This course examines the wide range of lives, experiences and histories of Black peoples in Canada by focusing on expressive cultures. The approach is broadly interdisciplinary and we will study a range of Black Canadian literature (novels, poetry, plays) as well as other forms of cultural production such as film, musics, and visual art. Through […]
This course centres "the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia" (Hartman, xiii) to understand the social, historical and political contexts of the wayward practices of Black Women. It uses key issues and debates in contemporary Black Feminist Thought to grapple with the conundrum of social dispossession that around the way Black women […]
This course examines the burgeoning corpus of Black Canadian film to consider the ways in which Black cinematic culture in Canada has developed in the last 40 years and continues to develop today. It addresses a range of genres, including dramatic feature films, documentaries, short and experimental films. Guest speakers including Black Canadian film makers […]
This course explores the key themes, critical questions, and entrenched conflicts about the place of religion during the long and varied history of American civic and cultural life. It analyzes Native-Newcomer religious tensions, disestablishment, uniquely American religions, and the intersections of religion with war, nationalism, immigration, race, science, expansion, urbanization, gender, counterculture, and new media.
The course explores the co-existence of traditional African religious cultures and Christianity on the continent and among various African Diasporas in the Americas. Our approach is interdisciplinary. We read anthropological and cultural studies theories of African-derived religious practices that crossed the Atlantic during the slave trade and continue into present societies and cultural productions. Students […]
The questions that Renaissance humanists cultivated are central to the humanities today: why study the Liberal Arts? How does the life of the mind relate to an active professional career? What defines humanity? What is the individual’s proper relation to the state? What is the role of sexuality, faith, and money in the pursuit of […]
This course begins at Keele campus where students prepare for archival field work abroad. It incorporates book history, childhood studies, literary and archival methodologies in its exploration of the social and textual production of children's literature. It focuses on a selection of historical children's texts held in special collections to study how these artefacts shape […]
This course examines British debates on science and its application to pressing moral and social problems through a reading of the scientific literature on materialism, the mind, and the economy during the Victorian era.
Examines art produced in times of crisis, social and personal extremes: imprisonment, totalitarianism, political occupation, illness, war. Focuses chiefly on the Holocaust of WW2, as well as Indigenous American Reserve cultures, contemporary Palestinian art, representation of atrocity.
The meeting between Jews and Arabs in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict is famous. Less familiar is the encounter between Muslims and Jews in Muslim lands. This course explores Jewish life under Islam from the rise of Islam until modern times, with a special focus on Sephardi Jews.