This research seminar explores topics and issues of violence in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, beginning with forced collectivization and ending with the Great Terror. The seminar focuses on new archivally-based research and aims to contextualize Stalinist terror within larger theories of political and social violence.

Focusing on the institution of the inquisition, this seminar explores the response of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to religious heterodoxy. Among the groups prosecuted by the inquisition discussed: Cathar heretics in France, crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims in Spain, and witches in Italy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union along national lines brought about a renewed interest in the non- Russian parts of the Imperial Russian state. This so-called “imperial turn” has altered the ways that we think about Tsarist Russian rule. In this course we address different approaches to the study of Empire as reflected in the Russian case from its origins in the sixteenth century until the collapse of the Tsarist state — but not precisely of its empire — in 1917.

Examines the use of maps through the ages to depict spatial relationships and political, social, or cultural authority. Explores the visual display of quantitative information, the evolution of historical atlases, and cartographic crime. Such topics as Lebensraum and gerrymandering illustrate how maps can distort historical processes and communal relationships.

This course is an advanced research seminar in Soviet history. It will explore the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union, with a focus on the Holocaust. The seminar will begin with an examination of the history of Jews in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the years leading up to the Second World War. Then the course will pivot directly to the topic of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. How did the Holocaust in the “east” differ from the Holocaust in the “west”? How did the conduct of war condition genocide in the Soviet Union? How did Soviet Jews and non-Jews respond to the German genocide? What was the response of Stalin and the Soviet government to the Holocaust? How is the Holocaust remembered by the states and people of the former Soviet Union.

How did early moderns experience sense and space and how did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge from and shape those experiences? This course explores Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, Manila to compare how experiences of space and sense varied by age, gender, race, and class.

Selected topics on a specific period or theme in Jewish history. Topic in any given year will depend on the instructor. Please see History website for details.

What is a nation? Are nations ancient or modern, unchanging or malleable? Do nations create states, or does the state create the nation? This course seeks to answer these questions through an examination of nationalism, primarily in Europe, from the 1700s through the present.

The course examines the relationship between gender and the experience of slavery and emancipating several Atlantic world societies from the 17th-19th centuries. Areas to be covered are the Caribbean, Brazil, the U.S. South, West and South Africa and Western Europe.

The role of the intelligentsia in East European national revivals; the ethnographic and literary revival; the language question; the press and cultural organizations; education; religion; and political movements. (Joint undergraduate-graduate)

Senior seminar discussing readings on a specific period, aspect or themes in African history. Topics in any given year depend on the instructor.

The fall of the Versailles system, German and Soviet diplomatic and military activities and their occupational policies in East Central Europe during World War II, economic exploitation, collaboration, resistance, and genocide in the discussed region, its liberation and sovietization in 1944-1945. (Joint undergraduate-graduate)

Slavery has existed in many human societies. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European empires pioneered a novel system of racialized chattel slavery that ensnared unknown numbers of Indigenous people and spurred the transportation of millions of African captives to various plantation zones in the Americas. This course examines the history of slavery in North America, Canada, and the United States (c. 1500-1865). Topics include Indigenous and Atlantic slaveries; slavery and the rise of British, French, and Spanish colonialism in North America; racial formation; the Atlantic and domestic slave trades; gender and reproduction; enslaved people’s politics and social worlds; and the gradual abolition of slavery in the United States and Canada (1780-1865).

This course provides a unique opportunity to grapple with the challenges of public history, while exploring new methods and technologies in the digital humanities. Each year, we partner with one or more community groups to create historical websites which endure well beyond the school year. Topics vary annually.

Explores the central themes in the history of the French Revolution: the causes of the Revolution; the contested varied efforts to build a new regime; the invention of a novel republican political culture; counterrevolution and Terror; the Haitian Revolution; Napoleon and the Empire; the Revolution as a global phenomenon; the Restoration; the Revolution's legacy today.

The history of Soviet cinema and the importance of film as a historical source. Documentary and fiction film; editing, narration, and sound; film distribution and exhibition; the Soviet school of montage and socialist realism; nationality and gender; the Soviet musical comedy of the Stalin era; resistance and dissidence.

