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.
"This was the ghetto: where children grew down instead of up" (Spinelli, Milkweed, 2003, 153).This course analyzes themes and art relevant to children and youth in adolescents' and children's Holocaust literature. Participants apply cognitive andaffective modes of perception-ways of knowing, perceiving, and sensing- to read through the eyes of the main characters, predominantly children and […]
This course introduces students to traditional oral cultures of the African-Caribbean diaspora. Adapting an ethnographic approach, the course focuses on the culture's African origins, its evolution in the Caribbean nations, and its subsequent transplantation to urban contexts such as Toronto.
This course explores narratives of nature in a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts. It examines how different figures and understandings of nature are developed in and through diverse modes of story-telling or narrative forms.
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 authors will […]
How have South Asian religions been represented, practiced, communicated, and transformed through popular culture? How are religious themes, images, and ideas explored in contemporary film, television, print media and music? Focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Sikhism, the course explores concepts of the religious and the popular in ancient and medieval South Asian art forms […]
Examination of the relationship between science and religion through a study of the implications of the following intellectual developments for religious thought: the rise and triumph of Newtonian science, the Darwinian revolution, relativity theory, quantum physics, "big bang" theory, and creationism
This course investigates the origins, development, significance, and social functions of personified evil--Satan and his demons--in early Judaism and in the history of Christianity. We will consider some of the most important literary and visual depictions of this figure (and his story) from the ancient world through the middle ages to our own day.
The course focuses on the representation of Muslim women in modern Islamic literatures (novel and short stories) and other forms of Islamic cultural production, such as photography and film. Course credit exclusion: AP/HUMA 4816 3.00.