HIS 1997H  The Practice of History (MA only)

HIS1997 is the common experience of all post-Medieval 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.

HIS 1001H (J)  Topics in History: The Two Germanies and the Cold War, 1949-1989  (Winter 2024 - LEC 0101)

This course explores central themes of the field of postwar German and Cold War history from national, European and global history perspectives. It familiarizes students with significant events, texts, dates and actors in its analysis of the histories of the two postwar German states and explores German history as a microcosm of Cold War relations. In analyzing the two Germanies after 1949 an interdisciplinary variety of texts will be studied, covering topics from diplomacy and economy, to gender, memory, politics and geopolitics.

HIS 1001H  Topics in History: Jews of the Premodern Islamic World (Winter 2024 - LEC 0202)

For a millennium, most of the world’s Jews lived in Islamic lands. The result of this extended encounter was that Jewish literature and culture developed in intimate dialogue with Muslims. This course explores key facets of that Jewish-Muslim relationship, including the political and legal institutions that shaped the Jewish experience of minorityhood; the Islamic religious milieu which simultaneously challenged and inspired Jews; and the popular and scholarly culture which Jews both consumed and contributed to. A major focus of the course will be on investigating the promises and challenges provided by different genres of primary sources. We will examine legal, documentary, and literary sources, and consider the strategies that scholars have developed to draw information from them. Prior course work in either Jewish or Islamic studies is recommended. All texts will be provided in English although students with knowledge of Hebrew or the languages of the Islamic world will be encouraged to put those skills to use.

HIS 1003H  Theory and History

This course provides an introduction to key theoretical works that animate historical research and practice, as well as connect historical scholarship with debates and problematics in other disciplines.  We will read classic texts of social theory such as Foucault, Marx, Spivak, Chakrabarty, Butler, Braudel, Fanon, and Trouillot in conjunction with problems and methods explored by historians, past and present. Selected themes pertinent to the historian’s craft—temporality and archives, scale, translation—and to the philosophy of history—universalism and alterity, modernity and capitalism--will be taken up to prepare students to craft their research trajectory and projects.

HIS 1004H  History and Biopolitics

This course examines and expands on Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics,” which identified the historical emergence of methods for governing living-being.   The course combines close readings of pivotal historical texts by such authors as Malthus, Marx and Darwin with current interdisciplinary scholarship that reevaluates biopolitics in relation to race, capital formations, colonialism, sex, technoscience,  economy, and ecology.

HIS 1006H  Historiography “From Below”: Comparative and Critical Perspectives

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.

HIS 1007H  Theories, Histories, Imaginaries

This course draws on theoretical, historical, and creative texts to explore an annual theme relevant to the study of technoscience.  The theme this year is temporality and futures.  The course examines questions of time, chronicity, pasts, remainders, futures, speculation, anticipation, cycles, forecasts, aftermaths, apocalypse, development, genealogy other figurations of time, particularly as they relate to histories of technoscience, life, ecology, colonialism, and capitalism. The course takes up these questions with an emphasis on the recent past and the contemporary and through readings from interdisciplinary and theoretical scholarship with an emphasis on feminist, postcolonial, critical-race, queer, political economic orientations.

HIS 1008H  Practicum in Local and Community History

This course is designed as a practicum – we quickly will move out of the seminar room and into the archives where students will apply a number of techniques and methods used by research historians writing about the nineteenth and twentieth century city. Although the spatial and temporal focus will be on Toronto in the “long” twentieth century, the methods taught will be applicable to other geographic and national contexts. The aim is to prepare students for the research that will underlie their Masters papers or PhD dissertations.  There will be a strong emphasis on the design of research projects and how they can be structured from start to finish in collaborative fashion using a range of digital humanities tools such as Slack, Zotero, Omeka, and Neatline.

The course will begin with readings that cover exemplary recent works in community history and then move on to a section on theory and method.  Visits to the City of Toronto Archives, Metropolitan Reference Library, Ryerson Image Centre, and the Thomas Fisher Library will orient students to available source materials, finding aids, and staff support. They then will be divided in small teams that will model projects, conduct sample research, and develop digital presentation tools.

Each student will be assessed upon 1) a review of a monograph on local/community history; 2) a methodological essay that reflects on both the practice of local history and working collaboratively; and 3) a final digital research project.  In addition there will be regular “hands on” assignment using archival and documentary materials that will be submitted but not formally assessed, but will be considered part of participation.

HIS 1009H  Empire and Liberal Governance

This course delves into techniques and technologies of modern governance, seen especially through the lens of British colonial liberalism, in two broad ways: first, as a central project in the global history of the present, and more particularly, as a key story in the genealogy of contemporary neoliberal mappings of society, subjects, and agency. The seminar will introduce students to foundational literature on the concept of governmentality, historicizing the term by reading it alongside key primary texts on political economy and sovereignty, and postcolonial approaches to political theory. In particular, it poses British India as a site through which to open investigations on the key features and contradictions of liberal governing more broadly, most especially, the relationship between economy as the dominant idiom of governance and the politicization of culture/identity politics.

HIS 1010H  New Historiographies of Capitalism

Highlighting key themes and methodologies in what has been called “the new history of capitalism” emerging since the financial crisis of 2008, this course will grapple with foundational primary texts in the historical, theoretical and interdisciplinary study of capital and capitalism, alongside recent historiography addressing processes of economization and financialization.  Engaging global perspectives via colonial and contemporary formations, and posing the question of governing, the course distinguishes itself from traditional economic history as well as business history by focusing on a key feature of recent historiographies:  the contextualizing of timeless and trans-historical categories of economists through attention to processes that make economic space, time and subjects.  

HIS 1011H  Queer and Trans Oral History

For decades, oral history has been a preferred methodology in documenting social movements and the life experiences of marginalized populations. Recently, LGBTQ history, intersectional feminist politics, and queer theory have given rise to new oral history projects, new identities, and new methods. This seminar will be a workshop in doing LGBTQ oral history, with a focus on queer and trans lives. Students will follow the full life-cycle of the interview and learn how to: develop a theoretically informed research plan; grapple with ethical considerations; write a questionnaire and consent form; find narrators; use audio and visual technology to record interviews; write up fieldnotes; transcribe interviews; analyze and write from the material; and contribute to a digital exhibition using Omeka. We will read work in oral history theory in practice, including work by Boyd; Portelli; Abrams; High; Ramirez; Murphy; and others. The course will undergo ethics review before the first class, but students will learn about IRB procedures as part of the course content. 

HIS 1012H  Indigenous and Decolonial Science and Technology Studies

How have Indigenous and other colonialized people created, taken up, critiqued, transformed and resisted technologies, data, and science? From digital games to laboratories, from genetic research to pollution, from statistics to plants, we will discuss the ways land and body sovereignties are at stake in technoscience. We will learn from the growing field of Indigenous science and technology studies that includes historical and other approaches, and then put this field in conversation with works from other decolonial traditions.

HIS 1013H  Intellectuals and Decolonization

Efforts to decolonize museums, universities, and other institutions have been met with confusion, opprobrium, and applause. It is clear that decolonization no longer refers to a historical period or the fate of a nation, but rather a set of ideas, processes, and movements. This course approaches decolonization from the perspective of intellectual history. What did writers argue that decolonization meant; what role have intellectuals and their institutions sought to play in decolonization; and what were the consequences of their efforts? Moreover, how have historians written—or not written—the history of decolonization? This course will focus on historical responses by anti-colonial intellectuals to the end of the British and French empires and the ascendance of an American one. In addition to the study of anti-colonialism and its narration in professional historiography, this course also considers the relevance for historians of recent theoretical debates over decolonization and what is called "decoloniality."

HIS 1014H  Neoliberalism in North America

Neoliberalism has been North America’s dominant ideological, policy-framework and political,economic and social reality for the last half-century. Neoliberalism’s defining elements— free trade, individualism, market fundamentalism, privatization, deregulation and a weakening of the state –have profoundly reshaped Canadian and American governance and society since the 1970s, and marked a departure from the Keynesian interventionist approaches that dominated policy and discourse from 1945 until the 1970s. This course seeks to historicize neoliberalism’s emergence, its ascendance, and the resistance that this ideology and its policies have engendered from its beginnings in the postwar period to the present, and within a transnational context. The aim of this course is for students to develop their own opinions on just what the impact of neoliberalism has been on life in North America. Students will develop and sharpen these views by critically assessing historical works together, and by individually addressing issues through writing and seminar discussion. It should be emphasized that this is first and foremost a history course, and that all of these activities shall be rooted within the historical discipline.

HIS 1015H  Oral History Theory and Practice

This course will focus on the theory and practice of oral history.  Students will read and analyze scholarly works that utilize oral history interviews, and engage with key debates around issues such as memory, trauma, narrative, and representation.  Students will learn how to develop and undertake a project that employs oral history methods, including the processes of interviewing, archiving, and publishing.  They will grapple with a range of ethical, political, legal, and other considerations inherent to oral history, and of significance to other fields in the study of history.  This course will consider different approaches to oral history, over time and across cultures.

