The course will offer an introduction to the philosophic thought of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), which will examine his major interests: philosophy, theology, and politics. We shall approach his thought through his writings on modern Judaism and on modern Jewish thought.

This graduate seminar will examine selected psalms, prayers, and hymns and other less overtly "liturgical" texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. We will consider the performative role of such texts in the Qumran movement and their relation to the evolving growth of the Hebrew Bible in the two centuries before and after the common era. The relationship of these texts to later Jewish and Christian liturgical texts (e.g., the book of Psalms) and the New Testament will also be considered. Seminar participation, seminar presentations, major paper. Requires working knowledge of Hebrew.

In this course, we explore the major genres of Sanskrit literature, including epic, courtly poetry, inscriptional poetry, drama, and devotional praise poetry. Students will become familiar with philological methods for interpreting Sanskrit literature and learn about Sanskrit literary criticism and Sanskrit literary theory, in conversation with relevant theoretical debates in modern literary studies. The objective is to use the reading of Sanskrit to enhance our understanding of the religious and cultural history of South Asia. While class sessions will be devoted to primary source readings, this is a content course culminating in a final research paper.

This course will cover the range of Hindu rituals that define Hindu life and lead towards the constitution of a Hindu social and religious personhood. They range from the life cycle rituals, to initiatory rituals, to rituals of fasting, festivities, and penance. The course explores how these rituals are part of the Hindu social order, even while they are marked by differences of caste, gender, and religious communities. The course will look at a wide range of textual materials on Hindu rituals including prescriptive texts, ethnographies, and literary accounts. These materials will be explored also within the help of ritual theory in order to understand the relationship between religion, ritual, and personhood.

This graduate seminar surveys classic and recent scholarship on religion in modern South Asia, as well as select primary sources, to provide students with a strong grounding in this interdisciplinary field that cuts across history, anthropology, literature, visual studies, and other disciplines. While the seminar’s scope is defined chronologically (1800 to present), it organizes material thematically around such topics as empire, law, secularism, reform, caste, communalism, gender, sexuality, family, image, cinema, city, ecology, etc., and cut across multiple religious traditions (Hinduism, Islam, etc.) and scholarly methodologies (ethnography, history, etc.).

This course will introduce the student to the study of South Asian Religions from a literary perpective; literary primary sources will be highlighted and literary theoretical models will be explored and discussed. While a variety of sources from a number of traditions will be investigated (from Vedic to vernacular devotion and modern novels), the stressin this course will be reading literature carefully in through different methodological lenses. Students will learn to be more comfortable using literature in their own work on South Asian Religions.

This course explores Tibetan Buddhism through careful readings of selected canonical sources. It examines prominent Buddhist stories as preserved in various versions of the canon and more obscure canonical materials not typically referenced in commentarial literature or modern scholarship. Students will learn about traditional printing practices and the material aspects of book making in Tibet. They will also be introduced to the ritual roles of Tibetan canons and ways in which these books have acted as community members. Readings will be conducted in English, though graduate students with a background in Tibetan will be expected to consult Tibetan source texts.

Advanced study in specialized topics on Hinduism such as Ramayana in Literature. This course explores how this conception is the result of a historical process by examining documentable transformations in the reception of the Ramayana. Our focus will be on the shift in the classification of the Ramayana from the inaugural work of Sanskrit literary culture (adi-kavya) in Sanskrit aesthetics to a work of tradition (smrti) in theological commentaries, the differences between the Ramayanas ideal of divine kingship and medieval theistic approaches to Ramas identification with Visnu, the rise of Rama worship, and the use of Ramas divinity in contemporary political discourse.

In Indian society, the role models of the women can vary greatly today as in the past. To investigate diverse aspects of the roles of women in religion, the course will be organized around three main themes. In the lay life, we will examine the various images of virtue, practices of observance and acts of patronage; in the ascetic life, we will look at the role of saints and nuns and the debates about their access to salvation, which vary from tradition to tradition and from period to period; and in the divine world, we will study the positions of the goddesses and their specific functions.

Advanced reading of classical Sanskrit philosophical texts. Students will learn techniques and strategies for analyzing Sanskrit primary sources in hermeneutics, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, or language philosophy. While the course will include a review of Sanskrit grammar, our focus will be on specific philosophical problems encountered in the readings.

Advanced reading of classical Sanskrit philosophical texts. Students will learn techniques and strategies for analyzing Sanskrit primary sources in hermeneutics, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, or language philosophy. While the course will include a review of Sanskrit grammar, our focus will be on specific philosophical problems encountered in the readings.

