Course descriptions

HIST 200/D - Chinatown: A Global History

This first-year seminar introduces students to the global history of Chinese diaspora. The class visits major Chinatowns in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, exploring their histories both as global phenomena and unique local products, all intertwined with foodways, tourism, and gentrification as well as the politics of race, gender, and class/labor. Students will read a variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from different disciplines and present their findings on various occasions both orally and in writing. The final destination will be Montreal’s own Chinatown, which students will approach not only as a subject but also as an evolving archive for historical research. A field trip, including a food scavenger hunt, is scheduled.

HIST 200/E - Gaming History 

Many young people today are first introduced to history through games: waging wars and building empires in Europa Universalis, re-enacting the Cold War through Twilight Struggle, and parachuting into the French Revolution in Assassin’s Creed. Rather than dismissing this experience as a mere pastime, this course takes games seriously, thinking about the ways in which they embody and portray the past. The class examines games as historical sources—considering, for example, what a pack of cards might tell us about libertine culture in Ancien Régime France—but also as a means of exploring and interpreting history, contrasting the immersive and imaginative aspects of games with the discursive and rational approach of texts.

HIST 200/F - Oral Histories: Childhood and Youth 

In 1960, the historian Philip Ariès suggested – in a work that both inspired and infuriated subsequent historians – that childhood was a modern invention that had emerged in Europe only around 1500 A.D.  In unpacking shifting notions of childhood, this course is designed to examine both social constructions of childhood and children’s own voices in historical perspective.  How has childhood – as a category of social thought – served to determine the social roles and responsibilities of the youngest members of society?  How, and to which extent, have children shaped their own histories and given voice to their own thoughts and feelings? 
 
The scope of our readings will be comparative and international, while course assignments will foreground the use of primary sources in reconstructing worlds of childhood, including paintings, obituaries, family photographs, material objects, and oral histories. Just how we can piece together, and make sense of, the faint traces that young people left in the historical record? To this end, you will have the opportunity to undertake your own original research project: an oral history of childhood and youth.

HIST 202 - Modern Europe

This course introduces students to the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, as well as providing some grounding in historical method and the development of a critical historical mind.

HIST 203 - History of Canada: Pre-Confederation

A survey of Canadian history, from settlement to Confederation, emphasizing readings and discussions on selected problems.

HIST 206 - Medieval Europe

A survey of the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, from the fifth century to the 15th century, with consideration of political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious developments.

HIST 235 - History of the Holocaust

Beginning with a discussion of Jewish communities in Europe and America before 1933, this course traces the evolution of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and racism, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, the shaping of Nazi ideology, the growing demonization of the victims of the Holocaust and the genocide against them in their various countries, resistance by the victims, and the parts played by bystanders in the outcome of the Holocaust.

HIST 242 - History of the Middle East

This course surveys the history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present.  It traces broadly the formation of an Islamic World over a millennium and follows its engagements with modernity, examining closely the shift from the overarching paradigm of the multi-ethnic/multilinguistic Ottoman Empire to that of the mono ethnic/monolinguistic modern nation state.  This course covers the political history of the region including the experience of British and French colonialism, the rise of nationalist movements, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and focuses on its social, intellectual, and cultural history.

HIST 253 - History of the United States since the Civil War Era

This course is a survey of United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the present.  It asks how contests for power among different regions, classes, and groups animated U.S. political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual development.  Course topics include:  Reconstruction, reconciliation, and segregation; western expansion and empire; industrialization and immigration; urbanization, suburbanization, and consumption; reform and radical movements, including progressivism, the labour movement, civil rights, feminism, and the new left and right; world wars, Cold War, and globalization.

HIST 285 - Introduction to Law and Society

Law influences all aspects of life in society, from resolving conflicts to structuring family or commercial relationships to controlling crime to allocating property. This interdisciplinary course examines the roles law plays in Canada and internationally, from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Cross listed with POLI/ANTH/SOCI 285.

