This course provides a framework for students to complete their thesis while considering other aspects of a writing life. The course priorities include generating thesis material, editing manuscripts, producing a literary journal, giving feedback as a Creative Writing TA, preparing for readings, and considering a creative life beyond the program. Please note that this is a half-year course spread across the two academic sessions (Fall/Winter) during which students meet 10 times. About half of each class is used as a writing session.

The aim of Critical Topographies: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Literary Studies in English is to provide MA students about to embark on professional studies in the discipline of "English" with a comprehensive overview or set of maps with which to understand the discipline and locate themselves in the current state of the field. Contemporary literary studies in English can sometimes appear bewildering in terms of both the issues analyzed and methods applied - so much so that there is now no one unifying paradigm, objective, or methodology. The course aims to address this phenomenon; it aims not only to chart current critical topographies but also to suggest how they came into being and what opportunities they and new modes of critical practice offer for significant future research.

This is a directed reading course. Please consult with the department for eligibility and enrolment procedures.

This is a directed reading course. Please consult with the department for eligibility and enrolment procedures.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to the intersections between literary studies and the methods of another discipline or other disciplines. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging, for example, from relations between Literature and Medicine, Literature and Science, Literature and Translation Studies. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to digital literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from digital literature (in all its established and developing forms) and the ways in which digital technologies are transforming texts, reading, readerships, and the idea of the literary. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to theory. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from literary and other forms of critical theory that inform literary studies. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

The Essential Skills Workshop Series (ESWS) introduces the incoming cohort of doctoral students to the essential skills they will need in order to succeed in the PhD program in English and beyond. ESWS meets eight times each fall, approximately once a week for one hour and twenty minutes from mid-September through mid-November. Most meetings will feature a guest or guests, who, along with the faculty coordinator, will lead an open discussion for students embarking on the doctoral degree at U of T, moving into new pedagogic responsibilities, and entering wider professional and scholarly networks. Occasionally, there will be short, pre-circulated readings. Some sessions may provide students with tangible feedback on work (such as SSHRC proposals) they are already doing as part of their professionalization during the first year of the program.

This course is intended to prepare University of Toronto PhD. students in English for the job search and more generally to provide them with an introduction to the professional skills that will be part of their lives after they finish the PhD. The course will meet the equivalent of 13 2-hour sessions, on selected Thursday afternoons through the academic year. Individual sessions will include the following topics: The Shape of the Profession; An Overview of the Academic Job Search and its Documents; Setting Up a Dossier; Preparing Letters of Application and CVs; The Teaching Dossier; Interviewing; Campus Visits and Job Talks; The Publication of Academic Research; An Assessment of the Year's Job Searches at U of T and Postdoctoral Fellowships. There will also be a session on Non-Academic Jobs (Publishing and Other Alternatives)

This seminar, required of and limited to PhD students in either Year 2 or 3 and PhD U students in either Year 3 or 4, addresses the teaching of English literature at the university level. It is designed to provide the foundations for an informed, self-reflexive pedagogy and to help students develop effective methods for teaching English to undergraduate and graduate students. Guest faculty will discuss a range of pedagogical challenges and solutions.

This is the core course for the graduate Collaborative Specialization in Environmental Studies at the School of the Environment. In this course, we address the topic of "environmental decision-making," which we understand broadly as the challenging process of how humans engage with the natural world, and the many iterative (and sometimes invisible) decisions we make about how to organize human societies and activities.

While decision-making is itself a field of study, this course takes a more flexible interpretation of the term, involving choices about, and affecting, the environment. With a focus on the insights from across a range of disciplines — throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences — and with attention to fields beyond academia, we consider multiple perspectives on the environment.

Through biweekly guest lectures, student presentations, group projects, and individual written assignments, we explore themes of worldviews and values (what assumptions we make about the world that shapes the kinds of decisions we can make), conflicting interests and information (at multiple scales), and decision-making models and tools (a survey of the range of tools that are available), along with questions of uncertainty, adaptation, and iterative decision-making processes.

