recommended Reading” list as well as a final 20-25-page historiographical essay that surveys an aspect of the field.
HIS 1532H-F American Foreign Policy in the Cold War
R. PRUESSEN
An in-depth analysis of U.S. activism in the global arena after World War II. Emphasis will be on the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s though there will be regular, informal discussion of more recent developments and “post-Cold War” international relations. Most weekly meetings will focus on the major secondary literature, but there will also be regular attention to primary sources.
HIS 1539H-S American Film Comedy and Popular Culture
R. KING
This course will explore the history of American film comedy from the origins of cinema to the end of the studio era in the early 1960s. In its various forms, comedy has always been a staple of American film production. But it has also always been a site of heterogeneity and nonconformity in the development of American cinema, with neither its form nor content fitting existing models of classical film practice. This course accounts for that nonconformity by exploring comedy's close and essential links to “popular” cultural sources (in particular, vaudeville and variety); it considers how different comic filmmakers have responded to and reshaped those sources; and it examines the relation between comedy and social formation (class and ethnicity in particular).HIS 1543H-S Topics in Material Culture
A. HOOD
HIS 1673H-S Critical Historiography of Late Imperial and Modern China
L. CHEN
This course introduces students to a host of important topics concerning late imperial and modern Chinese history. It will cover issues including state-society relationship, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, print culture, foreign relations, translingual politics and empire, modernity, nationalism, and revolutionary ideology. Mindful of the traditional approaches, these topics will be discussed through comparative and global perspectives and through the lens of more recent historiographic theories. All the readings are carefully chosen to reflect both the cutting-edge scholarship on the topics and the important methodological questions at issue. Students will be asked to write reaction papers (3-4 pages long) every week (for eight out of twelve weeks). Alternatively, students can opt to write and present a substantive research paper (at least 25 pages) on a topic of Chinese history with instructor’s approval.HIS 1707H-F Topics in African History
S. ROCKEL
An investigation of selected topics in social, economic and political history from the earliest times to the present. The emphasis will be on Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to East, Central and Southern Africa. In any one year topics chosen will include some of the following: iron age cultures; precolonial states and economies; slavery and the slave trade; religious innovations; colonial conquest and resistance; migrant labour; changing identities; segregation and apartheid; nationalism and decolonization; armed struggle and civil wars; demography, health and environmental management. Students are welcome to suggest areas of personal interest. Course work includes a research or historiographical paper and class presentations.HIS1709H-F(J) Conversion & Christianities in the Early Modern Spanish World
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS 441H/1709H)
K. MILLS
The seminar investigates religious conversion and the ways in which human allegiances and identities emerge and change in colonial settings. Our readings and discussions will concentrate on the Spanish world between about the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Principal settings will include the late medieval Spanish kingdoms, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, and the Philippines archipelago. A few of our meetings will range even more broadly in the hope of awakening the student to the wider historical frames in which our theme and period rest, and in search of interdisciplinary thinking tools for students of religious and cultural change. Primary sources translated into English will inform discussions and secondary readings whenever possible, and visual images will also be considered.
HIS 1720H-F Caribbean Decolonization
M. NEWTON
This course is a critical intellectual history of Caribbean decolonization. It begins with the Haitian Revolution, exploring and comparing how history was mobilized to structure anti-colonial theories about to the making of ‘postcolonial’ Caribbean societies. Key conceptual frameworks to be examined include indigenism, noirisme, creolization, metissage; Caribbean interpretations of Marxism, Negritude and Pan-Africanism. Several questions structure the course. Why was the re-interpretations of history such a battleground of decolonizing Caribbean politics? How and why did the Caribbean produce such varied and often politicalle competitive versions of common historical experiences? What happened to decolonizing theories of history in translation, as they moved across the region’s multiple linguistic zones? How did these new ‘decolonizing’ histories produce/reinscribe categories of marginality?HIS 1785H-S International Relations in the Middle East
J. HANSSEN
Since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the Middle East has been experiencing and negotiating the effects of European, US and Soviet intervention. The Middle East shares with other regions the legacy of formal and informal empires, of superpower rivalry and the cold war. There are, however, a number of regional factors specific to the politics of the Middle East which require a shift away from superpower-centered analysis to a regional perspective. After a historical overview of the legacy of early 20th century colonialism in the region, this course will focus on three conflict clusters: Israel/Palestine, Lebanon/Syria and the Iraq/Iran, and three issues: state formation, US imperialism and Islamism.
HIS1997H-F The Practice of History
HIS1997H is the common experience of all History MA students. It provides the occasion for you to reflect on the discipline through an examination of theoretical and methodological writing, as well as some historical works exemplifying important currents of historiography. Emphasis in the course is on reading and discussion.
Exclusion: HIS1201H-F
JEH 2020H-F EARLY MODERN DIASPORA: A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY SEMINAR ON THE LITERATURE AND HISTORY OF EXILE
MARJORIE RUBRIGHT (English) and NICHOLAS TERPSTRA (History)
(*NOTE: This course is also posted under Cross Listed Courses here.)
The early modern period was fundamentally shaped by waves of human migration unprecedented in western European history. From the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) to the flight of the Huguenots from France (culminating in the late 1680s), European Christian culture sought to protect its changing notions of religious purity by expelling and/or enclosing the Other, thereby triggering an ongoing diasporic discourse. In addition to migrations catalyzed by religion, the movement of people from rural to urban centers transformed many of Europe’s cities into crowded and diversely constituted metropolises. This seminar will explore exile, refugeeism, and diaspora across literary and historical texts and contexts. We will familiarize ourselves with a range of current theories and approaches to the study of diaspora with the aim of developing methodologies for investigating the diasporic discourses engendered by real and imagined experiences of early modern exile. As a cross-disciplinary seminar, we will draw upon texts, methods, and critical theories that inform both historical and literary critical approaches to this topic. We welcome students in English, History, Comparative Literature, and Religion.
Questions we will consider include: In what ways is the current critical discourse regarding diaspora useful for a study of exile and refugeeism in the context of a pre-nationalized Europe? How did English dramatic literature represent the dynamics of exile and how did exiles participate in shaping English literature in this period? In an era when English plays were censored for their explicit references to violence against strangers, how were ideas and ideals of tolerance also emerging? In what ways did the exile put definitional pressure on the civic categories governing access to citizenship and enfranchisement (such as citizen, stranger, denizen, alien, and naturalized subject)? We will also query the sometimes-celebratory tone of discussions of cultural mixing in order to ask how we can rethink these ideas and their attendant subject categories (the hybrid subject, the exile, the trans-national) in a more grounded and contextualized way. The interests of seminar participants will further shape our inquiries.
Seminar members will have the opportunity to participate in events related to the Jackman Humanities Institute 2011-2012 annual theme, “Location/Dislocation,” and may elect to present paper proposals to the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies conference (Spring 2012), “Exile, Expulsion, & Religious Refugees.”
Locating Exile, an archive-based assignment 10%.
Active and Informed Participation 20%.
JHP1631H–S Intelligence and International Relations
W. WARK
This course seeks to expose students to the literature on the development of modern intelligence services and their impact on the conduct of international relations since the outbreak of World War Two. The history of intelligence power in the period from 1939 to the present will be explored through a series of case studies, many involving the use of selected primary sources. The objective of the course is to further an understanding of the informational base on which decision-making in war and peace is conducted.