Graduate Courses

This course introduces students to a variety of methods and theories currently used to advance historical explanation.

Particular attention will be paid to the role of narrative, the place of the social sciences, and the complexities of race, gender, ethnicity, and class in historical writing.

Readings will also address the problem of synthesis, post-modernism and the relationship between history and public policy.

This course also stresses the development of skills in critical reading and analytical writing. 

This course introduces students to the range of methods and approaches to historical research, and to the problems associated with interpreting various kinds of sources.

Students will identify and establish a research problem, in which they define the questions to be posed, and begin to move from broad to narrow approaches to their topic.

They will discover and evaluate accessible sources of evidence, and at the same time develop an appropriate methodological and interpretive framework for a specific research project.

This course examines the historiography and theory of these two interrelated fields since 1970.

It explores the themes and approaches in early studies of women's organizations, labour, and sexuality; the later growth of attention to differences of culture and power among women; and the more recent emergence of poststructuralism and the study of the interrelation of gender, class, and race.

The course discusses approaches, methods, and debates in the writing of social history in English Canada since 1970.

Topics discussed include historiographical debates over the writing of a "national" history, the writing of labour and working-class history, women's history, ethnic and immigration history, the history of sexuality, regional history, family history, as well as how the categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality have been incorporated into the writing of Canadian social history is a focus of consideration.

This course evaluates important works of history and theory written from a postcolonial perspective.

It focuses on novel approaches to studying people whose modern experience began as subordinate subjects of the West's colonizing projects.

The course will also consider the influence of postcolonial scholarship on contemporary historiography.

This course addresses themes in the history of modernity, as well as the lived experience of the capitalist, scientific and technological revolutions over the last three hundred years.

Focusing primarily on the years from 1800–1950s, this course will begin with literature on the contemporary ideas of “being modern” in North America and Europe and the critiques of modernity by social theorists such as Marx, Gramsci and Weber.

It will then turn to the historical literature on modernity, ideas of the modern and their impact on areas such as politics, the state, the workplace, economic development, education, colonial relationships, the environment.

Seminar-Based Selected Topics Course in History.

Directed Readings Course in History.

A sophisticated scholarly essay, normally amounting to some 40-60 pages, incorporating research on primary sources (in most cases), and written under the supervision of two members of the graduate faculty, a supervisor and a second reader.

There will be a public oral examination.

Students are advised that they may be required to have proficiency in a language other than English in order to do their research.