Course descriptions

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.

HIST 200/A - Chinatown: A Global History

This first-year seminar introduces students to the global history of Chinese migration. We will visit major Chinatowns or Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, the United States, and Canada, exploring their histories both as global phenomena and local products, all intertwined with foodways, heritage, and gentrification as well as the politics of race, gender, class, and 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. Our final destination is Montreal’s Chinatown. Students will approach this unique neighborhood as evolving archives for research into Chinese migration history and the history of Montreal and Canada. A field trip is scheduled.

HIST 200/B - A Global History of September 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001, a group of nineteen hijackers used passenger aircraft to attack the World Trade Centre (New York City) and the Pentagon (Arlington, Virginia), killing 2996 people. Though two decades have since passed, the history of 9/11 is still being lived -- and still being written. This class explores what it means to live in what is often called the “post-9/11 era” through a range of themes and approaches, including: American Empire before and since; the War on Terror in global perspective; surveillance and policing; conspiracy theories and disinformation; post-9/11 cultural production; and questions of grief, public memory/commemoration, and selective forgetting. In addition to engagement with sources ranging from Iraqi memoirs to home-made documentaries to Supreme Court rulings, students will learn history by “making” it, including conducting oral history interviews with people who remember 9/11, as well as engagement with digital archives, databases, and other repositories of primary source material.

HIST 200/C - Murder in Medieval England

The medieval period of European history is often conceptualized as an especially violent age. In this introductory seminar we will use our enquiries into a series of murders in late medieval England as an entry point for learning how to read and analyze historical evidence; how to read scholarly interpretations critically; and how to communicate ideas effectively in oral and written form. 

HIST 398/A - The Philippines and the World

The Philippines is not only a nation that emerges from worldshaping global relations, but is also a worldmaking historical force. As such, this course rethinks the time and place of Philippine history. We will explore numerous overlapping and interconnected themes, such as: colonialism and imperialism, religion and culture, capitalism and migration, racialization and indigeneity, gender and sexuality, ecological and climate crises, and geopolitics and social movements. We will pay special attention to peoples’ historical perspective on, and cultural grappling with, social dilemmas faced by those in the Philippines and in the diaspora.

HIST 398/D - History of Southeast Asia

This is a broad history of modern Southeast Asia. The course will focus on the interconnections of numerous key themes: imperialism and religion; transformations in local and regional economies; the formation of modern states and polities; migrant displacements and the making of diasporas; the eruptions of revolutions and counter-revolutions; and the surfacing of racial forms and nationalisms. Countries that will be especially highlighted are: Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Viet Nam.

HIST 398/Z - Movements of the Black Atlantic 

This course explores Black political and cultural movements that connected different regions across the Atlantic between the 18th and 20th century. By looking at how people and ideas circulated, we will examine how knowledge informed and shaped these movements. An emphasis will be placed on communities of resistance to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century; intellectual networks of the 19th century and early 20th century; and artistic and activist movements of the 20th century.

HIST 481/AA - War and Memory in the 20^th Century 

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.

HIST 498/A - History of Science and Technology

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.

HIST 498/B - Truth and Lies on the US-Mexican Border

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. 

HIST 498/C - The Nature of Empire 

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. 

HIST 200/Y - History of Nightlife 

TBA.

HIST 200/Z - Food Histories and the Middle East 

TBA.

HIST 298/C - 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/D – Quebec Through its Social History

This course provides an introductory survey of the Quebec settler province from the mid-16th to late 20th century with an emphasis on social, cultural and intellectual history. The course situates key socio-political and cultural events that shaped Quebec history and their long-term impact on Quebec society. By engaging with the work of scholars, artists, and activists, students will also learn about how people living in the province have understood these events over time.

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 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/L - Black Settlements in Canada 

This course explores how Black communities formed in rural and urban contexts, in the pre- and post-confederation Canadian settler state. We will examine the history of various Black community settlements from Nova Scotia to Vancouver from the late 18th and to mid-20th century by looking at demographic and institutional development, cultural and religious life, activism, and the Black press. The course will geographically and historically situate the variety of Black experiences in Canada.

HIST 437/AA - The First World War in European History

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.

HIST 498/W LAWS 4100 - Law and Emotions in History

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 is cross-listed with LAWS 4100.

HIST 498/670/Y - Witches, Shamans, Vampires and Zombies: The Supernatural in History:

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.  

HIST 498/670/Z - Megacities and Decolonization

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.

LAWS 4100/W - Law and Emotions in History

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.