This course explores the practice of reading at the juncture between printed page and digital screen through assembling a digital commonplace book, an annotated personal anthology that will document each student’s intellectual path. Students will learn close reading strategies, multimodal annotation techniques, and various modes of digital engagement with texts. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course examines science fiction as pop culture genre, media industry, and sociocultural phenomenon, with attention to some of its key themes, its important texts, creators, and audiences, and its place in contemporary culture. We will study some works chosen by the class as well as by the instructor. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

In the 21st century, Jane Austen’s early 19th-century novels of love and marriage are increasingly experienced through retellings and updatings in theatrical and made-for-television movies. The course will examine highlights from the last 25 years of Austen adaptations for what they can tell us about relationships in our time, including how Austen’s stories are rewritten to please a modern audience. Films in the course will include works from 1995 to 2016 (from 1995, Clueless, Austen’s Emma retold as a Hollywood high school comedy and starring Alicia Silverstone; and Sense and Sensibility, for which Emma Thompson’s screenplay won an Academy Award; and from 2016, the Hallmark Channel’s Unleashing Mr. Darcy, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice transferred to the present-day dog show circuit; and writer/director Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship, the first-ever film version of Austen’s Lady Susan). Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Since the mid-twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have become classics of children’s and fantasy literature. In this course, we read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and investigate the world-building and imagined history that lies behind the books. We trace how Tolkien’s own life experience informed his work—his experience as a soldier of the Great War and a civilian during World War Two; as a scholar of medieval language and literature, and of fairy tales; as a Catholic thinker; and as a lover of nature and the past. We also survey the afterlife of the novels in fantasy, film, and the popular imagination. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

The land now known as Toronto has a 13,000+ year old history of Indigenous presence that is still unfolding. This history is inscribed in the land – it is visible in the geographical features, place names, and contemporary urban form of the city and is represented through stories (oral and written) told by diverse members of Toronto’s Indigenous community. This course engages with stories of Indigenous history and presence in Toronto through a selection of Indigenous literary works about Toronto, Indigenous guest speakers, and a series of experiential Indigenous storytelling tours of significant locations across the city. Students will be introduced to Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing and will learn why storytelling remains a significant and culturally-appropriate means for keeping and sharing land-based Indigenous Knowledge. Students will gain a deeper appreciation of the city as a traditional Indigenous territory and will reflect on their own relationships and responsibilities within these lands. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Course description varies each year. Please see the Summer Abroad website for course details. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Credit course for supervised participation in faculty research project. Details at https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/current/academics/research-opportunities/research-opportunities-program. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Credit course for supervised participation in faculty research project. Details at https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/current/academics/research-opportunities/research-opportunities-program. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

An integrated and historical approach to social relations of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability, particularly as they relate to women's lives and struggles across different locales, including Canada.

Examines modes of theories that shaped feminist thought and situates them historically and transnationally so as to emphasize the social conditions and conflicts in which ideas and politics arise, change and circulate.

A critical examination of institutions, representations and practices associated with contemporary popular culture, mass-produced, local and alternative.

Using a transnational, feminist framework, this course examines material and conceptual interrelations between gendered human and non-human nature, ecological crises, political economies and environmental movements in a variety of geographical, historical and cultural contexts. Does environmental justice include social justice, or are they in conflict? What might environmental justice and activism involve?

Examines how masculinities shape the lives of men, women, transgender people. Effects of construction, reproduction and impact of masculinities on institutions such as education, work, religion, sports, family, medicine, military and the media are explored. Provides critical analysis of how masculinities shape individual lives, groups, organizations and social movements.

Subjects will vary from year to year.

Subjects vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar.  Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar.  Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar.  Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year. Please consult the Women & Gender Studies Institute's website for more information.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level course. Topics vary from year to year. Please consult the Women & Gender Studies Institute's website for more information.

This course examines the complex and conflictual relations between women and revolutionary struggles and focuses on a number of theoretical and empirical issues relevant to the Middle East and North Africa context.

This course will focus on masculinities and femininities in workplace settings, with an emphasis on service work around the world. We will discuss workers' lived experiences of gender regimes which are embedded within the dynamics of class, race and nation.  The relationships between gender processes and workplace hierarchies will be explored. 

Teaches skills in feminist approaches to making knowledge.  Introduces feminist practices for doing research and navigating the politics of production and exchange.  Develops skills for conveying knowledge to the wider world, such as through research papers, reports, performance, new media, art.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.

Examines the operation of the law as it affects women, the construction and representation of women within the legal system, and the scope for feminist and intersectional analyses of law. Includes an analysis of specific legal issues such as sexuality and reproduction, equality, employment, violence and immigration.

Examines diverse traditions and normative models of health (e.g. biomedicine, social constructionist, indigenous health) in conjunction with analyses of the origin, politics, and theoretical perspectives of contemporary Women's Health Movements. Topics may include fertility, sexuality, poverty, violence, labour, aging, (dis)ability, and health care provision.

Examines gendered representations of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disability in a variety of colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial contexts. Topics may include the emergence of racialist, feminist, liberatory and neoconservative discourses as inscribed in literary texts, historical documents, cultural artifacts and mass media.

Drawing on diversely situated case-studies, this course focuses on the ideals that inform struggles for social justice, and the mechanisms activists have employed to produce the change. Foci include the gendered implications of movement participation, local and transnational coalition, alternative community formation, and encounters with the state and inter/supra/transnational organizations.