HIS 1016H (J) Historical Readings in Gender and Sexuality: History of Sexuality in China

This reading seminar will focus on sexuality in Chinese history. We will engage with theoretical works as well as empirical studies. What is historically specific about sexual identities, sexual acts, and the discourses and technologies of sex in China? How does the concept of "China" itself relate to sexuality? The goal of the course is to provide students with a basic framework for pursuing additional research, as well as for comprehensive field preparations in these areas. This course will be offered as a joint UG/G course with HIS 485 in the 2023-24 academic year. 

HIS 1017H  History and Social Media: Critical Histories for Big Publics 

This seminar responds to the disinformation crisis of the past decade by focusing on the relationship between social media and history in two ways. First, it offers a thematic survey of the much longer histories behind social media platforms, including global histories of computing, mechanization, capitalism, race, gender, and power. Second, it explores how historians could use these newer technologies to generate better public access to quality historical scholarship. So doing, this course seeks to provide future historians with a deeper understanding of how these “modern” platforms are defined by global historical legacies and biases that require our urgent attention. Readings, research, and seminar discussions help students examine these legacies at work within social media platforms themselves, revealing how they are “haunted” by ingrained biases, rooted in longer histories of racism, colonialism, misogyny/ transphobia, and capitalism. Beyond critique, this seminar focuses on whether social media platforms can function as potential tools for historians. Could a stronger understanding of the technologies and histories behind social media help historians protect public digital access to quality history and data that can make a difference? Assignments and workshops blend traditional formats like book reviews and project proposals with newer digital formats, including the production of TikTok and YouTube videos on archival sources that put our readings into action and attempt to make accurate historical information “go viral.”

HIS 1018H  History as Creative Nonfiction

The course introduces students to creative nonfiction writing by combining elements of a traditional graduate seminar and a writing workshop. The aim is to improve historical writing and prepare students to incorporate elements of creative nonfiction into their writing about the past, whether in the form of traditional scholarship, public facing work, or innovative hybrid forms. The course material and assignments will focus on careful reading and critical analysis, as well as, writing exercises, creative experimentation, and an exploration of the possibilities of form, style, and media. In order to enable students to develop greater confidence and a more self-aware engagement with writing as craft, the course will delve into creative nonfiction methods, tools, and techniques. These will relate to the fundamentals of narrative (e.g., characters, scenes, structure, plot) as well as more experimental forms of creative expression. We will read exemplary works by historians as well as engage with other forms of narrative nonfiction, literary essays, fiction, poetry, and documentary film.

HIS 1019H Science, Nature, and Empire

Empire has long been considered a crucible in which the sciences of nature were formed. The radically different environments, places, and forms of life that Europeans encountered as they expanded their territorial reach overseas—and the exotic organisms that accompanied returning explorers and collectors to Europe—exploded standard understandings of nature and the world, ushering in new theories, methods, and practices for knowing nature. This course will engage literature on the science of nature since the early modern period, with a particular focus on the 18^th and 19^th centuries, in the context of European imperial exploration, expansion, and violence. Particular attention will be paid to the roles of indigenous knowers, knowledge systems, theories, and practices in shaping modern understandings and sciences of nature.

HIS 1023H  Time, and History

“Translation, Time, and History” is an introduction to the philosophy and practice of history and it is conceived as a bridge or means of conversing across areas and temporal periods. Readings on the debates about historicism spanning a wide range of intellectual traditions such as dialectical thought, postcolonial theory, hermeneutics, and Marxism will be paired with texts pertaining to theories of translation and periodization. The seminar will reconsider questions of historical method and practice through a discussion of contemporary dilemmas of writing historical narratives that engage with the conundrums of globalization.

HIS 1026H  Modernity and Its Others: History & Postcolonial Critique

This seminar presents a postcolonial approach to the history of ideas and to the idea of history.  It tracks three major themes in the history of the idea of modernity from the late 18th through the 20th centuries: political freedom, citizenship and the nation-state; capitalism and its critique; and the relationship of history, memory, and identity.  The course will at once engage in close analysis of canonical primary texts on these themes and introduce students to practices of critical questioning that have emerged from postcolonial historiography.  Drawing largely but not exclusively from South Asian historiography, as well as from the fields of colonial/postcolonial cultural studies, the seminar addresses influential historiographical problems, such as the question of "alternative" modernities; the question of the derivative nature of anti-colonial nationalism; and the problem of writing the history of regions which have been deemed static and without history.

HIS 1031H  Images as History: photography, historical method, and conceptualizing visuality

This seminar examines photography and photographs in three ways: historically, methodologically, and conceptually. Throughout, we investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might enable us to refuse capitalism’s violence–and if so, how?

Historically, the seminar will cover the era of the photographic image, from its invention in the 1830s to the present. We will be especially concerned with examining the role that photography has played in shaping modern understandings of self, nation, and race. In addition to examining relationships between photography, identity, and power, we will develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing photographic images, carefully considering the status of photographs as primary sources for historical research. In terms of the conceptual, we will read and discuss foundational works by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and others. Here, we will consider the ethics and politics of human visual experience as such. What does it mean to see and be seen? How has photography been used to separate, identify, and classify? How have photographs changed the kinds of claims that people could make in their respective private and public spheres? Finally, students will consider ways that they might mobilize the visual archive in their own research.

HIS 1032H  Modernity and Its Visual Cultures

This seminar examines the concept of “modernity” and its expression in visual form and cultural practice. We will focus on developments in visual culture beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to explore a range of transformations in subjective and social experience and economic and cultural practice that scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have described within the rubric of modernity and modernism. By studying both the primary theoretical texts underpinning this concept – including Baudelaire, Marx, Freud, and Benjamin – and key secondary literature, we will attempt to define modernity and capture the nuances of its many competing definitions. We will ground this pursuit in the history of Western visual culture. Key topics will include: technological change (from photography and film to color and printing); the centrality of urban space; theories of vision; ideas about temporality, history, and the archive; emergent practices of collecting and display; travel and colonialism; and consumerism and the mass press. In what ways, we will ask, have changes in visual culture been central to the concept, experience, and origins of modernity? And how does focusing on the visual aspects of modernity help us better understand its broader social, political, economic, scientific, and technological developments?

HIS 1040H  Maps in History: Power and Identity, Conflict and Imagination

A recent historiographical shift has opened up the study of mapping, particularly in its imperial functions, not only as an antiquarian fascination but now also as a source of political, social and intellectual history. This graduate course will examine maps as sites of the construction of identities, of the exercising of power and of performances of violence.

We will look at mapping as an encounter, and as an intrinsically ideological and imaginative process. Each week will focus on a specific set of maps, reading the maps themselves as historical texts and looking at the constructions of space, power, identity, and conflict they engendered. Although taking a global perspective, we will look at four case studies from North America, Africa, India and South East Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, through which we will explore themes of imperialism, nationalism, expressions of sovereignty, territoriality, cartographic literacy, non-cartographic mapping practices, gender and space, counter-mapping, conceptions of self, and wider issues related to geographic imaginations.

HIS 1101H  Race and Gender in the Northern Colonies of North America

A comparative examination of race and gender in colonial New England, New France and the British North American colonies.  Initial sessions discuss theories of gender and race 1600-1850. The course proceeds to case studies of groups such as the Salem “witches.”   It examines debates on women in New France and literature on masculinity in the fur trade.  The course then turns to the Loyalists at the time of the American Revolution, with particular attention to Iroquois and black minorities among the exiles. Occupational groups such as midwives and seamen are analysed. The course closes with examination of two mid-nineteenth century racialized groups, the blacks of Upper Canada and the mixed-bloods of Red River.

HIS 1104H  The Colonial Americas in the Atlantic World, 1500 - 1800

This course examines North and South America, as well as the Caribbean and Meso-America, during the centuries of European conquest and colonization.  A range of topics will be considered, including war, slavery, Christian missions, and the establishment of settler societies, but the main focus will be on the interaction of indigenous peoples and newcomers.  The working hypothesis is that the American empires of Spain, Portugal, France and Britain were the joint creation of natives and Europeans.

HIS 1106H  Topics in Canadian Social History

This course examines selected topics in Canadian social history from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.  Students will have an opportunity to study various significant topics where there is a strong secondary literature.  The topics are organized chronologically, and an effort will be made to appreciate the significance of social transformations over time.  We will focus on the changing approaches and methodologies of historians during the past 30 years.  Ultimately, students should gain a better understanding of both Canada's social history and the writing of social history by Canadianists. Likely topics include: the rise of institutions, aboriginal peoples and acculturation in the prairie west; industrialization and the family; working-class cultures; spectacles and the new cultural history; gender and the reform movements; the rise of the welfare state; immigration; consumerism.

HIS 1107H  Religion, Culture and Society in Canada

This seminar offers an overview of the principal historical movements and historiographical debates relating to the role of religion in Canadian social and cultural development.  Seminar discussions will focus on such issues as native spirituality, the role of religion in the Canadian state, social Christianity, “national” and ethnic Churches, the emergence of Judaism and Islam as religious presences in Canadian society, religion and multiculturalism, secularization, and the relationship between religion and education.  Emphasis will also be placed on using primary sources for scholarly research.  Students will be encouraged to write original microstudies of local religious groups based upon archival research.

