PhD Courses

PhD Courses Descriptions 2026-2027

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

 PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 804 Seminar in Film and Moving Image Culture Theory: Mediated Exits & Escapes

Instructor: Dr. May Chew
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This seminar explores tropes and discourses of escapism pervading our current media spheres. Ranging from the individualistic to the collective, the spectacular to the quotidian, the reactionary to the radical, forms of escapism are fundamentally yoked to issues of time and labour, and often express the desire for some kind of extrication from the social or even planetary. Tracking its circulations in the popular imaginary, this course makes a case for escapism as an evolving and significant site of inquiry in contemporary media studies. Departing from Frankfurt School debates around the media’s anesthetising qualities, we consider the latter’s role in reproducing escape/ism as both limit and possibility under late capitalism. To this end, at the same time that we investigate escapism as a withdrawal from the social, we will also situate it alongside Indigenous and Black strategies of survival and resistance, especially through everyday practice, fugitivity, and refusal. Collectively, we will explore the aesthetic, political, and affective grammars of escapism, and consider its potential in feminist and anticolonial thought. The course further invites students to engage in methodological experimentation to trace how escapism emerges across different media formats and publics, and circulates through infrastructures, discourse, memetic/viral formats, and affective and embodied resonances.

FMST 807 Proseminar II: Contraband Media

Instructor: Dr. Ishita Tiwary
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This PhD Pro seminar engages with critical scholarship on contraband media practices across different geopolitical contexts focusing on quotidian practices. How does it affect circulation, aesthetics, and formal/informal practices ranging from labor through urban sociability? These are the central questions that will underpin this course. Contraband media is often discussed in terms of the legality and illegality of its circulation. Yet its representative practices of smuggling, piracy, and informality rarely become salient to their practitioners in relation to the legal terrain from which they emerge. In the diverse set of readings prescribed for this seminar, across transnational instance, while informal modes of circulation often arise out of a direct response to repression or correlate with a political order in which they are prevalent, on a social scale, these practices often make as many rules as they break. Contraband, thus, is just not the illicit, the erotic, or the informal. It’s a leaky space where underground distribution serves as mechanism of cultural authorization. Contraband media also enables the political to consolidate the ideological terrain of neoliberal multiculturalism, where cultural value hinges on narratability and global legibility. Rather than opening space for new forms of access or solidarity, these stories channel political desire into familiar scripts of rescue, reward, and display. They ultimately serve as scripts that strengthen systems of patronage and elevate constraint into a spectacle. On the other hand, it also engenders a dynamic where ethical authority, religious majoritarianism, and neoliberal media flows do not merely coexist (as seen in India and Pakistan through confluence of digital and video technology and informal practices, or in Iran through the terrain of underground film circulation; or in the way social media is mobilized during the Arab Spring); they interact and reinforce each other. This PhD seminar looks at diverse contraband screen cultures –across US, India, Dubai, Pakistan, China, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia, Iran – to analyze informal infrastructures built on piracy/smuggling/informal modes of circulation. Is it an ethic? An aesthetic? Or a tactic?

PhD-Only Courses Winter

FMST 802 Seminar in Film & Moving Image Aesthetic: Sensory Media Ethnography

Instructor: Dr. Joshua Neves
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm  

This course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on sensory ethnography, among other forms of documentary research and creation, we will (i) examine sensory ethnographic film, video, and other artworks; (ii) consider key debates in ethnography, documentary, and nonfiction research/practice; (iii) participate in weekly labs focused on video shooting, sound recording, editing, and related skills. The course will draw on approaches from a number of fields, including cinema and media studies, anthropology, urban studies, and critical social theory, as well as genealogies of documentary and experimental media. Students will create their own sound/video work and write a critical essay addressing key questions related to sensory/media ethnography. [*In addition to our weekly course meeting, students are required to participate in regular lab/training sessions on Friday afternoons in the GEM Lab.]

-Combined MA/PhD Courses Fall

FMST 622/822 Topics in Digital Moving Images: Queer/Trans Video Games

Instructor: Dr. Cáel M. Keegan
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This interdisciplinary course explores the medium of video games as offering new perspectives into queer and trans perceptive and phenomenological experiences. Combining key readings in queer and transgender theory with readings from game studies, it explores how game environments have historically co-constructed our notions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation, and how queer and trans gamers and game designers have used game space and its affordances to express alternative relations to desire, embodiment, sensation, and subjectivity. Tracing the entangled relationships between queer/trans subcultural formations and the history of computational media, it asks how video games have provided queer and trans players a medium for the reimagination of the world’s design—and for the survival of its current rules. No prior gaming experience or gaming equipment is needed to be successful in this class: Games will be played and discussed collectively as a group.

FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Film Theory, Media Theory

Instructor: Dr. Joshua Neves
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on sensory ethnography, among other forms of documentary research and creation, we will (i) examine sensory ethnographic film, video, and other artworks; (ii) consider key debates in ethnography, documentary, and nonfiction research/practice; (iii) participate in weekly labs focused on video shooting, sound recording, editing, and related skills. The course will draw on approaches from a number of fields, including cinema and media studies, anthropology, urban studies, and critical social theory, as well as genealogies of documentary and experimental media. Students will create their own sound/video work and write a critical essay addressing key questions related to sensory/media ethnography. [*In addition to our weekly course meeting, students are required to participate in regular lab/training sessions on Friday afternoons in the GEM Lab.]

FMST 645/845 Topics in Film Genres: Decolonial Sc-iFi

Instructor: Dr. Masha Salazkina
Wednesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course will introduce students to the recent turn within global literature and, increasingly, film and media towards speculative fiction, its ideologies and aesthetics, the possibilities it opens up and the problems in poses. The course will focus on films made outside of US and Western Europe. We will discuss the overlaps and divergences between the established, genre-driven conventions and its decolonial speculative variants; questions of industrial production and labor embedded in it; colonial(ist) legacies and modes of their subversion. We will look specifically at the alternative imaginaries of the future: “co-futurisms” as they have entered the film and media sphere. We will pay particular attention to the way that speculative modes allow for queer feminist and posthumanist imaginaries. Finally, we’ll also address the difference between socialist/postsocialist sci-fi traditions vis-à-vis these contemporary global developments and discuss how they fit within these broader frameworks.    

Every class will center around a film screening, which students will be asked to discuss in relation to the texts assigned for that week.

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 605/805 Topics in English Canadian Cinemas

Instructor: Dr. Catherine Russell
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm

The 1980s was an important transitional decade for Canadian cinema, most evidently in the sphere of feature filmmaking and the emergence of young auteurs such as Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Denys Arcand, and David Cronenberg. In this course we will situate this “Canadian New Wave” within institutional frameworks of funding sources and distribution, and also in relation to developments in experimental and documentary filmmaking as well as emergent indigenous media production. We will look at some of the debates of the period regarding censorship, formalism, and nationhood. Canadian cinema arguably matured during this decade by incorporating new identities and new aesthetics, creating important fissures within the hegemony of national cinema.

FMST 625/825 Topics in Film History: Late Silent Film

Instructor: Prof. Peter Rist
Wednesdays 8:45am-12:45pm

This seminar course will examine the situation where everyone working in the global film industries understood that it was only a short time before sound would be introduced and silent cinema would be no more. During this transitional period (that occurred at slightly different times in the United States, Europe and Asia), there were two aesthetic tendencies occurring simultaneously, a move towards “realism” (because a “total” cinema of sound and colour was fast approaching) and a desire to explore the artistic possibilities of the silent medium before it disappeared altogether. The course will be divided into four segments: Hollywood from Sunrise (1927) to 1929, the year when U.S. sound films became the majority; France, from the experimental to the spectacular; Germany/UK, a transnational cinema, involving Hitchcock, E.A. Dupont and others; Shochiku studio, in the Kamata suburb of Tokyo, and the Lianhua (United Photoplay Service) in Shanghai, 1932–1935. We will be paying special attention to written documents from the time, including European theory—Balacs, Arnheim, Epstein—but, we will also be reading much more contemporary material, and consider the role of restoration, the Giornate del Cinema Muto, annual silent film festival in Pordenone, northern Italy, and perhaps, the impact of recent films that pay homage to early cinema including The Artist and Hugo. Assignments will consist of an in-class presentation and an essay, or two presentations, and students will be asked to attend extra screenings.

FMST 650/850 Topics in Experimental Film and Video: Curatorial Practices

Instructor: Dr. Farah Atoui
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This seminar examines curatorial practice as a critical, creative, and political field within contemporary film and moving-image culture. Moving beyond traditional programming models—often institutional, hierarchical, and canon-driven—we approach curation as a form of research, knowledge production, and world-building that links artistic experimentation to critical reflection and social transformation. Through conversations with Montréal-based curators and case studies drawn from film festivals, museums, artist-run centres, community screenings, and digital platforms, we will explore how curated events are shaped by institutional histories, exhibition infrastructures, and transnational circuits of circulation, and how curatorial strategies influence meaning, reception, and the cultural afterlives of images. The seminar also incorporates visits to curated events across Montréal, enabling students to analyze curatorial decision-making in context and to reflect on the political, aesthetic, and relational encounters produced through exhibition.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film an Moving Image Studies: Cinema of Exploration

Instructor: Dr. Luca Caminati
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course explores the tradition of travel films, tracing their evolution from early reportages to contemporary travelogues. Our screenings will include anthropological films, National Geographic-style nature documentaries, experimental and avant-garde cinema, and “fake” travel films that blur the line between fact and fiction. Course requirements also include weekly web posts, a group video essay, and a final paper.