This graduate-level course provides an introduction to the cross-disciplinary field of astrostatistics, and is intended for both astronomy and statistics students. We will cover topics in statistics (e.g., hierarchical Bayesian analysis, time series analysis, and cluster analysis) in the context of their applications to astronomical research (e.g., studies of galaxies, the Milky Way, exoplanets, and stellar populations). These topics will be covered through two main aspects of the course: 1) peer-instruction and collaboration on a term project, and 2) readings, in-class discussion, and exercises related to current astrostats literature. For the term project, the students will develop practical skills by collaborating in cross-disciplinary teams on a research project in astrostatistics using real astronomical data.

This course will focus on the mechanisms associated with the assembly of molecular and biomolecular systems, including colloids, small molecule organic crystals, and protein complexes. The goal of the course is to foster an understanding of the subtle interactions that influence the process of assembly, which has wide ranging implications in fields ranging from materials science to structural biology. Examples will be drawn from the current literature encompassing studies of self-assembly in solution, at surfaces, and into the solid state. Supplementary reading and a term project targeting some aspect of molecular assembly will be assigned.

The objective of this course is to develop fundamental aspects of microbiology and biochemistry as they relate to energetics and kinetics of microbial growth, environmental pollution and water quality, bioconversions, biogeochemical cycles, bioenergy, and other bioproducts.

This course will trace the complicated history of Jewish racialization from the Spanish conception of limpieza de sangre ("the cleanness of blood") to the "whitening" of (some) Jewish Americans and Jewish racial positioning today; we will also follow the tensions and coalitions of Jews and other racialized others, including Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, and Black, paying particular attention to Jewish-Black relations from the slave trade to the labour movement, the Women's March, and Black Lives Matter. Alongside these historical studies, we will collaboratively build a theoretical apparatus for understanding the often-charged nexus between Jewish Studies and Critical Race Theory, reading Max Weinreich's mobilization of the W.E.B. Du Bois's "double consciousness," Frantz Fanon's dialogue with Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, the controversy around Nadia Abu El-Haj's The Genealogical Science, and Jewish responses to Frank Wilderson III's Afropessimism. We will watch Al Jolson's 1927 The Jazz Singer and Anna Deveare Smith's 1992 Fires in the Mirror, and read early-twentieth-century Yiddish anti-lynching poetry, Toni Morrison's 1977 Song of Solomon, and Philip Roth's 2000 The Human Stain.

As Emily Apter and others point out, the field of Comparative Literature begins, in some sense, with such exiles and emigres from war-torn regions as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Edward Said. Beginning with the Bible, this course will follow the movements of travel, exile, and migration in constructing Jewish history and literature; so, too, will we follow the migrations of these narratives across national and cultural boundaries, and from antiquity to modernity and the global present. Learning from scholars in the fields of memory studies and diaspora studies, and reading a variety of texts of different genres and in different languages — or in the migration that is translation — we will attempt to understand the connection between movement, memory, and forgetting; migration and narrative; in the construction of worlds and selves over geographic, temporal, and ideological upheavals. Readings include Genesis and Exodus, medieval travel literature, Abramovitz's Travels of Benjamin the Third, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, and André Aciman's Out of Egypt.

This course takes a long-range view of Greek literary thought by focussing on orality and textuality as modes of discourse. Equally fundamental will be the concept of hypertextuality — the obsession and overproduction of text as exemplified by the profusion of specialist compendia, encyclopedia, and commentaries of the Imperial Greek period. Rather than approach orality, textuality, and hypertextuality teleologically, we explore their interdynamics, their potentialities and limits, the social and intellectual institutions and practices undergirding them, as well as the distinct forms of authority inherent in each mode. Some guiding questions include: How does occasional performed poetry already intimate the textual? Why do inscriptions and technical scholarly texts routinely take recourse to aspects of orality? Indeed, how do we purport to access Greek oral tradition when the evidence is largely, if not entirely, mediated by the textual? What happens to the speaking voice when rendered textual?

