Winter 2025
All course descriptions provided by instructors should be considered provisional. You will receive an official description at the beginning of the Winter semester when you attend class.
| Course Number | Course Title and Description | Location |
|---|---|---|
|
HIST*6230 |
Calendar description: A course that examines the current historiography of selected aspects of Canadian history. Topics will vary with the expertise of individual instructors. Instructor description: Theme: Canada in the Late Twentieth Century Canada experienced unprecedented booms following World War Two: the demographic ‘Baby Boom,’ a multi-decade economic boom, and a massive expansion of the state’s role in society and the economy. Historians have a strong understanding of what can broadly be termed Canada's postwar period (1945-1973). However, much of what ensued remains under-examined, even though a series of socio-economic, cultural, and political shifts that destabilized the postwar consensus between the early 1970s and late 1990s continues to shape our present. In this course, students will examine continuities and ruptures between the postwar and "post-postwar" periods, and will be encouraged to break new historical ground by writing papers on the 1970-1995 period. Summary course outline posted when available. |
Guelph, in-person |
|
HIST*6360 |
History of Sexuality and Gender Calendar description: This course will examine the history of gender and/or sexuality in different cultures, paying close attention to various theoretical approaches to understanding the history of gender and/or sexuality. The chronological and geographic focus of the course may vary according to the interests and expertise of the instructor. Instructor description: Theme: Asia. This course examines constructs of gender and sexuality in Chinese history. Our study will follow a topical approach, with each week generally devoted to a selected subject or theme. We will focus on the late imperial, modern, and contemporary periods. This class is necessarily inter-disciplinary, highlighting analyses of primary and secondary sources. There are no language requirements for this course; all material will be provided either in English or in Chinese with English translation. By the end of this course, you will have a broad sense of the field and of important scholarly works that have structured its current state. In most of our classes, we will analyse Honours theses, MA theses or PhD dissertations. This activity is aimed at increasing your knowledge of this particular field of study but – even more importantly – sharpening your writing skills, critical thinking, and awareness of what constitutes effective graduate-level written work. |
Guelph, online |
|
HIST*6380 |
Topics in Early Modern European History Calendar description: This seminar course examines current issues in early modern European history as selected by the instructor(s). Participants review current research and historiography, discuss the principal debates, and develop their own perspectives through encounters with primary source materials. Instructor description: In Winter 2025, this course will focus on Early Modern Intersections: Gender, Race, and Identity in England, 1550-1700. Students will engage with intersectional feminist theory while examining how historian’s perspectives on early modern identity have changed over the past 50 years. While the course materials will focus on England, students are encouraged to explore and write on identity elsewhere in early modern Europe for their projects, especially as it pertains to their own graduate research. Students will be graded on engagement, primary source analyses, and their final projects, which may take the form of an essay or a mock grant proposal. Summary course outline posted when available. |
Guelph, in-person |
|
HIST 601 |
Instructor description: This course will introduce students to the currents of Canadian history over the last 60 years. Using the Canadian Historical Review as a baseline, we will trace the (r)evolution of the Canadian historical profession from the 1950s to the present. Potential topics may include the rise and fall of Canadian political history; biography; women; gender; labour; the environment; ethnicity; and Canadian culture. How do we remember and commemorate the past in Canada? Students will be responsible for leading the weekly readings, for three short position papers and a longer historiographical paper due at term’s end. |
Waterloo, in-person |
|
HIST 612 |
Calendar description: This course examines the historical and political contexts of Indigenous rights movements from around the world. It considers the histories of Indigenous-state relations and Indigenous assertions of rights and sovereignty through cultural, political, and legal means. We will discuss grassroots and global Indigenous rights movements and international efforts to address Indigenous aspirations and decolonization especially following WWII. Attention will be also paid to the formation of Indigenous organizations and the engagement of international forums (i.e., through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). |
Waterloo, in-person |
| HIST 624 |
Environmental & Climate History, Premodern Calendar description: This course introduces graduate students to the major authors, works, and themes of preindustrial environmental and climate history. It demonstrates how historians frame the historical interaction of mutable human culture and natural environment. The locus of study is western Europe, the period between the end of antiquity and the start of the industrial revolution. Each week, students will read assigned texts and discuss them in a seminar format. Ultimately, each student must write a final research essay. |
Waterloo, in-person |
|
HIST 660 |
Transnational and Global History: Old Problems and New Directions Calendar description: This course examines transnational and global historical processes, focusing on temporal and geographic scales of analysis outside of traditional national histories, and promotes linking the local and the global. It looks at global forces influencing particular societies and encourages students to place themselves outside conventional local, regional, and national boundaries, and will critically consider a number of the metanarratives that have informed and continue to inform historiography, particularly idea such as modernity, progress, and the ongoing preoccupation with the 'rise of the west'. Given these questions, and the almost endless scope of a course that purports to take the world as its focal point, weekly seminars will begin with a discussion of the possibilities offered by as well as the limits to transnational/global/world history, the various interpretative frameworks in use and their proponents as well as the challenges that transnational/global/world history poses. We will then focus on particular case studies or themes so as to promote discussion that is as much historiographical as it is historical. Such themes/case studies may include: feminism and imperialism, famine and climate change, disease and ecology, military technology and governmentally, global trade and the rise of consumer society(s), colonial knowledge and shifting ideas of race. |
Waterloo, in-person |
| HI615B |
War and Genocide in Europe, 1939-1945: Research Seminar Prerequisite: HI615A Instructor description: This course focuses on the ghettos that the Nazis established in occupied Europe. We will study the reasons behind Nazi ghettoization policies and where ghettos fit into broader Nazi plans for the Jews. Topics covered include: the geographies of ghettoization; ghetto labour; living conditions; food policies and hunger in the ghettos; resistance; smuggling; ghetto police; and ghetto leadership. The first part of the class takes a historiographical approach to this topic whereas in the second term students work on their own research projects based on a wide variety of available primary source material (e.g., ghetto diaries and memoirs, survivor testimonies and interviews, photographs, etc.). |
Laurier, in-person |
| HI650B |
Early Modern Europe: Research Seminar Prerequisite: HI650A In this research seminar, students will write long research papers on some aspect of Early Modern European military history. |
Laurier, in-person |
| HI657H |
American Pop Culture in the 20th Century: Research Seminar Prerequisite: HI656L Instructor description: Continuation of same description from Fall. This course focuses on major forms of popular entertainment: movies, television and music. In discussing examples and genres, it will introduce students to how scholars approach cultural texts. Some of the works discussed will focus on developments within the entertainment industry itself, others will look at how cultural products reflect and challenge conventional ideas about race, ethnicity, age, gender, region and class. In addition to weekly discussions and book reviews, students will prepare a critical evaluation of the literature surrounding a theme or particular media. |
Laurier, in-person |
Fall 2024
All course descriptions provided by instructors should be considered provisional. You will receive an official description at the beginning of the Fall semester when you attend class.