HIS 1109H  Topics in Canadian History

This seminar will introduce some of the key topics and classic readings in Canadian history. It is mainly intended to allow PhD students to begin preparation for the Canadian field exam, but it will also provide a general view of work in Canadian history for graduate students. A key aim of the course is to draw students out of their area of thematic or temporal specialization within Canadian history.

HIS 1111H  Topics in North American Environmental History

This seminar course is interdisciplinary, studies past environmental change in North America and reviews major works and themes in environmental history.  Topics include theory and historiography, the pre-European environment and contact period, the environmental impact of resource development, of settlement, industrialization and urbanization, ideas about nature in religion, literature and Canadian and American culture, the conservation movements in Canada and the United States and the modern environmental movement.  The works of American historians such as Donald Worster, William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant, and Canadian historians such as Ramsay Cook, Gerald Killan and George Wareeki are considered.  Students will have the option of writing several analytical book reviews or of writing one research paper to fulfill the written requirements in the course.

HIS 1112H  Canada in Comparative Contexts: Gender, Labour, Migration

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 1113H  Politics and Society in North American History

This seminar examines selected topics in the political history of North America, drawing on both Canadian and American literature (and, where appropriate, theoretical or analytic works from international scholars) to think about politics in a broad and comparative way.  Students will be encouraged to think about similarities and differences in political cultures across the 49th parallel, and about the development of political vocabularies, institutions, and practices that transcend national, regional, and local boundaries but are simultaneously shaped by them.  The course is intended to appeal to students interested in political, social, economic or cultural history, but also to break down the distinctions between such categories.  Possible themes and topics include: varieties of liberalism; imperalism and republicanism; the emergence of “modern” state institutions; social movements and radical politics; regional influences on politics; citizenship and nationalism; the public sphere; changing ideas of and struggles over political participation; race and gender in politics.

HIS 1114H  Indigenous Histories in North America

This seminar provides a broad regional survey of recent scholarship in Indigenous histories of Turtle Island.  Readings for the seminar will feature histories written by or in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities, with the aim of drawing students into discussion of comparative historiographies, the role of worldview in historical writing and the significant methodological interventions made by Indigenous scholars and Indigenous studies.  Students will consider oral history and material culture as sources for writing history, and discuss ethical research practices for community-based scholarship.

In addition to active participation in weekly seminar students, each student will write a major paper, approximately 20 pages in length, in the form of a review essay on the historiography of either a region or a topic.

HIS 1117H  Canada: Colonialism/Postcolonialism

This course will introduce students to key works and approaches to the study of empire and ‘race’ in Canadian history. We will discuss the history of migration, the meaning of empire in everyday life, Canada’s relations with the global south, and Indigenous politics. Throughout, we will debate the merits of the ‘transnational’ turn in Canadian history.

HIS 1118H (J)  Canada by Treaty (Joint HIS419H1)

This intensive joint graduate/undergraduate research seminar provides opportunity for detailed study of the treaty processes between Indigenous peoples and newcomers in Canadian history, examining the shift from alliance treaties to land surrender agreements during the colonial period through to the signing of recent treaties including the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the Nisga’a Final Agreement. We will consider the history of Canada as a negotiated place, mapping the changing contexts of these agreements over more than four centuries through readings and seminar discussions. The first six weeks will be devoted to an intensive study of more than four centuries of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and newcomers to the lands that would become the Dominion of Canada.  There will be a day long field trip Friday September 28th to the Woodland Cultural Centre and the Mohawk Institute Residential school and a class trip to the Royal Ontario Museum. For the major assignment, students will select a treaty of personal relevance to them and conduct detailed research (guided by the professor), contributing their findings to a web resource on Canada's treaties. Students in this year's Canada By Treaty will have the opportunity to learn about digital curation and website design. Primary source analysis, seminar participation, digital content, research essay.

HIS 1128H Canada and Transnational History

This course explores how the “transnational turn” has influenced the writing of Canadian history over the past two decades. Students will be introduced to the major debates in the international literature, as well as a range of works in Canadian history that adopt a transnational approach.  In weekly readings, seminar discussions, and in the preparation of a major historiographical paper on a topic of their choosing, students will reflect on the challenges and merits of interpreting, researching, and writing Canada’s history through a transnational lens.

HIS 1142Y (J) Canadian Foreign Relations (Joint HIS405Y)

The course this year will concentrate on the period since 1980-2000. The course will centre around the Mulroney government’s foreign relations, including acid rain negotiations, the free trade agreement of 1988, peacekeeping, the South African question, Canada’s defence policy, and the end of the Cold War. On some topics primary research materials can be made available.

HIS 1168H (J)  Topics in History: History of the Sex Trade in Canadian and Comparative Contexts (Joint HIS417HI)

This course explores the historiographies and historical populations surrounding “the world’s oldest profession” in Canadian and comparative global contexts, from the 17th century onwards. Using a range of texts, students explore both the lived experiences and representations of those involved in this controversial economy, including madams, clients, police, and queer and trans communities. Throughout the course students will examine a range of sex work archives and primary sources, including memoirs, photographs, and film, to develop an original research project on a topic related to the course theme.

HIS 1180H  Race in the USA and Canada

This course explores the enduring power and changing forms of “race” in Canada and in the United States from historical and theoretical perspectives. We will examine how “race” has affected society and inequalities within both nations. We will also see how “race” has impacted both nations’ engagements with the world. To make our comparison concrete, we will consider connections as well as divergences. To that end, our examination of “race” will focus on tracing interactions among law, society, and policy from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. We will examine these interactions as they affected white, black, indigenous, Asian, Latino, Muslim and mixed race residents. We also will probe related impacts on transnational and international relations. This is both a reading and research course.

HIS 1200H  Readings in European Intellectual History

The course will introduce students to the methods and practices of intellectual history with a focus on the development of ideas in Europe from the Enlightenment to the present day. The books assigned in the course will be a combination of classic and exemplary works in the field, theoretical texts in related fields, and some of the best and most representative works recently published in the field. The aim is to give students a solid foundation in the methods and practices of intellectual history, an exposure to a breadth of approaches within the field and a sense of the trends in recent scholarship while also enabling them to engage with challenging theoretical works that will allow them to create their own unique approaches to intellectual history.

HIS 1203H  Jus commune

Jus commune: the rise and development of learned jurisprudence in the High Middle Ages. Jurisprudence is one of the foundational disciplines in the rise of the Universities and the one in which the newly defined figure of the academic most directly became engaged in the rule and development all sorts of high medieval institutions and practices.  This course will examine the texts and practices relate to medieval jurisprudence.

HIS 1204H  Topics in Medieval Church History

Our medieval history students and those in the Centre, whatever their topics of interest, can all profit from some familiarity with the history of ecclesiastical institutions in the high Middle Ages (papacy, episcopate, parish structures, clerical education etc.).  The proposed course would provide the opportunity to acquire such familiarity while varying the topics covered in accordance with the research interests of the students.

HIS 1205H  The Communist Experience in Central and Eastern Europe: Genres of Interpretation

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of 20^th century east European Communism. A little over three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the east European communist regimes, scholars across the disciplines continue interpreting communism’s multifaceted legacy. Consensus on what exactly constituted state socialism and how to remember it, however, is difficult to achieve. With emphasis on recent historiography, this course highlights the complexities of the communist past. Focusing on a range of issues--such as nostalgia, consumer culture, sexuality, gender, nationalism, dissidence, political violence and attempts at transitional justice--this course will reveal that, when considered as a lived-experience, it is impossible to represent socialism in a straightforward and unambiguous narrative. Instead, we will explore the various, sometimes conflicting, ways in which people lived in and through the communist regimes and the ways in which they have come to interpret their legacy. This course will combine discussion of scholarly studies with screenings of documentary and fiction films. For their writing assignments students will produce a historiographical survey, a comparative essay on visual and written sources, and a research paper based on both secondary and relevant primary sources. Students will also deliver an in-class presentation and lead discussion.

HIS 1210H  Gregory of Tours and the Sixth Century

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 1213H  Medieval Institutes of Perfection

In order to understand a society, it is necessary to study its ideals. Monastic life was perceived in Western Europe as the most perfect form of existence up until the twelfth century; this seminar will try to understand why such was the case, as well as how the monastic ideal evolved from its origin to the twelfth century. We will explore some of the most important monastic primary sources with a critical eye, especially narrative sources (Lives of saints) and so-called “normative” sources (rules and customaries). The daily life, internal structures and relationships with the outside world of the most significant monastic communities of the Middle Ages will be studied. This is an introductory course for graduate students desirous to acquire sound bases in the history of medieval monasticism.

HIS 1214H  The Merovingians

Narrative and institutional history of Gaul in late antiquity and the early middle ages, culminating in the Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians.