We will read representative original Greek texts (not only selection of archaic poetry, historiography, philosophy, and public inscriptions and sacred laws, but also inscribed hymns, Totenpässe, curses and prayers recorded on various materials, and written oracles) to recover how the Greeks themselves theorized the oral, textual, and hypertextual. We will integrate into our discussions pertinent secondary scholarship from comparative literature, linguistics, anthropology, and the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Goody, Vansina, Ong, Havelock, Rosalind Thomas, Benveniste, Certeau, and Latour).

In order to create sustainable solutions to the world's most important challenges, global development professionals must reach beyond the traditional boundaries of their field of expertise combining scientific/technological, business, and social ideas in an approach known as integrated innovation. In this project-based course, students from multiple disciplines (engineering, management, health, and social sciences) will work together — using participatory methods with an international partner — to address a locally relevant challenge. Students will be expected to communicate with and understand team members from other disciplines, integrate their knowledge and experience of global issues in order to: a) identify and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of existing technical approaches to addressing the challenge, b) analyze the characteristics of existing social frameworks (ethical, cultural, business, political) c) identify gaps and needs d) propose an appropriate integrated solution approach that incorporates an analysis of the challenge through these disparate lenses. The final deliverables for addressing the challenge at the end of the school year will include: a prototype of the end product, a business plan, a policy analysis, and analysis of impact on global health.

This course will be devoted to reading Freud's case histories. We'll be paying close attention to the unstable relationship between the theoretical and the clinical registers in Freud's text, with particular emphasis on the psychoanalytic concepts of transference, resistance, repetition, working-through, "construction in analysis," and the end-of-analysis. In addition to the major case studies — Dora, Anna O, Little Hans, Schreber, Wolfman, Ratman — we will also consider the snippets of Freud's own auto-analysis (e.g., the "specimen dream" in the Interpretation of Dreams, the Autobiographical Fragment, and other first-person texts, including Freud's early correspondence with Fliess). Our reading of the primary texts will be accompanied by recent theoretical and critical engagements with the case histories, including Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida, Jacqueline Rose, and Eric Santner.

This is a two-hour seminar that covers topics relevant to ethical conduct in research. It is offered once in the Fall session and once in the Winter session. Students will be notified via email concerning scheduling details. Credit for this course is mandatory for all PhD students. PhD students will not be permitted to graduate without credit for this course. Attendance at the earliest stage of the program is strongly recommended. PhD students who earned credit for this course in a previous MASc program at the University of Toronto are not required to attend the seminar again as a PhD student.

The course tackles the opportunities of digital media as new technologies emerge. Students are exposed to new business models, policy development, distribution structures, and intellectual property regimes. Students learn about the value of cross-disciplinary thinking and work towards the development of viable business models.

We will present an elementary introduction to the revolutionary and important new theory of Compressed Sensing. We will fill in the basic mathematical prerequisites on Fourier Transforms and Wavelets. Other topics will depend on the interests of the class: we will choose between a detailed explanation of how MRI works, imaging electric properties of tissue, or present modern techniques in signal processing for denoising, segmentation, and registration.

General perspective of neural engineering and neurobiology; biological neural networks; parametric neural models using rate processes; nonparametric neural models, using the Volterra-Wiener approach; artificial neural networks as nonparametric neural models; applications.

Physical acoustics, acoustic measurements, electroacoustic transducers, and physiological acoustics. Speech processing, speech recognition algorithms, and signal processing by the auditory system. Engineering aspects of acoustic design. Electrical models of acoustic systems. Noise, noise-induced hearing loss, and noise control. Introduction to vision and other modalities. Musical and psychoacoustics.

This course analyzes the link between contact literature (travel literature, discovery literature, colonial literature) and the establishment of modernity and its discourses of knowledge. Taking into account the philosophical and political debates between the 16th and 18th century, the course seeks to account for the European expansion, in particular the colonization of the Americas, and the emergence of discourses of knowledge about other cultures.

