Graduate seminar course descriptions

In this seminar, we will explore "history" as a field of knowledge, a critical orientation, an instrument, a praxis, and a philosophy. Our weekly trajectory follows major issues and shifts in historiography since the mid-20th century. Topics will include: social history and the influence of Marxism; cultural and linguistic turns provoked by poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and race-critical theory; environmental history in the midst of ecological breakdown; as well as methods and critiques in public and oral history. This course is challenging - with a heavy reading load and strong emphasis on engagement - but also rewarding. Students will leave this course with a solid foundational understanding of the most salient theoretical and methodological questions and approaches in this discipline; they will be able to use this knowledge to assess and critique different works of historical writing and apply these approaches to their own work.

This seminar examines performance histories in Tiohti:áke/Montréal through an interdisciplinary lens that spans cultural expressions in grassroots gatherings to avant-garde experimentation. Such forms may combine established disciplines or take shape as social and cultural practices, community and family gatherings, in sacred as well as secular contexts.

The course invites intersectional dialogues with wide-ranging performance forms, examining both highly visible and marginalized practices that challenge conventional notions of archive, body, and historical knowledge. We explore how embodied interactions, whether in protests, nightlife, street performance, or everyday social practices, function as sites of historical transmission, embodied learning, and cultural practice. We will investigate clandestine and conceptual performances alongside everyday embodied experiences including clubbing, work environments, parades, parties, and protests. These explorations trouble epistemic boundaries and expand our understanding of how performance creates and preserves cultural memory.

Working across disciplines—dance, music, theatre, circus, street performance, and social practices—students engage with Montreal’s rich performance ecology through both theoretical frameworks and hands-on research. Course participants are invited to attend events and undertake individual and group projects that may incorporate creative, media-based, and written approaches. All assignments emphasize original research methodologies, and students conduct archival work in Montreal collections or field sites.

We live in an age of increasingly hardened, policed, and proliferating state borders. The apparent 'return' to walled and guarded nation-states sits in tension with the period that proceeded it, predicated on globalization, mobility, and the expansion of 'zones' in which both trade and transit were thought to be 'free'. Yet, the border has also transformed over the past two decades into a more pervasive set of mechanisms — spanning novel modes of policing, incarceration, surveillance, deportation, immigration and citizenship laws, visa regimes, healthcare management, and labour regulations — that go far beyond the physical demarcation of lines on a map. 

Prompted by these urgent questions, this course will introduce students to the fast-growing, multi-disciplinary field of Critical Border Studies. Grounded in historical and socio-legal methods, students will engage vigorously with a range of scholarly perspectives, as well as community-based knowledge-sharing, through which we will consider how factors leading to human displacement globally have intersected with state border securitization regimes and shifting concepts of sovereignty.

This course will consider recent historical work on the long history of student protest in North America, from the Black Campus Movement in the 1960s, through 1968 anti-Vietnam War campus building occupations, to the 1980s demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa and 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments. While the main focus will be on the United States, the course will include local milestones, such as the 1968 Concordia Computer riots, and international perspectives, such as student movements in the decolonized Congo. Each week, we will discuss a book that presents an innovative theoretical or methodological approach to the subject. The course will examine student protest as a legitimate and persistent aspect of political process and social change in North America and the world, as well as analyze the recurring patterns of state repression of student movements at the time when they occur and celebration of them after the fact.

This seminar introduces students to recent scholarship in the history of science and technology. Since the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and with an increasing emphasis on material undertakings rather than abstract thinking as legitimate scientific practices, scholars have expanded the meanings of science and technology by problematizing the three implicit modifiers: “modern,” “Western,” and “innovative.” We will visit many unlikely sites of knowledge production, such as artisans’ workshops and early modern households, to explore how ordinary people gained knowledge of nature through experiments and observation beyond the modern science lab. We will also investigate how science and technology have been made and remade through circulation of objects and people across different parts of the world, questioning unidirectional assumptions about their flow from the West to the rest of the world. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of “non-heroic” sciences and technologies that are by no means considered “new” or “innovative” and yet are crucial to the maintenance of our society.

This course is designed to help MA students frame and develop the first stages of their theses. It will allow you to think in a deliberate way about the various components of historical research: conceptualizing a topic, framing a central research question, locating appropriate sources, reading (and keeping track of) secondary sources, putting new research in dialogue with existent scholarship, writing and revising. The end product of the course will be a substantial thesis proposal which will be the basis of your research in subsequent terms.

This seminar will explore a series of themes in the social and cultural history of Quebec in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will develop and deepen their appreciation of the issues and perspectives that have stimulated research and debate among Quebec historians in recent years. Themes such as modernity, gender, religion, the environment, social class, ethnicity, law, family, and indigeneity will be among those considered. While not neglecting rural society or the regions, participants will have ample opportunity to focus on the diverse and dynamic experiences of Montrealers over the long period bounded by the rebellions of 1837-38 and the 1995 referendum.  

Oral history is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that seeks to understand the lived interior of history.  This advanced seminar will enable students to workshop their own oral history methodology through the various stages of a project. Students will go through ethics, conduct two interviews, transcribe and data-base the interviews, and interpret them.  All the while, sharing their practice-based learning with the group.

For scholars and publics seeking to explore how non-Western worlds – African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American – have shaped our political present, the “new global history” has become a touchstone. Methodologically too, much of this work has led experimentation over how to best craft historical narratives combining an attunement to globe-spanning structural forces with a feel for granular detail and the narrowly-channeled, contingent paths through which historical change takes shape. This course is a tour of cutting-edge scholarship in global history, exploring phenomena such as capitalism, slavery, the Enlightenment, empire, modern law, anti-colonial movements, revolt, and revolution. It also focuses on creative approaches to the past and allows students to complete a piece of historical writing that can serve as the foundation for an academic or public-facing essay.

As human and other life on the planet hangs in the balance, fossil fuel extraction and consumption continue apace. Indeed, fossil fuel consumption is still increasing, which it has done so by around eight-fold since 1950, roughly doubling since 1980. Though fossil fuels encompass coal, oil, and gas, we will ask specifically, why oil. In this seminar we examine the geopolitical history behind the rise of oil and its emergence as a natural resource that humans ostensibly cannot do without. Rather than focus on the physical properties that make its burning and its transformation indispensable to life, we will inquire into how oil and power are connected via social and political networks. We will do this by mostly tracing the connections through 20th-century Middle Eastern history, but we will take detours to consider the global scale of oil’s geopolitics and political-economy, as well as global cultures of oil and resistance in the present.