The aim of this course is to examine the spread of Śaivism after the first millenium in South Asia which, in Alexis Sanderson's magisterial work, has come to be seen as the commencement of the Śaiva Age. In order to see how this Śaiva Age comes to expand locally the course concentrates on one specific locale — the Tamil region — and the emergence of Śaivism as the elite textual religion between the 14th to 18th centuries of the Common Era. The course will thus concentrate on looking at specific texts — Vedāntic (doctrinal) and/or Bhakti (devotional) — of the Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta and the Tamil Vīraśaiva tradition, to understand the construction of a trans-sectarian Śaiva religious landscape by the colonial period.

Burma, also known as Myanmar, offers one of the richest literary landscapes in the Buddhist world. This course introduces students to the Buddha's sermons, to the animal lives of struggling bodhisattvas, to the poetic creativity of Mandalay princesses, to the intricacies of the Buddhist philosophy of mind, to the textual regimes of monastic dress codes, and to cosmographies of Buddhist kingship in the interface of South and Southeast Asian religions. Students will be trained to take a critical look at the fascinating world of Buddhist texts, inflected by the scriptural language of Pali, through a specifically Burmese prism. Burmese/Pali language knowledge is not required.

Discourse on the Anthropocene engages scientific thought, religious studies, and philosophy to think about humanity’s impact upon the earth at the geological stage.

This course will analyze the Anthropocene from Indigenous perspectives. First we will examine how the Anthropocene is understood from Western theological, philosophical, and scientific understandings. Next we will engage and enrage the Anthropocene from an Indigenous perspective drawing up on Indigenous scholarship and critique of the Anthropocene.

The course will also bring forth many perspectives from within Turtle Island itself. While we have overlaps under the frameworks constructed around "Indigenous," we have profound differences as well between regions and different geographic perspectives based on our home territories or lands.

Recent scholarship has witnessed a shift away from the image of Buddhism as historically reactive and reformist or as locally imported and foreign, in other words as a missionarizing religion which always arrives late and produces historical narratives of conquest, civilization, and acculturation. This course will confront these older dominant narratives with emergent visions of Buddhism as originary, autochthonous, oppressed, and subversive that have shaped much of politically active, ritually creative, and textually productive Buddhist life between the 19th and the 21st century, in Asia and beyond. The course will look at the connections between early Orientalist theories of the Buddha's tribal origins and the revolutionary historiographies of Dalit theorists like Jyotirao Phule, B. K. Ambedkar, and Iyothee Dass which turn on their head claims to the Brahmanical beginnings and supremacy of religion in South Asia and theorize Buddhism as India's original religion ("We have always been Buddhists.") that holds the promise to liberate the oppressed. In a second move, the Dalit Buddhist indigenous will be confronted with a rich array of ethnically oriented cultures of resistance across Central, South, and Southeast Asia, such as the Gurung, the Newars, the Baruas, and the Tibetans, for which their religious identity is associated with place, genealogy, gender, and belonging and is articulated in forms of resistance to state power associated with the repression and/or appropriation of Buddhism. Students will be encouraged to juxtapose those passages in premodern Buddhist literature that have been hermeneutically mobilized to support such struggles with other Buddhist scriptural passages that have dehumanized the indigenous and have advocated for their oppression. Thirdly, students will explore the interest in Buddhism, mediated by Anglophone New Age ecology and spirituality, among authors and activists from the indigenous communities of the Americas, through the engagement with work by scholars such as Chicana Apache Natalie Avalos and Canadian Cree poet and UTSC faculty Randy Lundy. The teaching plan includes reaching out to one or more community representatives for in-class discussions. The course will aim at formulating an answer to the question what Buddhism may have contributed and what Buddhist Studies may contribute towards decolonization and indigenous empowerment.

The course considers the varieties of religious practices in North America from anthropological and historical perspectives. Of particular interest are the ways religions have mutually influenced each other in the context of North America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Each year it is offered, the course will focus on a specific theme, for example, millennialism, religion, and consumerism or gender and the body, as found across a range of religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Afro-Caribbean religions, and new religious movements. In addition to analysis of primary and secondary texts, students will be required to submit a research paper (20-25pp.) concerning the theme under study.

Reading course designators for those who wish to take appropriate, upper level Toronto School of Theology Courses.

This seminar seeks to support students in the dissertation process, from proposal to successful defense by providing a space to discuss research and writing practices. The seminar meets twice per month over the full academic year and focuses on workshopping dissertation chapters. Along the way, it also covers topics ranging from setting a writing schedule and cultivating better writing habits to improving style, strengthening prose, sharpening analyses, and making clearer arguments.

Once General Exams are completed, students in the PhD program are required to participate at least once in the Centre for the Study of Religion's colloquium before undertaking their final oral exams. The colloquium participation is recorded as a credit/no credit on the transcript.