HIS 1215H  Social Change in Medieval England, 1154 - 1279

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 1221H  Early Modern Europe: Topics in Social History

Theme for Winter 2021:  Recent Turns in Social Historiography:  Sense, Space, Emotion, & Materiality

Social historians of the past decades have explored new ways of understanding human experience, publishing fascinating new work on sensory history, spatial history, material history, and history of the emotions.  They have worked with some earlier social historical methods, like quantification, they’ve incorporated foundational concerns about class and economics, and they’ve integrated areas of inquiry that took off in the second half of the 20^th century, like the histories of gender, of children and youth, and of race.  Early modern historiography has been transformed by the intersections of these approaches, and in this seminar we’ll consider how the new work on sense, space, materials, and emotions may change our approach to the early modern world.  We’ll look at some theoretical or survey works, read some monographs together in depth, and sound out the scope of possibilities through a few essay collections.   When we look at different sides of human experience, do we see and interpret the early modern period differently?

HIS 1222H  Ritual in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe               

This course will consider the use of ritual as a means of understanding the evolving structures of European domestic, religious, and political life in the period of 1400 through 1700.  Particular attention will be paid to ritual calendars and rites of passage, the inter-penetration of political and religious concerns, the reaction against ritual in the Protestant Reformation, and the expanding use of ritual to substantiate claims of political authority both in Europe and overseas.

HIS 1223H (J)  Humanism and the Renaissance (Joint HIS496H1S)

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 1228H  Revolutions in History: The Annales School in Context

This course is a readings seminar designed to introduce students to the work of the loose association of 20th-century French historians known as the Annales school, which came to have far-reaching influence on the writing of history around the world. More broadly, this course proposes to explore how an understanding of both historical context and the social trajectories of individual historians can shed light on historical scholarship itself.

HIS 1230H  History of the Sexes

This course explores ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, as well as patterns in the relationships of the sexes in the early modern western world.  The course gives an opportunity to discuss concepts and methods used by historians currently working on sex and gender, through a literature review and exposure to some of the key source material.  We will meet weekly for discussion on such topics as: ideas about sexual difference, reproduction and legitimate sexual practices, motives for marriage, parenting, regulation of behaviour, sexual politics, and the role of religion in forming ideas about manhood and womanhood.

HIS 1231H  Topics in French History: Governing a State in Contemporary Europe, France 1940 - 2000

The course aims at giving a plural and vivid image of the challenges facing the governants (i.e. political power and administrative élites) of a modern State such as France during the second half of the 20th century.

HIS 1232H  European Colonialism, 1870-1970: A Comparative History

The course will examine colonialism from the rise of the “New Imperialism”, to the advent of decolonialization. Although all European colonialisms will be considered, special attention will be paid to the two largest European empires, France and Britain’s. The course will further analyze a set of important themes, ranging from power and social control, to race and gender, colonial culture, colonial ideologies, and mechanisms of colonial rules. Chronologically, this course will cover a number of crucial watersheds, from conquest and resistance to the construction of new identities, and the breaks and continuities provided by the two world wars.

HIS 1233H  Colonial Urbanism in the Mediterranean World, 1800 - 1950

Modern European powers tend to inscribe their power onto the urban fabric of its colonies and protectorates.  In the process, colonial cities often became ‘laboratories of modernity.’  This course analyses how – from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to decolonization in the 1950s – colonial urbanism affected the modern Mediterranean world.  It does so by focussing on French, British and Italian urban designs and politics in cities of the Levant and North Africa.  We will pursue comparatively the cultural and material, economic and architectural policies of three major European imperial powers and contrast them to late Ottoman urban culture.

HIS 1234H  Readings in Early Modern French History

This course is designed to introduce students to fundamental questions in the history of early modern France, as well as help prepare students for examination fields in early modern European history. Students will examine a series of key themes and important primary and secondary texts as an avenue into critical reflection on 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 essay analyzing a substantial primary text (or series of documents).

HIS 1235H  Histories In/Of The Mediterranean: From Braudel To Post-Colonialism

This seminar addresses the emergence and recent transformation of the early modern Mediterranean as an historical object.  It will offer an overview of the historiography of the early modern Mediterranean from Braudel to his most recent critics, and situate this historiography within the broader field of contemporary scholarship and politics.  In particular, it will explore the methodological and epistemological implications of post-colonial critiques of Orientalism and Occidentalism on the one hand and of the ongoing conversations between historians and anthropologists of the Mediterranean on the other.  Among topics covered will be the emergence of Europe, borderlands and frontiers, varieties of colonial and territorial states, early modern ethnography and travel writing, kinship, merchant "nations" and diasporas, and cultural interaction between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbours.  Students will be expected to write weekly response papers, a book review, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

HIS 1236H  French Colonial History: 1830 - 1962

This seminar will examine recent trends in French colonial history, covering the period from the conquest of Algeria (1830) to the wars of decolonization. Readings will span a wide geographical range, encompassing French colonies in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and ending chronologically with postcolonial legacies and the question of Francafrique.

HIS 1237H  France since 1870

This graduate course explores themes and episodes in French history since the Paris Commune. Students will be introduced to the historiography of the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, French colonialism, immigration, the two world wars, the Vichy regime, decolonization, and May 1968.  Memory, identity, citizenship, immigration and empire are some of the recurring themes in this course. Readings will include a range of cultural, political, gender, and social approaches.  In some cases we will read classics, and in others we will consider very recent studies.

HIS1245H  Gender, Men and Women in Europe, 1500-1950

This course explores theories and histories of gender with particular attention to Europe over four-and-a-half centuries. We will consider gender and sexuality as connected and entangled with religion, violence, the state, and everyday life. The chronological and geographic boundaries of the course are porous, and we will be especially attentive to linkages between Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Americas and the ways gender shaped those interactions and intersections and how people experienced them. Assigned readings will pair older scholarship with new work to reveal continuities and changes in the discipline. Students will explore an area of particular interest in a historiographic analysis and participate in peer-review workshops.

HIS1265H  Atrocities and Memory in Postwar Europe and North America

This course will examine how Europeans and North Americans confront the memory of both Nazi mass murder and the Allied bombing of Germany through the law, literature, left wing agitation, film, memorials and museums, and political debates. How do postwar representations of German atrocities and the Allied liberation of Europe, or conversely, German suffering and Allied war crimes shift throughout the postwar period, and what do these representations mean for “overcoming the past?” We will juxtapose generational responses, national reactions (including Germany, Poland, Israel, and the US and Canada), and official vs. unofficial representations of the atrocities of the Second World War. Among the focal points: the Nuremberg and postwar West German trials of Nazis, the fascination with Anne Frank, anti-fascist terror in 1970s Germany, The Berlin Memorial and the US Holocaust Museum, and films such as Shoah and Schindler’s List, and the explosion of debate on the bombing of Germany between 1943-45.

HIS 1268H  The Holocaust: History and Historiography

This seminar explores the history and especially the historiography of the Holocaust. Among the themes we will consider are the roles of religion in the Holocaust, colonial contexts, gender and sexuality, and cultures of memorialization. How has scholarship on these and other matters changed over the course of 80 years? Readings include works written during and close to the events and recent contributions to the field. Combinations and juxtapositions of works are intended to highlight innovations and persistent questions and help you revisit familiar material in new ways. We will read primary sources and secondary literature related to the Holocaust as well as consider how similar issues play out in other cases of genocide and mass atrocity and the scholarship about them. Oral presentations and the long paper (an historiographical analysis, although in consultation with the professor, students may write a paper based on original research) will give students an opportunity to explore areas of particular interest to them.

HIS 1269H (J)  The Social History of Medicine in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Joint HIS423H1)

The seminar, designed to inform students about developments in this new emerging 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.

HIS 1272H (J)  Twentieth-Century European History: Globalization and Empire (Joint HIS496H1)

What is globalization? What is empire? How can we think of the relationship between them? Globalization is one of the most widely-used concepts today. As a concept, it means many different things. We will investigate its range of meanings, analyzing in particular its connections with different imperial projects and the types of connections (economic, political, cultural) that they fostered. The goal is to seek to understand the types of globalization active in our world today. In other words, through a historical analysis of globalization and empire we will explore the various processes of economic and political transformation that created our modern present.

This course is designed for advanced undergraduate students as well as MA and PhD students in History and CERES. For the MA students it builds a strong foundation in the core topics and literatures of modern European and global history. For PhD students it supports the preparation of examination fields in this area.

HIS 1275H  Imperial Germany, 1871 - 1918

This research seminar will focus on recent controversies concerning social, cultural, and political change in the time of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. Among the topics to be considered are state- and nation-building after 1866, regional identities, gender and sexuality, religion, culture, antisemitism and murder in a small town, and British diplomatic reports on the rise and repression of the German labour movement. A combination of secondary literature and primary documents (all in translation and many online) will be discussed each week, beginning with a short student presentation. Among the required texts are James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871-1918. The Short Oxford History of Germany (2008) and Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale. The course will conclude with a discussion of the East German film adapted from Heinrich Mann’s biting satire, The Loyal Subject (1918).

