Examines the status, roles, and rights of Muslim women in the Quran, the Prophetic traditions, and the diverse Islamic laws. It explores the development of different schools of laws in diverse societies and examines the changes regarding Muslim women's identity.
Allows students to pursue a supervised program of research in the advanced study of religion. Topics can include focused projects in specific ancient religious texts; contemporary religious issues; or religion and literature, philosophy or psychology.
This is a research seminar focused on the cultural expressions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the 16th century. Students will study a selection of relevant doctrinal points, relating them to their expression in the broader cultural context.
Analyzes two forms of media, the book and the photograph, and two moments in their histories, East and West. In the first instance, examines the separate Western and Eastern trajectories in the development of print. In the second, the ways the Western technology of photography was appropriated in the East. We read both canonical and […]
Explores the representation of terrorism and terror in a range of forms, disciplines and historical contexts, complicating the simplistic binary of good and evil characterizing terrorism that functions in dominant political and media discourse.
An examination of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews: the historical and philosophical background, the theological and psychological implications, the history and literature of the period.
This seminar examines the transformation of Yiddish from the vernacular of an ethno-religious community to a language of modern, secular mass culture and national politics in the 19th and 20th centuries in Eastern Europe.
A historical analysis of the formation of the ideas, literature and institutions of rabbinic Judaism as they took shape from the first to the seventh centuries.
This course examines contemporary manifestations of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Canada. To provide historical context it explores the antecedents of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim thought in the medieval and early modern periods. The course is interdisciplinary in nature drawing on both Humanities (primary texts, films, literature) as well as social science approaches. It begins by providing […]
This course focuses on the modes of transmission, acquisition and reproduction of knowledge in a variety of Islamic societies from the ninth century to the present.