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 explores historiographical and broader academic engagement with memory - individual, collective, and national. We will approach memories of 20th century wars by looking at a wide range of modes of representation of the past across media including novels, films, video games and genres from World War I poetry to science fiction.  Like all seminars, it has a major presentation, discussion, and class participation component. Students can write a major research paper on memories and representation of nearly any theme intersecting with war and mass violence from the late 19th century to present.

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 their 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.

TBA. 

Debates and distortions about the US-Mexican border are central to American political attention in our current moment. Recently, nearly half of all adult Americans reportedly accepted the notion that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country; in part, this attitude provoked the violent ICE raids in American cities of 2025-2026. In this class, we examine the extended backstory behind the present moment by studying the long history of the borderlands region and the interactions that occurred on it between Indigenous people, Spaniards, Blacks, and Anglo-Americans. We will use both scholarly and eye-witness accounts of the region from Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s tale of his sixteenth-century journey from Florida through Texas and California to Luis Alberto Urrea’s reconstruction of the harrowing story of 26 Mexican men who paid to be smuggled across the dangerous Sonora-Arizona crossing known as The Devil’s Highway in 2001. This seminar focuses on the key issues of race, labour, identity, and community to unpack current misperceptions of the border, border policy, and border impermeability. 

What do petroleum, caged animals, industrial agriculture, mosquito-borne diseases, whale hunting, infrastructural projects, and climate change have to do with the making and unmaking of imperial history or its legacies? This seminar will examine influential and recent studies in the global environmental history of colonialism and empire—from the early modern period to the twentieth century—that offer a variety of answers to this question. 

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 examines in some detail certain aspects of the Great War which was arguably the defining event of the last century. The twentieth century may really be said to have begun in August 1914 as the nations of the old continent lined up in two opposing blocs, pitting German Kultur against French civilisation. 1917 marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of mutinies in the French army on the western front. March 1918 saw the 100th anniversary of the great German spring offensive, the failure of which spelled the end of the hopes for victory in Germany. Along the road to 11 November 1918, three European empires disintegrated and fell, the Bolshevik Revolution engulfed Russia, and the United States emerged as a power on the world stage.

This seminar is reading and essay-heavy.

War disrupts normative understandings about the meanings of childhood and youth. When just over a hundred years ago, the Swedish feminist and educator Ellen Key published The Century of the Child, an international bestseller that struck a chord with adults across the globe, she captured contemporary Western ideals of childhood. In envisioning a peaceful and harmonious future for humankind, Key evoked a century in which modern societies would expand formal education and medical care, look after children’s welfare, and legislate against child labour.  

Instead, the twentieth century ushered in a period during which the scale of global conflicts soared. Children and youth grew up amidst the armed conflict of the First and Second World Wars, came of age under the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War, and lived through the social upheaval of the over thirty-five other wars that raged over the course of the twentieth century.  In countries suffering through civil war, traditional warfare combined with acts of terrorism and guerilla fighting to draw children into armed conflict in new ways.

In this seminar we will examine how the lives of young people have been shaped by war in an enormously diverse range of ways between the First World War and the early twenty-first century. Topics under consideration will include, among others, the wartime correspondence between children and their fathers fighting on the front; the history of children in Nazi-occupied Europe (including children in ghettoes and concentration camps); the history of child soldiers; the life stories of children born of wartime rape; the mobilization of children in the peace movement; and the stories of refugee children displaced by war, violence, and armed conflict.

In our exploration of these "small stories" of war, we will pay special attention to the ways these histories have been represented in the public realm and preserved against all odds. We will undertake field visits to the Montreal Holocaust Museum and the Canadian Jewish Archives; read two brilliant graphic novels, Persepolis and Vietnamerica; listen closely to the life stories of child survivors of the Holocaust; and embark  on the prize-winning audio-walking tour "Refugee Boulvevard."

Law can seem like a realm of reason and rationality, but emotions run through law, legal institutions, and legal processes in various ways. This seminar will explore intersections between legal history and the history of emotions to consider the ways in which emotions shape the law, in Canada and beyond, and from the late eighteenth century to the present. Topics will include (among others): the courtroom as emotional space; violence and emotion; accidents, families, and grief; love, betrayal, and law; the emotions of capital punishment.

This course seeks to recapture the importance of certain spirit-beings – witches, shamans, vampires, and zombies – as a way of understanding social dynamics in the modern world, from the 17th through the 21st centuries. In particular, it will examine the connections between the political and the spiritual, looking at how the intervention of spirits offered people a lens though which to view interpersonal tensions. Topics will include witch-hunting; the evolution of faeries; ghosts, hauntings, and historical memory; zombies, colonialism, and modern life; vampires as metaphors for capitalism; and monsters as conceptual categories. Rather than seeing the supernatural as something to be dismissed or explained away, we will try to understand historical actors’ beliefs on their own terms.  

At present, over half of the world’ population lives in cities. By 2050, it is expected that over two thirds will be part of urban communities. Megacities, cities that are defined as having a population of more than ten million inhabitants, remain the center of gravity for much of the world’s regions. Indeed, over 75% of the world’s megacities are in the Global South. This seminar will examine the colonial and neocolonial histories in the making of the megacity, paying particular attention to not only state and corporate actors, but also the struggles and movements of common people who call the city their home.