HIS 1278H  Topics in 20th C German History: The Two Germanies in the Postwar Period

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 1279H  World War II in East Central Europe (Joint HIS451H1)

World War II was much more destructive and traumatic in East Central Europe than in Western Europe. The difference was caused by many reasons, among which the Nazi and Soviet plans and policies were the most important. Yet, there were also numerous East Central European phenomena that contributed to the cruelty of World War II in the East. This seminar will explore the external and internal factors that defined the war in the discussed region. Students will analyze the military, political, economic, and cultural activities of Germany, the Soviet Union, and their allies and enemies. Following sessions will concentrate on the fall of the Versailles systems, diplomatic and military activities throughout the war, on occupational policies of the invaders, economic exploration of the invaded, on collaboration, accommodation, resistance, genocide, the “liberation” and sovietization of East Central Europe after 1944. All the secondary and primary sources used in class are English.

HIS 1281H  Experiences of Real Socialism

This research seminar will examine a number of texts and films produced during and after the socialist era. Writings from the former period include memoirs, diaries, fiction, and film produced during the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Union and other countries of the “socialist camp,” including Yuri Trifonov’s novel, House on the Embankment (1976); Natalya Baranskaya’s novella “A Week Like Any Other” (1979) and the films The Joke, by Jaromil Jires (1969) and Man of Marble by Andrzej Wajda (1976). Works produced after 1991 include Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel On the Road to Babadag (2004), and the films Goodbye Lenin! byWolfgang Becker (2003) and 24 City by Jia Zhangke (2008).  Additional readings are critical works dealing with the concept of “real (existing) socialism," its legacy and issues of nostalgia.

HIS 1282H  Comparative Totalitarian Culture

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 the 1930s and 1940s.

HIS 1283H (J)  Crusades, Conversion and Colonization in the Medieval Baltic (Joint HIS412H1)

This seminar will explore the impact of crusades, religious conversion and colonization on medieval Baltic history. The focus of the course will be on close reading and analysis of the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia in English translation. Our readings and discussions will include topics such as crusades and violent conversion, medieval colonialism, Europeanization as well as German expansion eastwards, the role of the Teutonic Knights and the strategies of survival of the native Baltic people after conquest and Christianization.

HIS 1286H  Imperial Russian Social History

The first all-Russian (which was really the first all-imperial) census of 1897 categorized the population of the Russian Empire by gender, by social status, by profession, by religion, and in a way, by nationality. In this course, we will examine the ways that those categories developed over the preceding centuries. We will examine how social estates developed, and how alternate forms of social stratification did or did not develop to challenge those estates. We will look at the role religion played in categorizing Russian society, and the ways that the Russian state viewed religion synonymously with nationalism.  And we 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. 

HIS 1287H (J)  Polish Jews Since the Partitions of Poland (Joint HIS433H1)

The history of the Polish Jews and of Polish-Jewish relations are among the most interesting and controversial subjects in the history of Poland. The Jewish experience in Poland can contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust and of the non-Jewish minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The course will explore the history of Polish Jews from the Partitions of Poland to the present time, concentrating on the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries: the situation of Polish Jews in Galicia, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and Prussian-occupied Poland before 1914; during World War I; in the first years of reborn Poland; in the 1930s; during WW II; and in post-war Poland. The course will examine the state policies of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Poland towards Jews; the rise of Jewish political movements; the life of Jewish shtetls in Christian neighbourhoods; changes in the economic position and cultural development of Jewish communities in Poland, and the impact of communism on Jewish life. Materials for the course are in English. Sessions will focus on an analysis of primary sources, translated from Polish, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, as well as on secondary sources, representing diverse interpretations and points of views.

HIS 1288H  Russia’s Empire

For centuries, the Russian capital, whether Moscow or St. Petersburg, has served not only as the center of the Russian nation, but also as the center of a large, multi-ethnic, contiguous empire.  In this course, students will examine various issues facing the rulers of this unusual empire.

HIS 1289H  The Cold War Through Its Archives

The course 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 1290H  Topics in Imperial Russian History: Russia’s Empire

The collapse of the Soviet Union along national lines brought about a renewed interest in the non-Russian parts of the Imperial Russian state. This so-called “imperial turn” has altered the ways that we think about Tsarist Russian rule. In this course we address different approaches to the study of Empire as reflected in the Russian case from its origins in the sixteenth century until the collapse of the Tsarist state — but not precisely of its empire — in 1917.

HIS 1296H (J)  Stalinism (Joint HIS490H1)

A historiographical survey of the political, cultural and social history of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s years in power. Major emphasis of the course is on historiography, interpretation, and an introduction to sources. Key topics covered include collectivization, the Great Terror, the gulag, WWII, the Holocaust and postwar Stalinism. This course serves as basic preparation for a minor field in Twentieth-Century Russian history.

HIS 1301H  History of Food and Drink

The field of food studies has emerged in the past few decades as a rich source of interdisciplinary research that also speaks to a broad audience beyond the academy. This class will introduce students to a wide range of approaches to the field from history and allied disciplines. Readings will cover all chronological periods from prehistory to the present and geographical areas from around the world. Because many scholars also teach classes on food, even if they research in other fields, we will also discuss teaching methods. Writing assignments will include weekly reviews and a historiographical term paper. Students should consider this class an opportunity to practice the art of writing clear, compelling prose, even if they adopt different styles in other venues. A part of each seminar will be devoted to “workshopping” student essays and practicing editing skills.

HIS 1416H  Early Modern English Popular Culture 

This seminar introduces students to current research debates and methodologies in early modern British social, cultural and legal history. Topics include orality, literacy and print culture, religion, magic, medicine, drink, sex, work and public order.

HIS 1435H  Studies in Victorian Society

This course will consider some of the major themes in Victorian social and cultural history with emphasis on the most recent secondary literature. Examples include a feminist analysis of the victims of Jack the Ripper, a revisionist treatment of servants after Downton Abbey, and covid-informed examinations of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Emphasis will be on trends in the scholarship, models for writing, and links with other fields.

HIS 1440H (J)  Irish Nationalism in Canada, 1858-1870 (Joint with SMC416H1)

An examination of Irish Canadian nationalism in the context of transatlantic migration patterns, revolutionary and reformist movements in Ireland, annexationism and Irish radicalism in the United States, and ethno-religious tensions in Canada.

HIS 1441H (J) Ireland, Race and Empire (Joint with CLT411H1)

Ireland, Race and Empires.  This course examines the extent to which the Irish can be understood as a colonized and racialized people, and the degree to which they participated in the colonization and racialization of Blacks and Indigenous peoples in the British and American empires.  It encompasses debates about whether the Irish were victims of genocidal policies during the Famine, and their role in what one historian calls the “casual genocide” of imperial expansion.  It also discusses the character and limitations of anti-colonialism in Irish nationalist discourse, and attitudes of racialized minorities and Indigenous peoples towards the Irish. 

HIS 1519H  Thinking of Diversity:  Historical Perspectives on American and Canadian Pluralisms 

This one-semester seminar explores the historical evolution of American and Canadian thinking about diversity -- ethnic, religious, and regional -- from early modern defenses of religious toleration and the “two nations” concept to early twentieth-century “cultural pluralism” and today’s multiculturalism.  Participants will consider the development of pluralist ideologies as articulated by intellectuals and in more everyday, vernacular forms, such as political campaigns, historical commemorations, and other Ccultural productions.  They will examine pluralist thought in the context of competing ideologies, such as nativism.  And they will explore the problems and promise of comparing pluralist ideologies and other responses to diversity in Canada and the United States.  The seminar combines intensive reading in primary and secondary sources -- including an emerging literature by Americanists and Canadianists on the early roots of multiculturalism -- with discussion, in-class presentations, three short response papers, and the preparation of a detailed prospectus (25 pages) for a research project in this developing field.

HIS 1531H  American Political History Since 1877

This course is a one-semester seminar designed to introduce students to major themes and problems in the political history of the modern United States. We will examine a range of topics under the heading of politics broadly defined, including the ways ordinary Americans of various backgrounds practiced politics; reform movements such as Populism and Progressivism; American nationalism; the emergence of the federal administrative state; the rise and fall of the New Deal political order; and the resurgence of conservatism since the 1960s. The seminar seeks to provide an introduction to American political historiography that would prove useful to, among others, students preparing for comprehensive examinations.

HIS 1532H  American Foreign Policy in the Cold War

This seminar will provide an in-depth exploration of U.S. foreign policy during the so-called “Cold War Era.”  Cold War historiography has exploded in recent decades: In addition to diplomacy and strategy, a history of US policy in this era requires attention to the intellectual, psychological, legal, racial, and gendered foundations of policy. Weekly discussions will consider how scholars have brought new methods to the study of the Cold War, and how consideration of the Cold War has helped propel the field of history in new directions.

HIS 1533H  Gender and International Relations

This seminar explores the use of gender as a category of analysis in the study of international relations.  Topics include gendered imagery and language in foreign policymaking; beliefs about women's relationship to war and peace; issues of gender, sexuality, and the military; and contributions of feminist theory to IR theory.

