2026 Summer
HIS395H5S - Topics in History: History in Games (Instructor: B. Veras de Morais e Silva)
History in Games examines how historical narratives, events, figures, and themes are represented, interpreted, and contested across analog and digital game media. The course analyzes games as sites of historical production and considers how designers, players, and platforms construct meaning about the past. We will explore how video games, board games, virtual reality experiences, and card games model time, power, memory, and social relations. Students will study scholarly literature on historical representation, analyze gameplay, and develop hands-on experiments using game engines.
HIS494H5S - Advanced Topics in the History of the Americas: Land, Law, and Justice in North America (Instructor: J. Bayer)
This course will explore the historic interconnections between Indigenous and European conceptions of land and law, and examine the influence these had on understandings of justice in North America prior to the twentieth century. The course will also explore the connections between European ideas of land and land use, and the forced labour of enslaved Africans in North America in the same timeframe. Topics will include settler colonialism, land-use conflicts, legal frameworks and forced labour, and contemporary understandings of justice and injustice.