Two aspects ought to be singled out here: the knowledge produced about «others» and the new consciousness of Europe's own identity which was profoundly transformed in this very contact. The course follows the hypothesis that the philosophical and modern definition of modern Man is itself a result of the contact between Europe and its others. The discussions of the texts privilege epistemological aspects and anthropological and political thought. More precisely, the goal is to trace the various ways the emergence of the modern subject is tied to its construction of alterity. Literary texts for example will therefore be questioned about their social and political dimensions within the episteme of the time.

A prominent issue will be the intercultural dynamic between the 16th and 18th centuries between Europe and the rest of the globe, but also within Europe itself. The development of new discourses of knowledge will involve texts of very different nature: literary, ethnographic, political, philosophical, historical, etc. Other aspects to be discussed are the issue of literary genres and canon formation, the conditions which make anthropological writing possible and the conceptualization of the «other» (ethnicity, race, religion, gender, etc.)

This course will examine the complex and controversial relationship between feminism and postmodernism, as this encounter is staged in both theoretical and fictional writings. While many of the «canonical» theoretical texts on postmodernism were penned by male scholars (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Hassan, Scarpetta, etc.), who largely ignored questions of feminism, gender, and women’s artistic practices, feminist critics (Jardine, Butler, Suleiman, Nicholson, Yeatman, and others) soon intervened in the debate. As these latter theoreticians demonstrated, many of the notions characterizing postmodern theories and literary texts were in fact concerns common to feminist thought: the crisis of patriarchal master narratives and the ensuing emphasis on localized, small narratives; the criticism of binary, hierarchical oppositions (center/margin, life/art, culture/nature, mind/body, masculine/feminine); the endeavour to privilege the heterogeneous, the plural, and the hybrid; and the problematization of the subject, of representation, and of language. Doubtful as to whether disseminated subjects are capable of agency and effective political action, other feminist scholars (di Stefano, Hartsock) still question the possibilities of constructive intersections between feminism and postmodernism. Drawing on the principal feminist theories in the postmodern debate, we will study the contentious theoretical issues outlined above, before turning to an analysis of an international corpus of postmodern literary narratives written by women, which construct «strategic subjectivities» (Kaplan) and «forms of common action» (Mouffe), combining ethical perspectives and aesthetic experimentation. Our close readings of these texts will pay careful attention to textual devices typical of postmodern texts (see Hutcheon), such as the extensive use of intertextuality, the recycling and rewriting of mythological, religious, and historical figures and events, the questioning of major binary oppositions underpinning Western thought, genre hybridity, the representation of the author in the text, and so on.

1500-1800 is the first period of modern globalization by the West, of the foundation of colonial empires and of the economic but also scientific exploration of foreign lands. This seminar deals with the intersection of the "encyclopedic movement" and geographical expansions, more particularly the knowledge produced and disseminated about other cultures and "ethnography" in particular. The course seeks to show how the new anthropological knowledge becomes a point of public interest and political disputes and how this development is supported and accompanied by a dynamic book market.

The new ideas and ideals emerging between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment period and their reception are closely linked to the invention of the printing press, the progress in literacy within society, the emergence of a public sphere, and thus the development of an ever increasing market for printed materials and books. Due to political and religious censorship, but also economic considerations, the publishing history and the book trade of the time constitute a quite complex field of inquiry. Books were written in one country, often enough printed in another, only to reappear clandestinely in legitimate or pirated copies on the marketplace for which they were intended, while their authors, editors and printers were censored, went into exile or even to prison. Many works found their readers far away, across political, geographical, and ideological divides in copied, translated, or abstracted form. The changing worldview of this period is the result of new epistemological forces which seek to establish new paradigms and increasingly attempt to portray the world in encyclopedias, histories, dictionaries as well as other collections of knowledge (curio cabinets and museums). It is this worldview and its epistemological foundation which gives rise to philosophical and political modernity.