HIST 298/A - Pacific Worlds

This course forefronts experiences and knowledges of Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal peoples of Oceania in better understanding the entangled and intimate worlds of the Pacific. Although fundamentally marked by imperialisms, capitalist extraction, and militarization, the contemporary Pacific is also a historical place profoundly shaped by centuries of imaginative worldmaking by peoples across multiple continents, archipelagos, and islands. This course simultaneously embraces a people’s historical perspective on social dilemmas currently faced by those in the Pacific, such as: environmental and climate crisis, intensified frictions over regional security, struggles over displacement and diaspora, and ongoing desires for decolonization. 

HIST 298/BB - Histories of Film and Performance

This course examines intersections of film and performance. Course material includes screenings, scripts, recordings, live events, and scores that help us reflect with the transmission of the shared past, evidence, and its exclusions.

HIST 306 - History and the Public

This course is an examination of the practice of history outside the academy and an introduction to the critical analysis of presentations of history in public and popular culture. Topics include archives, corporate and popular history, museums and historic sites, preservation, film and television, theme parks, and anniversary commemorations. A special emphasis is placed on public controversies and ethical dilemmas involving historical interpretations.

HIST 309 - Law and Society in Canadian History

In this course we will examine changes in Canadian society through the lens of important legal cases.  What effect did these cases have on Canadian society?  How did the press, interest groups, and society generally influence the course of litigation and the subsequent interpretation of the decisions?  We will examine a number of cases from different time periods, touching various legal and social issues including discrimination, Indigenous peoples and the law, and the status of women. Readings will include the records of the cases themselves as well as contextual materials.

HIST 329 - Music in History

This course examines music as a medium for understanding the past. Depending on the historical focus, issues such as colonialism, nationalism, social movements, urban culture, youth culture, race, gender, and class through the prism of contemporaneous music genres may be considered. The course may also address the transformation of acoustic spaces and musical instruments, the rise of sound recording, radio broadcasting, online streaming, and the history of music copyright in relation to its composition, performance, recording, broadcasting, and streaming. Students have an option to create a podcast or curate a DJ set for a term project.

HIST 339 - Crime and Punishment in Canadian History 

This course examines the history of crime and punishment in Canada. Topics include the definition and regulation of deviance; policing; trials and the criminal law; prisons and theories of punishment; the death penalty; crime and the media. Students engage with a variety of primary and secondary sources in readings and assignments.

HIST 356 - United States in the 19th Century: The Era of the Civil War

A study of American political, social, and economic life before and after the Civil War, from about 1850 to 1890. Topics include sectionalism and the breakdown of parties during the 1850s, the tasks of Reconstruction after the war, the New South, and the problems of a maturing industrial society.

HIST 3620 - African Slavery in Global Perspective

This course introduces students to the history of African slavery from a global perspective (broadly covering the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Indian Ocean littoral) from the 15th century to its legacies in the present. Throughout, the aim is to tell this history from the perspective of the enslaved and their descendants.

HIST 368 - African Popular Culture

From African-American choirs touring South Africa in the early 1900s to Nigerian pulp fiction and the contemporary popularity of hip-hop and Hindi film in Africa, this course explores the varied terrain of African popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Beginning prior to European colonization of the continent, and moving through the hybrid cultural forms produced under imperial rule, to the politics of culture in postcolonial states, we will track the myriad ways in which African popular cultures have developed in relation to broader political and socio-economic shifts.  In highlighting the heterogeneous character of this popular cultural field — one which extends beyond the continent through diaspora and migration — particular emphasis will be placed on how African cultural forms have been shaped in conversation with influences from far afield.  Our 'texts' in this course will range broadly, including not only scholarly work, but also fiction, film, music and images that provide entry points into the ways African artists, youth, officials, freedom fighters, market women, bachelors, gangsters and others have engaged culturally with the world around them.

