This course focuses on the interaction of people and the environment in the 20th Century. Themes include the environmental impact of industrialization, urbanization, and the revolution in transportation, and of resource development in the mining, oil, and gas industries; the destruction and preservation of wildlife; parks and the wilderness idea; the modern environmental movement; the contested world of modern agriculture and the food industry; the collapse of the fisheries; Canadian public policy, environmental law, and Canada's international role concerning the environment.
This course examines the political, social, cultural, and religious history of Scotland during the medieval and early modern periods. Topics include the Anglo-Norman impact, the Wars of Independence, Stewart monarchy, the growth of towns and trade, Highlands and Lowlands, the medieval Church, the Protestant Reformation, and Union with England.
This course examines the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, situated within larger historical frameworks of the nature of precolonial polities, the impact of colonialism, and the crises of postcolonial state building. Through a close examination of primary sources and historical arguments, this course will explore history and memory, violence and trauma, identity and belonging, justice and reconciliation.
This course examines colonial violence and revolution through the case of the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. Through an examination of primary sources and historical arguments, this course explores settler colonialism; local moral economies and land; gender and generational conflict; propaganda and revolutionary thought; and decolonization, memory, and contemporary legacies of Mau Mau.
Looking at the last one hundred years of modern African history, this course will examine the consolidation of colonial societies; transformations in gender, sexuality and identity politics; the roots of ethnic patriotisms, racial ideologies and African nationalisms; the role of violence in colonial and postcolonial governance; and the contemporary in historical perspective.
A course on the experiences of women in what is now Canada, from the deep past through the twentieth century. It addresses questions related to the many roles women occupied in Indigenous and settler societies and how these have changed over time. The course explores political, social, and cultural movements alongside personal relationships and lives.
Disorder, destruction, the dissolution of old and the creation of new societies, and a cultural revival that continues to influence intellectual and literary traditions: these are the big themes examined in this history of the early medieval world.
Examines major movements and cultures in Latin American politics from independence to present day. Topics include: nineteenth-century militarism; revolutionary socialism in Cuba and Nicaragua; military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil and Chile; and recent grassroots and transnational political movements. Emphasizes the integral roles of gender, race and the United States in the region's political processes.
In late Cold War Central America, the aspirations of long-oppressed peoples collided with the zeal of entrenched military dictatorships. This course examines the logic of violence in civil war by introducing students to the revolutionary movements and the counterrevolutionary terror that rocked Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador between 1954-1996.
This course investigates the development of British politics and the emergence of its global empire from the early nineteenth century to 1900. It engages with key historical issues such as the development of representative government, imperialism, colonial relationships, the industrial revolution, and new political ideologies (i.e. conservativism, liberalism, socialism).
In (mis)information age, it seems that the more we know, the less we understand. This course examines how data, fact, and information all have their own history, and that their production and circulation are shaped by politics, emotion, capital, as well as mediated by technology.
This course provides an expansive survey of the Nazi extermination of European Jews, including the ideological underpinnings of the genocide; the policies leading up to the "Final Solution" in Germany and the rest of Europe, a broad overview of the varied reactions and policies of many countries throughout Europe, the role of the Vatican and the response of the Jews themselves as well as the international community; the motivation of the perpetrators; and the complexities of survival in the ghettoes and concentration camps.
This course will explore the history of Germany beginning in 1945. We will examine the evolution of Germany from a dictatorship to a divided state by looking at Allied Policies in the 1940s, the economic wonder of the 1950s, and the tensions between East and West Germany until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This course will look at both East and West Germany's very different confrontations with the Nazi past, the student movement of the 1960s, domestic terrorism in the 1970s, the breakdown of communism in the 1980s, and the growing pains of reunification that exist to the present day. All of these developments will be seen through legal, political, cultural, and media trends.
The focus of this course will be the religious movements of sixteenth century that are described collectively as the Reformation: Lutheranism, Calvinism, the Radical Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Tudor and Stuart England (1485-1714) is a transformative period in English history. From the reign of Henry VIII, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, to the execution of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution, this course charts out England’s dramatic development from peripheral backwater to emerging world superpower.
