Summer 2018 Topic Courses

HIS392H5: Topics in Global History: Comparative Colonialism and Imperialism, 15th-19th Centuries (A. Graham)

This course will explore the histories of colonialism and imperialism in a global context, beginning with early empires in the 15th century, including Amerindian empires and late-Ming dynasty China, and ending with the 'New Imperialism' of the 19th century in India and Africa. This course seeks to encourage a comparative analysis of different colonial and imperial regimes, and the varied experiences of individuals under such regimes.

HIS494H5: Advanced Topics in the History of the Americas: Visual Culture in 20th Century Latin America (E. Toffoli)

How have visuality, and different ways of seeing and being seen, structured Latin Americans’ interactions with each other, the nation and the globe in the 20th century? How have Latin American image producers and consumers employed different visual mediums — photography, film, art, etc. — to make social and political claims in their everyday lives and at pivotal moments in Latin America’s recent past? This course explores visual culture’s critical role in representing, shaping, and reimagining 20th-century Latin American history. We will focus on the ways in which different visual mediums’ properties influenced ideas about the sorts of claims that might be made through their use, specifically considering photographs’ unique characteristics as visual documents.

RLG388H5: Special Topics: Religion and Nature (A. Lehto)

This course explores the ways in which contemporary ecological issues and debates have provoked both a response from traditional religious communities and the emergence of new forms of religious concern and experience outside of any traditional framework.

RLG411H5: Advanced Topics in Religion, Media, and Culture: Mediating Religion (U. Hamid)

The seminar examines the role of media in how religion is experienced in the world today. By adopting a perspective that is attuned to the materiality of religious experience, the seminar looks at questions of aesthetics, presence, memory and space in the context of a number of different traditions including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism.

WGS337H5: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies: Proving Grounds: Spaces of Masculinity (J. May)

Working with theories of masculinities, this course explores social, cultural and spatial constructions of masculinity. In particular, it examines spaces that act as ‘proving grounds’ for the performance of masculinity, exploring how such grounds serve to shape both dominant and alternative constructions of masculinity.