HIST 370 - Japanese Popular Culture

This course traces the history of Japanese popular culture from the 1600s to the present, with emphasis on the last 50 years. The major focus is on the evolution of Japanese popular media such as films, anime, and manga. Other themes such as youth culture, fashion, and the spread of Japanese popular culture outside of the country’s borders are explored. No background knowledge or Japanese language skills are required.

HIST 378 - History of the Soviet Union

This course examines the main economic, social, and political developments of the history of the Soviet Union from its creation in 1917 to its collapse in 1991.  Particular attention is paid to the Stalin era, the impact of World War II, and the Cold War.  

HIST 398/E - American Capitalism

This course examines the history of capitalism and its relation to the making of the United States from the 15 th century to the present. We will trace the formation of “American capitalism” from its origins as a network of settler and extractive colonies in the Americas and its expansion as a continental and global empire. Different intertwining histories of enslavement, accumulation, dispossession, extraction, production, speculation, and consumption will be explored. We will pay particular attention to how and why “American capitalism” was produced and reproduced in and through material relation of power based on hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and religion. The readings will draw from multiple historiographies and fields, including the Black radical tradition, women of color and Third World feminisms, queer of color critique, and Indigenous decolonization.

HIST 398/G - Ugly Beautiful: History of Fashion

This course approaches fashion as an expression of political, social, and cultural identity. At the same time, it considers fashion as a material outcome of the exploitation of human labor and natural resources. Combining these two approaches, the course explores how ugly we can be to achieve what we deem beautiful without losing attention to the fluid boundaries between ugly and beautiful as a historical construct. We will read and discuss a variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from history, anthropology, fashion theory, and more.

HIST 398/H - History of the Climate Crisis

This course will allow students to delve into the complex environmental, social, political, and scientific history of our ongoing, global crisis of human-made climate change. We’ll begin by situating the crisis in the longer history of Earth’s climate from the Pleistocene to the Little Ice Age, but the emphasis of the course will be on how abiding material changes across the world resulting from human activities in modern times—since roughly 1500 (expansion of agrarian land uses, unbridled resource extraction, colonialism, global trade, uncontainable consumer and industrial waste, increasing reliance on fossil fuels, and much more)—have had disparate direct and indirect social, political, economic, and cultural consequences for different communities around the world.

HIST 403 - Methodology in History 

This course will provide an introduction to historical methods—conducting research into and presentation of findings about historical subjects. Topics will include: critical and effective reading of historical sources; exploration of non-written sources as historical evidence; use of quantitative methods in history; concrete problems of interpretation encountered during historical research; and the presentation of findings through different forms of writing. Because this is required Honours course, it will have no particular geographical or chronological focus. In the course of the term, students will write and present to the other students an extended essay based on primary-source research.

HIST 412 - Advanced Topics: Quebec Society and Culture

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. 

HIST 485 - Advanced Topics: Oral History: Methodology, Theory and Ethics

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.

HIST 498/E - Advanced Topics: Writing Creative Global History

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.

HIST 498/F - Advanced Topics: Oil, Empire, and Modern Life

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. 

HIST 498/G – Reading the Archives of Black Women’s Lives in Quebec

This seminar explores histories and archives of Black women in the Quebec colonial context between the 18th and 20th century. Focusing on the social and political role of Black women’s labour in the New France colony and the Quebec settler province, the course engages with the ethics and methodologies of researching Black women’s lives in the archives. By engaging with primary sources, archival repositories, scholarly texts, artistic productions and grey literature, we will question together what is understood as ‘labour,’ ‘knowledge,’ and ‘archives’ based on the lived experiences of Black women.

HIST 398/GA - Cairo, "the City Victorious": Megacities, Memory, and the Future

Dates: May 31, 2026 - June 16, 2026 

This course has specific requirements. Please consult the Concordia field school post and note that you must apply by February 9. 

Ever imagined what it would be like to live in a city of 26 million people? Welcome to Cairo! Situated on the Nile River extending westward to the ancient Pyramids and eastward farther into the desert then it's ever gone, the city is bursting at the seams, throbbing with life, hopes, dreams, and tons of history.