This course examines the history of French Canada, focusing in particular on the period from the 1830s to the present. It explores questions of culture, political community, language, and geography, looking to these aspects of historical experience to situate Quebec and French Canada with respect to North America’s English-speaking majority as well as to the French-speaking nations of Europe, Africa, and elsewhere in the Americas. Proficiency in French is not required for students enrolled in HIS342H5, though those with French-language skills will be given the opportunity to work with French-language material. This course is taught in conjunction with FRE342H5.
This course uses Indigenous, transnational and feminist frameworks to examine colonialism’s impact on the environment. From Turtle Island (Canada/U.S.) to Aotearoa (New Zealand), this course dismantles colonial histories, extractive industries and the state apparatuses that govern our relationship to the environment to form alternative understandings of environmental histories and futures.
A cultural history of the 15th and 16th centuries set against the socio-economic background. The course will concentrate upon the development of the Renaissance in Italy and will deal with its manifestations in Northern Europe.
This course examines Canadian developments in the post-war period. It explores the tremendous economic expansion in that period. It surveys trends in immigration and urban development. The course also examines social movements and social change, as well as the growth of nationalism in Canada and Quebec.
This course explores a number of significant historic diasporas - and sites of diaspora - from Constantinople to Al-Andalus to Shanghai, to the United States and the United Kingdom, and to Tel Aviv and the West Bank, through historical record, fiction, memoir and film.
This course explores the history of Canada as a recipient of diasporic communities, arriving from many parts of the world and bringing a great variety of cultures and experiences.
Algonkian and Iroquoian history from the eve of European contact to the present in the Great Lakes region of today's Canada and the United States. Algonkian and Iroquoian societies in the 16th century, change over time, material culture, and inter-cultural relations among natives and between natives and Euroamericans.
An introduction to the history of Americas (the present-day territories of the Caribbean, Canada, Latin America and the United States) from pre-conquest indigenous societies to the end of the 20th century. This course will explore the Americas as a zone of connection and interaction between people of distinct environments, cultures and experiences. It surveys the historical continuities and transformations within the region and its linkages to increasingly globalized networks of culture, communication and commerce.
Major developments in the economic, social, political, and cultural life of the United States during the past century as it grew from a burgeoning industrial nation to the leading Superpower.
This class historicizes the intersectional analysis of gendered and sexed bodies after 1945. We explore topics such as normative gender expectations; reproductive freedom; masculinities; second-wave feminism; race, class and poverty; conservative backlash; media and gender/sexuality; LGBTQ social movements; trans histories. In terms of methods, I look forward to introducing students to experiments in digital history.
An examination of the historical transformation of East Asian cities from the imperial to modern times. The course focuses especially on how cities have been planned, depicted, experienced.
This course examines the emergence of the connected histories of nation-states, space and border-making in modern South Asia. It is especially interested in engaging the changing political languages, practices and contested visions of citizenship that have animated and shaped languages of space, place and belonging in South Asia.
The discovery of oil, the establishment of the state of Israel and subsequent wars for Palestine, Pan-Arabism and Political Islam were the over-riding factors in the regional balance of power. This course examines international relations as they were shaped by state- and non-state actors in 20th Century Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria.
This course reflects on Edward W. Said's seminal Study Orientalism. The first part focuses on the debates around academic representations of the Orient before and after Said's intervention: his critics, alternative perspectives and methodological elaborations. The second part dissects the ways in which Orientalism inhabits political forms of belonging such as romantic nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism, as well as colonial constructions of liberalism, race, gender and sexuality. The third part examines the ramifications of Orientalist knowledge production in the media and in visual culture. The course also raises questions of strategic reversals of Orientalism, and to what extent Occidentalism can be considered the non-Western equivalent to Western constructions of Otherness.
This course seeks to understand the manifold ways in which gender has shaped South Asian history, with a particular emphasis on the period from the colonial era to contemporary times. The themes will include the relationship between gender, kinship, society and politics on the one hand and race, imperialism, nationalism, popular movements and religion on the other.