This is a seminar-style course where students will attend at least eight talks from a wide variety of robotics experts. The seminar series is already being delivered by the University of Toronto Robotics Institute and provides students with opportunities to learn about areas of robotics outside their thesis research. Speakers will be both internal robotics professors as well as external visitors from other universities and industry. The proposed course formalizes attendance of this seminar series as part of a larger plan to establish a Collaborative Specialization in Robotics (see next box). All seminars will be delivered either online or in hybrid delivery mode to allow attendance by students on any campus.

This is a foundational course in decision-making. At the Rotman School of Management, we firmly believe that developing a strong sense of ethical judgment is critical to your future success.

The study of business ethics is as much a part of management as finance, economics and accounting. Ethics is an ongoing conversation about the choices we make for ourselves and for others. Some of the most difficult and challenging decisions you will face in the future will involve issues of ethics, values and morality. Your choice will not only impact your organization but may have downstream, second and third order consequences for its stakeholders and society at large.

If you can recognize the ethical aspects of these decisions and are willing to wrestle more profoundly with their inherent issues, you will be better prepared to make more comprehensive and informed choices.

This course presents an overview of theory and research that shows how people can leverage the advantages of diverse teams, while minimizing the challenges. Moreover, it provides you with an opportunity to practice your team skills through exercises, case discussions, interactive lectures, videos, and assignments. By engaging with the course material, you will gain insight into your own behaviour on teams and have the chance for self-development; you will learn how to work more effectively in the study teams you will be part of at Rotman; and, going forward, you will be better equipped to participate in and to lead teams in organizations.

Why do some companies consistently outperform their rivals? Understanding the causes of persistent performance differences between firms is the central objective of scholarly research in strategic management. Maximizing the market value of your firm is the central objective of the strategic manager. This course is designed to bring these objectives together by equipping you with the most sophisticated and up-to-date research-based explanations on the causes of superior firm performance and empowering you to apply this knowledge to make better strategic decisions in the real world.

This class focuses on microeconomics and its applications to managerial decisions. You will deal with demand, costs, perfect competition, game theory, oligopoly, agency theory, and imperfect information. Managerial economics is fundamental to finance, marketing, strategy, organizational behaviour, and nearly every other field of business. It is therefore directly relevant both to your education at the Rotman School and to your career. After completing the course, you should have the tools to apply economic analysis to virtually every aspect of decision making for business.

An overriding objective of the course is to develop managerial perspectives on macroeconomic and global issues. Students will develop an understanding of aggregate output and cyclical patterns in GDP as well as factors that determine employment, prices, interest rates, and exchange rates. In an increasingly globalized economy, developments globally are intertwined with these questions and must be considered. Therefore, both national and international macroeconomic factors will be covered. The conduct of fiscal and monetary policy will be discussed in the context an open economy, and an understanding of the drivers of international trade and capital flows will be developed. Implications for corporate profitability and risk will be highlighted.

The Capstone course is based on two learning objectives. First, this course offers an opportunity to comprehensively apply your managerial decision-making skills in a safe environment. The MBA program is designed to enhance your ability to make effective decisions when facing uncertainty and the Capstone experience is an opportunity to practice those abilities. You will encounter the entire spectrum of managerial problem solving in a real-life context — from problem identification through analysis and insight generation to the presentation of recommendations to senior managers. Second, global trends toward digitization, big data, and data analytics are changing the way managerial teams approach the decision-making process. The Capstone course is designed to provide an opportunity to integrate traditional decision-making processes with data analytics, which is becoming a critical factor in all organizations. You will work in small teams — task force groups — to address real challenges and opportunities currently facing specific organizations. You will design and execute a decision-process as well as present your ideas to senior managers with the ultimate goal of convincing them to take specific actions.

This course introduces students to using data and models as inputs to business decisions. The notion that problem solving can be improved by the explicit and systematic use of data and models underpins the content throughout your MBA program.

This course provides an introduction to the financial reporting process and financial statements from a user's perspective. The course focuses on fundamental accounting concepts and principles. Students will learn how the economic transactions of a firm are reported in the financial statements and related disclosures. The goal of the course is to provide students with a set of skills that can be used to read and analyze financial statements and to prepare students for other financial accounting and reporting courses.

This course emphasizes the usefulness of management accounting information for decision-making. Organizations' internal information systems provide crucial knowledge and guidance for a range of managerial decisions, such as pricing, production, capital budgeting, and marketing. Thus, it is both an extension and complement to other core courses. Furthermore, it is essential for students to understand how management accounting information is created, produced, and disseminated for internal stakeholders and purposes; as opposed to financial accounting information which is intended for external ones. Students will learn how internal accounting systems serve two key purposes: a) to provide knowledge necessary for planning and making strategic decisions; and b) to help motivate and monitor people in organizations.