HIS 1538H  Readings in U.S. History

This seminar will survey some of the important topics and readings in U.S. history after 1877. Given the extensive scope of the historiography in the U.S. field, this particular section of HIS1538H will have a thematic focus on the “history of capitalism,” with an emphasis on the 20^th century. This relatively recent field brings together subfields such as the history of slavery, business history, critical management studies, labour history, economic history and the history of consumption, advertising, marketing and logistics. In this course, we will pay careful attention to how historians have brought analytic attention to structural inequalities based on race, gender, class, and sexuality to bear on their analysis of political economy. Readings will include works by authors such as Tanisha Ford, Cedric Robinson, Nan Enstad, Bethany Moreton, Louis Hyman, Kim Phillips-Fein, N.D.B Connolly, Peter Hudson, Dan Bouk, Lizabeth Cohen, David K. Johnson, and others. The course is designed for students preparing for comprehensive fields or others seeking a basic background in 20th century US history.

HIS 1543H  Topics In Material Culture

Material evidence such as clothing, consumer and household goods, art, built form, and landscape can provide unique and exciting insights into past and present culture(s) unavailable through textual sources alone.  Because of historians’ reliance on documents, we have overlooked material sources, in the process failing to develop a methodological framework for their study found in such object-centered disciplines as archaeology, anthropology, art history, and folklore. This is a historical methods/theory course where students produce a research proposal on a topic of their choice that centers on material culture.  The goal is to demonstrate the importance of objects for understanding the past by exploring current interdisciplinary trends in theory and methodology.  We examine how artifacts can inform historical inquiry and conversely how historical research can shape what we know about the material worlds of the past.  Although much of the theoretical and applied writing in material culture is North American, we will also look at the somewhat different approaches to the subject developed in Canada and Europe.  The course will give participants a better understanding of the practice of history in general and innovative ways to approach it.

HIS 1552H  Historical Perspectives on Gender and Migration

Gendered analyses conducted within varied theoretical and methodological contexts have arguably transformed the historical study on immigration, and feminist and gender approaches have gained a critical standing in analyses of international migration. More recently, critical gender interventions are being made within the field of mobility studies, with its focus on regional, continental, oceanic, and global migrations. This seminar explores the relation of gender and migration within national and comparative contexts, including for North America, and through a focus on mobility on a larger scale. It considers the major international migrations that have shaped the modern world as well as the making of refugee, labour, marriage, and family migrants. The features of migration as a gendered phenomenon—historically, migrations have been sometimes male-predominant, sometimes female-predominant, and sometimes gender balanced—will be highlighted. The course will consider the methodological problems posed by gender analysis of migration as well as methodological approaches that have proved important to the field, such as oral history (for the modern era). Other topics considered include pluralisms in different national contexts, and Indigenous/immigrant encounters.

HIS 1555H (J)  Gender and Slavery in the Atlantic World, 17th to 19th Century (Joint HIS446H1)

The course examines the relationship between gender and the experience of slavery and emancipating several Atlantic world societies from the 17th-19th centuries. Areas to be covered are the Caribbean, Brazil, the U.S. South, West and South Africa and Western Europe.

HIS 1662H  Rethinking Modernity through Japan

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the major problems, paradigms, and literature on global modernity as seen through the lens of Japan. The course will begin with reflections on area studies as it has addressed questions of modernity and modernization in Japan, while also attending to recent criticisms of this body of knowledge. Although specific topics will vary from year to year, they may include considerations of nationalism, democracy,  labor, social management, science, education, biopolitics, empire, temporality, gender and sexuality, culture and ideology, warfare, social conflict, and shifting understandings of human difference. Readings selected for their theoretical or comparative utility will complement those on Japan. 

HIS 1664H (J)  Religion and Society in Southeast Asia (Joint HIS496H1)

This course introduces students to the historical debates on religion and society in the eleven states that now constitute “Southeast Asia.”  Readings will address how religious practices in the region—animism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism and Christianity—have served as forces for social and political change in the modern period.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of “religion” in the region’s political transitions in the twentieth century, including the ways in which Southeast Asia’s approach toward “modernity” directly relies upon religious authority.

HIS 1668H  Topics in Early Modern Asian History

This course examines the historiography of the Asian region from c. 1500-1800 A.D. It focuses on the works emerging in the recent two decades, particularly those that seek to move beyond political-economic concerns, European-Asian dichotomization, the confines of area studies like “East Asia”, “Southeast Asia” and “South Asia”; as well as the dissection of historical periods into “medieval”, “early modern” and “modern” eras. The topics and approaches include the exploration of “parallel histories” and “connected histories” across Asian regions and around the world, the use of historical anthropological methods in the studies of Asian localities, and the study of units of analysis of border-crossing potential such as those following the movements of commodities, people and networks.

HIS 1673H  Critical Historiography of Late Imperial and Modern China

This is a graduate reading seminar that will introduce students to the major issues and debates in the Anglophone historiography of late imperial and modern China. It aims to provide students with a broad perspective on the field, prepare them for comprehensive examinations, help them develop their teaching portfolios, give them a chance to practice giving and receiving peer critique, and improve their public presentation skills.

Expect to cover topics including state-society relations; commercial and industrial economies; ideological orthodoxies and not-so-orthodoxies; gender, sexuality, and families; frontiers and ethnicities; technological, intellectual, and cultural patterns; and the perhaps the biggest set of questions of all: what has changed (and what has not) in the transition to "modern" China? Has that transition occurred yet? And why do so many, scholars or not, find the question so gripping? Though the focus is solidly on China c. 1600 to c. 1970, students will have many opportunities to incorporate their own interests and knowledge from other geographic areas, time periods, or disciplinary fields.

HIS 1674H  China in Global History

This course explores major themes and debates on the historical interconnections between China and other parts of the world based on the most recent scholarship and cutting-edge theories. It combines critical reflections and class discussions with a well-planned schedule for students to finish a quality research paper under the instructor’s guidance. This course will enable the students to further enhance their research and writing skills, prepare for a publishable article, or write up their thesis or doctoral dissertation proposal.

HIS 1675H  Imperial Circulation and Diasporic Flows in the British Empire

Over the last few years, the task of rethinking the British Empire has involved reconnecting issues of race, class, gender, nation, and empire. This new imperial history is greatly strengthened by recent historical works which explore a range of issues including mixed-race liaisons, lascar seamen, the English language, conversion, and chain migration. This history connects the local and the global. This course offers a thematic approach focused on modern South Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Rim, and the British Empire. Through exemplary studies, it challenges conventional, uni-directional dichotomies of empire-periphery & homeland-diaspora. It discusses how multi- directional modes of imperial circulation and diasporic flows transform both our understanding of the British Empire, and of imperial and trans-national history writing.

HIS 1677H  Empire and Nation in Modern East Asia

This course studies the transition from empire to nation in East Asia from the 19th to the 20th centuries in the greater global context. In addition to examining the historiography associated with this transition, which include the collapse of the Chinese Qing empire, the arrival of Western imperial powers, the rise of the Japanese empire, the emergence of nationalisms in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, this reading seminar also draws on a broad range of theoretical literature associated with the questions of culture and civilization, historical narrative, sovereignty, governmentality, capitalist modernity, and globalization to analyze the ideologies and practices of empire and nation. As such, it seeks to use East Asian history as a case study to re-examine the complicated theoretical terrains of empire and nation.

HIS 1702H  Colonial Violence: Comparative Histories

Historians have often downplayed violence as a central theme in the foundation and governance of colonial empires. In this seminar course we consider the violence of conquest and resistance, colonial genocides, anti-colonial rebellions, everyday violence and the law, the impact on indigenous peoples, policing, settler violence, and links between violence in the colonial and post-colonial eras. What are the implications for new thinking about some of the major issues in recent history such as the Holocaust and world wars, the crisis of postcolonial states, the Cold War, continuing western military interventions in Africa and the Middle East, and issues of memory and forgetting? We will examine case studies from a variety of periods and places in a comparative framework.

HIS 1704H  Seminar in Latin American and Caribbean History

Made up of several independent nations and overseas dependencies, the Latin American and Caribbean region is both the product of a tumultuous past and a site of constant reinvention. Once the home of hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, this fascinating region has witnessed centuries of dramatic changes: from the Iberian invasions of its indigenous heartlands to the Haitian Revolution, from the struggles to build independent nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the rise of military dictatorships and more recent efforts to rebel against an overbearing United States.

This course examines diverse debates within the study of Latin American and Caribbean History, from the pre-Colombian era to the present (specific topics and approaches vary from year to year, based on instructor preference). No prior knowledge of the region or of historical research is required; indeed, the course is open to students from any discipline and specializing in other regions of the world. The goal of this seminar is to provide students with a foundation in the historiographies of colonization, racialization, nation-state formation, gender and sexuality, and the environment (among other topics).

HIS 1705H (J) Trends in Women and Gender History in the Global South (Joint HIS406H1)

This graduate seminar is intended as an introduction to key issues, debates, and themes in the historiography of women and gender in the global south. With an emphasis on Africa, we will mostly focus on recent publications that aim to make new theoretical and empirical interventions into what has been an experimental sub-field, especially in terms of methodology.  We will also, however, consider older, now more canonical texts that still underline the terms of interesting debates.

The seminar will be a space for intellectual exploration and learning, for the forming and sharpening of ideas, and for discovery about some of the ways women and gender historians (and our colleagues from related disciplines such as historical anthropologists) have been making histories, working in a variety of fields and archives, defining and theorizing problems and using evidence-based research.

