For more information on our course offerings, please go to York Course Website.
Calendar Year
Term
Course #
Course Title
2024
SU
gs/huma 5000A
Directed Reading
For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
F, Y
gs/huma 5000A
Directed Reading
For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
SU
gs/huma 5000B
Directed Reading
For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
W
gs/huma 5000M
Directed Reading
For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2025
W
gs/huma 5000M
Directed Reading
For M.A. Students. Permission of Program Director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
Y
gs/huma 5100A
Core Practices and Methodologies in Humanities Research
Provides MA students with the core tools for interdisciplinary Humanities scholarship. It introduces basic techniques and methodologies of conducting, presenting and publishing research, with an emphasis on qualitative methods. Students practice, and reflect on, the process of planning, carrying out, and presenting research in ways that are adequate for specific contexts, topics, and problematics in the Humanities.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
F
gs/huma 5801A
Traffic in / of Meaning: Intersections of Travel Writing and Translation
This graduate seminar, crosslisted in Translation Studies and Humanities, examines the intersections of travel writing and translation through perspectives that help to see these activities as intertwined, co-constitutive, and often involving parallel processes with shared concerns in practice and in terms of theories brought to bear on their analyses.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
SU
gs/huma 6000A
Directed Reading
For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
Y
gs/huma 6000A
Directed Reading
For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
SU
gs/huma 6000B
Directed Reading
For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2024
W
gs/huma 6000M
Directed Reading
For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2025
W
gs/huma 6000M
Directed Reading
For Ph.D. Students. Permission of program director required.
Instructional Format: DIRD
2025
W
gs/huma 6102M
Experiences of Translation in the Americas
This course investigates translation in the Americas focusing on the relationship between language and culture contact in Latin America. Questions of translation as it relates to power, identity, and cultural production are addressed from an interdisciplinary outlook.
Instructional Format: LECT
2024
W
gs/huma 6135M
The Making of Asian Studies: Critical Perspectives
This course offers a historical examination of the multiple, overlapping processes through which Asian identities and regions were constituted. It will also examine new directions in Asian studies in an era of intensified global flows, transnationalism, and the presence of Asian diaspora in Canada and elsewhere.
Instructional Format: SEMR
Instructor(s): C. Wu
2025
W
gs/huma 6135M
The Making of Asian Studies: Critical Perspectives
This course offers a historical examination of the multiple, overlapping processes through which Asian identities and regions were constituted. It will also examine new directions in Asian studies in an era of intensified global flows, transnationalism, and the presence of Asian diaspora in Canada and elsewhere.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6140M
Western Thought of Empire
Examines how empire has figured in the works of dominant seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth century Western social and political thinkers. Issues about race, civilization, progress and modernity, and imperialism, colonialism, etc., are critically assessed discursively, ideological, socio-politically.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
F
gs/huma 6157A
Comparative and World Literature Seminar: History and Practice
Introduces students to the conditions of emergence and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe to its most recent global iteration of World Literature. Students will experience how expanded understandings of cultural translation and textuality have radically altered and expanded the Eurocentric character of the discipline. Questions for investigation includes: How have the aesthetics and politics of Comparative Literature changed over the past two hundred years? What factors have influenced those changes? How is World Literature related to Comparative Literature? How do both relate to colonial, post-colonial, diasporic, cultural and translation studies and digital humanities?
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
W
gs/huma 6161M
The Child, in Theory: Critical Constructions of Children and Youth
This course examines critical constructions of the child in a variety of critical discourses, beginning with scientific developmentalism and psychoanalysis, and moving toward more recent oppositional theories.
Instructional Format: LECT
Instructor(s): A. Murnaghan
2024
W
gs/huma 6164M
Visual & Verbal Portraiture in Nonlinear Life Writing
This seminar examines forms, functions, influence and effects of visual and verbal self-portraiture in contemporary life writing such as autobiographical narrative, diary, travelogueand poetry. It analyzes portraiture as ways of knowing (epistemology) and ways of showing (methodologies). It studies constructions of a multiplicity of selves, fragmented selves, andconcepts of bios, performativity, alterity, and fluidity in non-chronological life writing.
Instructional Format: LECT
Instructor(s): L. Wiseman
2024
W
gs/huma 6167M
Imagining Slavery and Freedom
This course engages a critical examination of Transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, and the ways in which the imagination functions in the articulation of a desired, but always elusive, Black freedom.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6167M
Imagining Slavery and Freedom
This course engages a critical examination of Transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, and the ways in which the imagination functions in the articulation of a desired, but always elusive, Black freedom.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
S1
gs/huma 6168A
Convergences, Disparities, and Fault lines: Research in Latin American and Caribbean Studies
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to debates and perspectives on Latin American and Caribbean studies and links theory with practice in the field. Supported by numerous CERLAC Fellows from a range of disciplines, students from different graduate programs and areas of study will collaborate together in teams on applied research projects.