Soviet film as a historical source and the institutional and ideological history of Soviet film production, distribution, and exhibition. Fiction and documentary film during World War II; the cinema of the Cold War and the Thaw; Soviet new realism and the return of the village; avant-garde cinema of the 1960s-80s; memory and historical revision in late Soviet film. Screenings include never-before-seen archival footage, as well as films and film clips subtitled by the instructor.

The 20th century has been an age of experiments for Poland. Universal, general problems of democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, communism, socialism, free market and centrally planned economies, are examined, as are the ongoing adjustments made by the Polish people. (Joint undergraduate-graduate)

Examines varying roles of religion in cases of genocide and extreme violence. Seminar proceeds from recent cases (Darfur, Rwanda, wars associated with break-up of Yugoslavia) backward through the 20th century (Cambodia, Indonesia, the Holocaust, Armenians, Herero) and the 19th century (Belgian Congo, Caucasus, native peoples in the Americas).

This seminar explores the use of gender as a category of analysis in the study of international relations. Topics include gendered imagery and language in foreign policymaking; beliefs about women’s relationship to war and peace; issues of gender, sexuality, and the military; gender and global governance; gender and the global economy; sexual violence; and contributions of feminist theory to international relations theory.

Selected topics in a specific period of Canadian history. Content in any given year depends on instructor. Please see the History Department website for complete description.

Examines French colonial Indochina through several different lenses. Themes include the cross-cultural contact zones between colonial and colonized societies, imperial culture, expressions of colonial power, and forms of opposition. Colonial novels, translated resistance literature, documentaries, and films are utilized as primary sources to be examined critically.

This course explores selected topics in the history of commemoration, public memory, and public history in Canada. Remembering the past has often involved various groups - political, economic, and social elites - who have attempted to create ‘pasts’ or ‘traditions’ for themselves and others in society, often as part of creating socio-economic and political hegemony. We also will read about their contestation by women, working-class people, and ethnic and racialized groups to counter the powerful’s apparent monopoly on public memory. As well, we will explore how historical memories have shaped and created landscapes, in ways both discursive and material.

This course explores selected topics in the history of Upper Canada: its formation in the crucible of transatlantic and imperial warfare, relationships with Indigenous people, the creation of multiple institutions, and colonial leisure and culture. As well as having its own particular local characteristics and features, not least its proximity to the United States, Upper Canada was one of a number of settler societies within the British Empire. The course explores various dimensions of these aspects and considers the relationships between local dynamics and imperial currents.

Addressing South Asian history after 1750, this course examines ideas of rights, contract, and the rule of law in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Attention is paid to the intellectual history of rights and the central place of colonial and postcolonial questions within that history. Topics include rights and questions concerning indigenous culture, caste and customary practice, gender and capitalist development.

This course is a critical intellectual history of Caribbean decolonization. It begins with the Haitian Revolution, exploring and comparing how history was mobilized to structure anti-colonial theories about the making of postcolonial Caribbean societies. Key conceptual frameworks to be examined include indigenism, noirism, creolization, métissage; Caribbean interpretations of Marxism, Negritude and Pan-Africanism.

In this seminar, students will learn the historical methodology skills required to undertake their major independent research project for future professional use or graduate studies, including the development of a topic, formal literature reviews, and the writing of research and grant proposals. History Specialists & Majors only (priority enrollment for Specialists). Not eligible for CR/NCR option. See department website for prerequisite details and registration instructions. Students may count HIS475H1 towards the Specialty methodology pathway or carry on to HIS476H1: Senior Thesis.

Students research and write a primary-sourced based thesis of approximately 7,000 words, building on the prospectus and literature review developed in HIS475H1. Students attend seminar meetings to discuss the hypotheses they have formulated, present their work in progress and engage in constructive critique of other students’ work. History Specialists & Majors only (priority enrollment for Specialists). Students must find topics and thesis supervisors. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. See department website for prerequisite details and registration instructions.

Examination of the impact of industrialism on Victorian society and values. Concentration on Victorian social critics including Engels, Owen, Mayhew, Dickens and Morris.

An in-depth study of U.S. behaviour in the global arena since World War II. Particular attention will be paid to the origins and evolution of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the initiatives of the Nixon-Kissinger years, the end of the Cold War, and the relevance of globalization.