The requirements are designed to give students great flexibility in developing work that will be most useful to their various personal research interests and needs.

HIS 1707H  Topics in African History:Themes, Methods, and Sources in African History

This course will introduce students to the principal sources of empirical evidence and methodological approaches in African history. We will explore the connections between particular historical contexts and the constitution of particular sources and how this informs different trends in historical production. Each week will focus on a different type of source and the debates around their collection and use, including traditions of oral history, colonial and missionary archives and new, less conventional, sources. We will also explore the political implications of historical work and the struggles over knowledge, power and the production of history. This course will highlight the importance of context and contingency in the creation of historical sources, in their use by guild historians and in the politics of power embedded in any given history.

HIS 1710H  Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

This course explores the long process of the ‘unfinished revolution’ of abolition in the Atlantic World from the 18th-late 19th century Atlantic World. It will take a comparative and transnational approach, with materials that include primary printed sources, classic texts, current historiography, literature, explorations of the history of emancipation through digital and visual culture. We will examine scholarship and historical debates about abolition in the Caribbean, North and South America, West Europe and Africa.

HIS 1712H Topics on the History of Ethiopia 

“Topics on the History of Ethiopia” will provide students with a forum to examine the history of the region from prehistoric times to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the Axumite, Zagwe and Solomonic dynasties, to the India Ocean and Red Sea trade routes, to relations with Egypt, the Sudan, Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula, and to the adoption of Middle Eastern religions. The UofT has a rich collection of unique on-line resources, including Mazgaba Se’elat (<ethiopia.deeds.utoronto.ca> UserID & Password: student) a database of 75,000 original images of Ethiopian art and culture; the entire collection of 219 manuscripts (18,000 folios) from the 15^th-century monastery of Gunda Gunde (http://digitalscholarship.utsc.utoronto.ca/projects/gg/frontpage), and a growing collection of interviews with craftsmen currently involved in chiseling out churches from the rock (https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/projects/ethiopic-churches/). “

HIS 1725H  Topics in Latin American History: Race, Genders, and Citizenship

A popular saying in various parts of Latin America is that “Mexicans descended from Aztecs, Peruvians descended from Incas, and Argentines descended from boats,” which posits that some countries construct their identities in relationship to pre-Colombian indigenous histories, and others to processes of immigration. Who gets excluded from the national body in these framings? And how have those marginalized groups sought to create more inclusive conceptions of citizenship and belonging?  To answer these questions - which trace their roots to Latin America’s colonial period, took on contentious implications during the independence era, and remain at the heart of contemporary discourse throughout the region – this course will guide students through an examination of historical documents, scholarly analyses, and various forms of cultural production.

HIS 1725H  Topics in Latin American History: Race, Genders, and Citizenship

A popular saying in various parts of Latin America is that “Mexicans descended from Aztecs, Peruvians descended from Incas, and Argentines descended from boats,” which posits that some countries construct their identities in relationship to pre-Colombian indigenous histories, and others to processes of immigration. Who gets excluded from the national body in these framings? And how have those marginalized groups sought to create more inclusive conceptions of citizenship and belonging?  To answer these questions - which trace their roots to Latin America’s colonial period, took on contentious implications during the independence era, and remain at the heart of contemporary discourse throughout the region – this course will guide students through an examination of historical documents, scholarly analyses, and various forms of cultural production.

HIS 1784H  The Islamic Revolution

This seminar explores the making of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Framed in a comparative historical perspective on revolutions, it interrogates the cultural and political peculiarities that made possible the rise of Shi‘i clerics to power after the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty in February 1979. This course particularly focuses on the pre-revolutionary conception of a diseased “social body” that required the intervention of “spiritual physicians” to restore the moral and spiritual health of society.

HIS 1800H  Global Histories of the Archives

How and why should historians study the repositories from which we derive our documentary evidence and interpretive authority? How might we think of archives as processes imbued with social lives and shaped by contingent practices of documentation and record-keeping, rather than as inert stashes of texts waiting to be mined? This course will explore such questions through case studies across a wide spatial and temporal arc, introducing students to a thriving, global historiographical field and a set of conceptual frameworks for further work at the intersection of the history of governmentality, materiality, and mediation.

HIS 1802H (J)  Slavery in North America (Joint HIS496H1)

Slavery has existed in many human societies throughout history. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European empires pioneered a new system of racial chattel slavery predicated on enslaving Native Americans and the transportation of enslaved African captives to plantation zones in the Americas. This course examines the history of slavery in British North America and the United States (c. 1619-1865). We will explore both the Atlantic and domestic slave trades; Indigenous and Atlantic slaveries; the codification of racial difference that accompanied slavery’s expansion; gender and the reproduction; enslaved people’s lives and politics; the economic history of slavery; the politics of slavery in the United States (1776-1865); and the destruction of chattel slavery during the Civil War (1861-65). We will conclude by taking up what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlives of slavery in post-war American history.

HIS 1805H  Human Rights and Empire

In what ways are human rights and empire entangled? What rights discourses developed in the colonies and territories across the global South and how did they shape the imperial subject? How did human rights in turn take shape at the end of empire and within the postcolonial world? This course uses a thematic approach to explore the connections between human rights and empire in the modern era, beginning with the New Imperialism of the nineteenth century to the present day. Emphasizing Asia and Africa, topics include theories and genealogies of human rights, personhood and sovereignty, individual-state relations, revolution and mass social movements, humanitarian intervention, anticolonial nationalism, and international law.

HIS 1806H  Histories of the Carceral State

The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population but nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners, including a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos. “Mass Incarceration” has been enormously profitable for corporations despite generating large public deficits and social crises in communities of color. It has also provoked public and scholarly debates about the history, ethics, and function of incarceration in modern societies. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary approach to politics, race, state-formation, capitalism, and empire, this course explores the origins of the U.S. carceral state and considers it alongside other twentieth-century carceral states in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

HIS 1810H  Indigenous Economies and Imperialism

This course will explore relationships between Indigenous peoples, empire, and capitalism since the late fifteenth century. It will focus on questions of the embeddedness of economies in a wide variety of both Indigenous and imperial societies and cultures while paying particular attention to critiques of both empire and economic systems, whether feudalism, gift or other indigenous economies, or capitalism. The course will also explore the imperialism of the discipline of economics, its scientific discourse of universal laws, and the ways in which these have driven the expansion of the market system, influenced recipes for “improving” Indigenous society, and continue to profoundly shape historical analysis.

HIS 1820H  Law, Space and History

An introduction to historical studies of law and space, this course will cover themes such as legal histories of colonization and the corporation, emergency, legal geographies of national spaces, frontiers and urbanism, the constitution of public and private property, and bodily space. In addition, the class will consider methodological reflections on jurisdictions, temporality, scale and place-making for historians. Readings will be cross regional and comparative but focus on colonization in Asia, Africa and North America. Open to students of anthropology, geography, and law.

HIS 1825H  Changing Skylines: (Re)mapping Urban History in the Global Age

This reading seminar examines how modern cities have been conceptualized in historiography and related interdisciplinary literature. The urban types and global moments that we are covering include colonial/postcolonial cities, industrial/postindustrial cities, socialist/postsocialist cities, Cold War cities, as well as science/smart cities. At stake here is to think about how to (re)write urban history when cities of the global South have increasingly become the sites for us to imagine urban futures. Special attention will also be given to the roles of war, ideology, capital, aesthetics, technology, and ecology in the making urban landscapes and infrastructures.

HIS 1830H  Critical Approaches to Historical Anthropology

‘Historical anthropology’ as a distinct, appealing and influential mode of enquiry seeking to combine historical and anthropological approaches to analyse social and cultural processes through time, emerged from important dialogues and engagements between historians and anthropologists over the past three decades. Through a critical examination of the propositions of ‘historical anthropology’, the course will probe how its practitioners have grappled with the constitutive, if problematic relationships between ‘culture’, power and history and ethnography and the ‘archive’. Equally, it will assess the extent to which historical anthropology has elaborated new research methodologies, shaped historiography and facilitated conversations and encounters between disciplines. In this regard, course readings will draw attention to recent strategies proffered by scholars grappling with the possibilities and dilemmas of historical anthropology in spaces deeply marked by colonialism, nationalism and globalisation like South Asia. Course materials will draw upon, but will not be limited to readings from South Asia

HIS 1840H  Empires in World War II

This seminar explores the fate of colonial empires during the pivotal period of the Second World War, globally defined (1937-1945). It spans much of the planet, from Canada to India, Manchuria and Indochina, as well as encompassing both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and the colonial metropoles of Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. Thematically, it considers the conflict from multiple perspectives, including the power inversions inherent in colonies liberating or coming in aid to their motherlands. The readings encompass cultural, political, military, gender and memorial themes. The seminar will focus for instance on Italian colonial cinema, on forms of Japanese power in Manchuria, on the war effort undertaken by African civilian populations, on the battle for natural resources, and on the tensions generated by the World War in Canada. The course will feature several non-mandatory films: showings will be arranged at Robarts Library.