Instructional Format: BLEN
Instructor(s): T. Samuels-Jones
2025
W
gs/huma 6169M
Writing Black Life: Black Life Writing
This course engages a critical examination of writing by Black people in English or in translation. What does it mean to write black life? What forms does that work take? We will read short fiction, novels, poetry, essays, experimental works and theoretical writing. The majority of the works that we read will be contemporary (mid twentieth century to the present). This course wants to familiarize students with the rich and varied materials of Black writing, with form, and style and argument.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6216M
Moses through the Centuries
This course begins by examining the Moses story as found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Subsequently, we will look at how the image of Moses has changed throughout the ages both within a religious context and within the arts.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
F
gs/huma 6228A
Religion, Secularism and the Colonial Encounter
This course explores the history of category religion and its deployment in the colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise of secularism in Europe was a process of defining certain discourses, practices and experiences as religious and isolating them as distinct from social and political aspect of life, a worldview and orientation. This way of knowing and ordain the world did not easily translate into the cultures colonized by European powers. Looking at case studies from Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, this course will explore how religion became a vector of colonial power in the hands of missionaries and others and a means of resisting colonial hegemony for colonial subjects. Furthermore, it will investigate the ways in which contesting the meaning and definition of religion became a way of negotiating the limits of colonial authority. Key texts would include Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Secularism and Religion Making, Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Penny Edwards Cambodge.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6239M
Understanding Exegesis in Select Philosophical Texts (Rene Descartes and David Hume)
For Philosophy to prosper, Descartes speaks of the need of philosophy to emulate geometry, and Hume talks of the need of philosophy to emulate Newtonian physics. These respective claims are misleading, inasmuch as their methodologies, in fact, vary, according to the work and topic. With Descartes, we focus on his Regulae and Meditations; with Hume, his Treatise of Human Nature and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
W
gs/huma 6309M
Essays in the Philosophy of Freedom
This course examines important texts on the philosophy of human freedom in modern continental philosophy from the late eighteenth to late twentieth centuries. It focuses on essays by Kant, Schelling, Heidegger and iek, in which the later essays interrogate the earlier essays.
Instructional Format: SEMR
Instructor(s): J. Steigerwald
2024
Y
gs/huma 6310A
Contexts Of Victorian Science
Contexts of Victorian Science. This course focuses on nineteenth century British and European science and its social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Adopting the contextualist approach to the history of science allows us to raise a series of provocative questions: in what way did all of these different contexts shape the nature of nineteenth century scientific thought? How were scientific facts socially constructed? What was it about the nineteenth century context that led many intellectuals to reject Christianity and embrace science as providing a new, privileged form of knowledge? Included among the topics to be covered are the discourse of natural theology, the politics of geological controversy, Scottish philosophy and phrenology, radical working class Lamarckianism in England during the 1830s, the plurality of worlds debate, science and gender, the professionalization of science, English scientific naturalism and German scientific materialism, the literary structure of Darwin's Origin of Species, Darwinian theory and its ideological uses, and late nineteenth century physics and psychics. This course will be of interest to students of British, European, social, and intellectual history.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6322M
Modernism, Interdisciplinarity, and the Arts
Examines the literary, musical, and visual cultures of modernism to create better understanding of the forms, meanings, and significance of interdisciplinary art practices.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2025
W
gs/huma 6333M
History of Things: Objects, Representation, and Display
This course explores critical debates and interdisciplinary research methods employed in the study of material objects. It draws on case studies and theoretical work on material culture, display, and representation to consider the influence of the 'material turn' on contemporary scholarship and on historical and curatorial practices.
Instructional Format: SEMR
2024
W
gs/huma 6333M
History of Things: Objects, Representation, and Display
This course explores critical debates and interdisciplinary research methods employed in the study of material objects. It draws on case studies and theoretical work on material culture, display, and representation to consider the influence of the 'material turn' on contemporary scholarship and on historical and curatorial practices.
Instructional Format: SEMR
Instructor(s): J. Hadlaw
2024
F
gs/huma 6500A
Advanced Practices and Methodologies in Humanities Research
Provides PhD students with advanced tools for interdisciplinary Humanities scholarship. As the only mandatory course in their degree, it ensures that students are well versed in conducting, presenting and publishing research, with an emphasis on qualitative methods. Students practice, and reflect on, the framing of research topics and fields as well as the design and conducting of courses.
Instructional Format: SEMR
Learn More
The Graduate Program in Humanities at York is an exciting environment to pursue innovative, socially engaging, career-ready education. Contact our Graduate Program Assistant to learn more.