HIS 1860H  Global Rights: A Critical History

This course will look at the history of human rights globally in the twentieth century. Students will focus on a range of rights debates across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. The goal of this course is to engage with key moments in human rights history, with a focus on the emergence of major human rights movements and institutions, and their interactions with liberalism, colonialism, capitalism, and social justice. The readings for this course will be mainly within the field of history, but will also include law, anthropology and political science. This course invites students to read human rights history from the perspectives of activists as well as lawmakers. As such we will read a variety of secondary and primary sources.

HIS 1880H  Digital History

This course will introduce graduate students in history to the conceptual, epistemological challenges of the rise of digital communication, research tools, and archives; to the emerging historiography written by historians using digital tools and archives or developing historical interpretation sin digital formats; and to the range of digital tools that allow them to contribute to this emerging historiography.

HIS 1890H  Regimes of Value

Notions of value are central to a wide variety of human activities, informing spirituality, morality, economics, social relations, public policy, and our relationship with the natural and built environments. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences, though, rarely do anything more than invoke an implicit understanding of the concept. Is value innate in people, places, and things? Or is it actively defined and redefined, whether by individuals or society as a whole? This course focuses on value in a series of contexts, including the value of money, commodities, and human life as well as the values promulgated by religion and morality. In doing so, it draws on the insights of political economy, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, cultural studies, and history to both demonstrate the value of deliberate reflection with respect to the use of concepts and to deepen our understanding of this incredibly important concept in particular.

HIS 1900H  History in International Affairs

The course will explore historical examples of decision-making in international affairs. The choice of case studies will vary from year to year, but might allow attention to a wide range of issues: e.g., decisions to go to war; economic globalization and instability; energy and environmental crises; regional tensions around indigenous, ethnic, or religious divisions; post- colonial political adjustments involving law, gender, and institutional development. Readings, research, and discussions will consider whether greater sensitivity to historical roots and complexities might have improved the results produced by decisions and solution efforts.

 

Cross-Listed Courses

JHL 1680H  Revolutionary Women's Cultures in East Asia, Early to Mid 20th Century

This course examines the interrelationship of concepts and practices of what we may term “revolutionary womanhood” and “revolutionary culture” (in the spheres of literature, cinema, arts, mass print media, and cultural associations and institutions) in different modern national, anti-imperialist, and socialist movements of the early to mid 20th c across East Asia. “Revolution” and “woman” were key terms, representing “new” subjectivities, collectivities, and arenas for imagining/enacting the transformation of the political, social and cultural realms in China, Japan and Korea.  When brought together under different frameworks of “revolutionary womanhood” what new possibilities emerged for these imagined and real transformations? We will explore the expressions and meanings of “revolutionary womanhood” in different cultural genres and media, examine the historical contexts of each revolutionary moment/movement, and engage with scholarship on the intersections between ideas and practices of revolution, culture, and gender. While attentive to particular local contexts, we will also explore the intra-regional circulation of concepts of “revolution”, “culture” and “woman” and their changing meanings across the period in East Asia. We will also engage in further comparative analysis with other revolutionary cultures transnationally, including but not limited to pre and post 1917 Russia, Europe and the U.S., with which ideas and practices of “revolution” and “new womanhood” in East Asia had deep practical and imagined connections. In this sense, we will explore the transnational (or internationalist) dimensions and visions of revolutionary women’s cultures in East Asia.

All primary works will be in English translation, but students with knowledge of Chinese, Japanese and Korean are encouraged to read works in the original languages. Students whose research interests include histories of 19th and 20th c revolutionary movements and cultures and questions of gender outside of East Asia are very welcome to join the course.

BKS 2000H Advanced Seminar in Book History and Print Culture

What does the history of books have to do with the so-called “archival turn”? And how might both respond to the challenges of global and entangled history? This course introduces students to book history and the history of archives as inter-related fields. In particular, it thematizes mobility – of textual artifacts, technologies, genres, scribal practices and practitioners – across presumed divides (manuscript:print:digital; pre:modern; metropole:colony; north:south; east:west) in the making of both “books” and “archives” as objects of study. Through a series of case studies students will explore how both books and archives (and books in archives!), as specific instantiations of textual materiality and institutionalization, might be thought of not as inert “objects” waiting to be mined extractively, but rather as processes imbued with social lives and shaped by contingent textual practices. Course readings and activities will offer a strong grasp of two thriving historiographical fields and their significant intersections, as well as divergent conceptual and methodological frameworks for further research across them.

HPS 4110H Medicine, Science, and Mobility in the Mediterranean World

The Mediterranean world has historically been characterized as a fluid and permeable space of both human and non-human movement across Africa, Asia, and Europe. This course examines the role of Mediterranean interactions in the histories of science and medicine, focusing on the premodern period. We will address topics such as medical pluralism; the relationship between slavery and medicine; the management of epidemics and public health; the movement of specimens and curiosities; travel and scientific exchange; the genesis of orientalism; and the making of human diversity. We will also critically reflect on the category of mobility, engaging in questions related to how movement participated in processes of knowledge production in the sciences and medicine and, conversely, how scientific and medical pursuits encouraged mobility.

HPS 4106H  Environment, Technology, and History

Environmental history takes as its foundational premise that human beings shape and alter their environment, and that the rest of non-human nature, in turn, influences societies and cultures the world over. A recent generation of scholars working at the intersection of the histories of environment and of technology have further demonstrated the degree to which technologies mediate this reciprocal relationship. This course will introduce students to both the histories of human-environmental-technological interaction, on the one hand, and the historiography of this nexus on the other. The focus will be on transnational flows and interconnections since 1800, from toxic places and toxic bodies, to nuclear energy, climate change, environmental justice, and the concept of the Anthropocene. Students will have the opportunity to build significant independent research projects over the course of the semester, with guidance on methods, archival research, and best practices for academic writing built into the structure of the course.

MST 3237H Through the Lens of Monastic Rules and Customaries

This course explores the history of monasticism from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages through its so-called normative sources, especially rules and customaries. The main goal of the course is in-depth reading of primary sources, however, attention will also be given to the recent secondary literature on these texts, challenging the traditional history of monasticism. While the focus is on monasticism, it is also a social history course as it allows the study of medieval daily life even in periods for which we have no similar sources for other groups of society. Students will be able to choose one theme to study through all the sources read in class (in translation and Latin) –such as food, organization of space, punishment or sexuality–, or to investigate lesser-known (and usually not yet translated) rules and customaries.

MST 3123H Medieval Medicine

This course surveys the major developments and examines key texts in the history of medicine in Europe and the Mediterranean from c.300 to 1400 AD. Topics include pharmacy and pharmacological treatises, surgery, therapeutics, regimen and diet, the transmission and adaptation of ancient medical works, the contributions of Arabic authors, the school of Salerno, the rise of academic and professional medicine in the 13th and 14th centuries, medical responses to the Black Death, and anatomy on the eve of Renaissance medicine.

MST 3253H King Frederick of Sicily

This course explores the complex Mediterranean world of the first half of the thirteenth century by tracing the colorful life and career of King Frederick II (1194-1250), known in his time as a ‘wonder of the world’ for his cosmopolitan court in Sicily, his knowledge of languages (including Arabic), his engagement with science and philosophers from around the world, his many titles (king of Sicily, Italy, Burgundy, Jerusalem, and Roman Emperor) and his ex-communication (three times) by the most powerful popes of medieval Europe who labelled him an Antichrist. The course examines key sources for Frederick’s reign, particularly Frederick’s own laws and contemporary chroniclers, and surveys major developments for context to Frederick’s reign, such as the Norman inheritance in Sicily, relations with the Islamicate world, the rise of mendicant orders, Pope Innocent III and the international papacy, early universities, and scholastic education.  

WGS1021H Black Diasporic Feminisms: Modernity, Freedom, Belonging

This seminar studies a select but living archive of Black feminist knowledge-making across diasporas, with a particular focus on the disparate but interconnected itineraries of Black and Third World feminist writers, artists and revolutionaries. We will situate our texts historically as well as transnationally to explore contexts and movements that generated imaginative practices of invention, connection and intervention. In addition to interdisciplinary scholarship, we will immerse ourselves in theoretical insurgencies and conjure work—self-making, bridge-building and freedom dreaming—that continue to animate ongoing struggles for liberation. This course invites participants to build on these rich traditions through self-reflection, creative expression and engaged scholarship. Our collective endeavor is not simply to reckon with, honor and critique what has gone before us, but also to orient ourselves toward new terrains and new questions. 

WGS1019H Gendering Racial Capitalism

Description coming soon.

FAH1965H The Sixties Revisited

The 1960s are synonymous with revolution, both political and aesthetic. In this course, we will consider how recent methodological "turns" within art history (e.g. the global, the diasporic, the decolonial; queer, transgender, latinx, indigenous, and Black studies; reassessments of social history of art) might produce new histories of this monumental decade. Potential topics include: the body and sculpture, performance and abstraction, information and technology, commercialism and capital, and solidarity. Students will be expected to identify the themes and gaps in current literature, discuss questions of methodology, and develop practices of close reading and close looking.