In a time of online learning provoked by public health concerns, we will turn analytic attention to the benefits and challenges associated with a range of virtual technologies for interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and decision-making. As travel becomes constrained not only by pandemic conditions but also as a response to climate change and environmental degradation, we anticipate the need for these tools will increase in the future. In the class, then, we will consider how online platforms may be useful in enabling ongoing research efforts at a distance, and how different strategies and tools may be designed for better communication and action.

Students should emerge from the course with a broader set of perspectives on environmental and social challenges, enhanced communication skills across disciplines, and additional experience working in diverse teams. In addition, based on our new online course structure, students should also leave the course more confident about the options for virtual collaboration across disciplines.

Our central goal in the course and the Collaborative Specialization program is to enable conversations to take place within and beyond the classroom about the challenges of human-environment relationships, with new ideas on creative and just approaches to social and political decisions, and bioacoustics — as well as with electroacoustic composition, sonic art, and everyday sound-based practices. We will also consider pressing issues for the humanistic study of the environment, and reflect on the value and ethics of an acoustic approach. This course is open to students with any disciplinary background. Proficiency in music is not required.

This course will provide an introduction to the study of public policy, from the perspective of political science. It begins from the premise that policymaking is an inherently political process, and seeks to demonstrate the ways in which policies are a reflection of power, values and interest groups.

The course will be divided into three parts: 1) First, we discuss basic concepts that underpin environmental policy: What is the distinction between market and polis? What are the goals of environmental policy? What are the obstacles to collective action? 2) Second, we will examine the mechanics of policymaking: how the policymaking process works, and what types of instruments are available to protect and manage the environment. 3) Finally, the last portion of the class will be devoted to examining cases of national and international environmental policy.

Though we tend to treat it as a technological or economic issue, climate change is fundamentally a political problem. This course provides much needed political science theory for understanding why we must consider the politics of climate change if we are to make progress on decarbonization. This course will examine the political economy of climate change at the international and domestic levels. We will investigate four questions: 1) What are the different ways of conceptualizing the climate change "problem"? 2) How is climate change currently governed internationally? 3) What are the main policies to govern the climate? 4) How can industrial policy and global trade reform help promote rapid decarbonization?

This course will cover popular statistical models for the analysis of ecological data. There will be a particular focus on the statistical properties and assumptions underlying the methods. We will cover topics such as identifiability/estimability, understanding the theory underlying distinct inferential approaches and their impact on ecological conclusions, as well as simulation-based model assessment.

Climate change, which is driven by global warming, is one of the most pressing global environmental crises of our generation and our children's and grandchildren's generations. Although the crisis has only been recognized in the public sphere in the past couple of decades, the foundations of our understanding of global warming are almost two centuries old. We will use The Warming Papers, a compilation of the canonical papers describing the scientific logic of global warming, as our guide.

This course will lay out the scientific logic of global warming from Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier's 1824 paper on what would come to be known as the greenhouse effect, through to the most recent discoveries, and will cover climate physics and the carbon cycle.

"Will religions assume a disengaged pose as species go extinct, forests are exterminated, soil, air, and water are polluted beyond restoration, and human health and well-being deteriorate?" -Mary Evelyn Tucker.

The connection among worldviews, religion, and ecology, while perplexing for many, has been of growing academic and pragmatic concern in recent years. Scientists, policy makers, and activists have of late been frustrated with the long-term efficacy of their actions, and have begun to reflect on the underlying worldviews and core values of their work. Is the neoliberal economic model a worldview, for example? Is consumerism? This has led to a recrudescence of interest in religious worldviews as a source of environmental theory and practice.

The fact that certain religious groups are beginning to take ecological systems seriously is a distinctive, important emergence within environmentalism. Given that approximately eighty-five percent of the human family reads their reality through a religious lens, any environmental policy or ethic that does not relate to religious concerns potentially ignores dialogue with ethical and moral traditions held by the majority of the world's peoples.

Religions traditionally challenge their members to ask foundational questions of human existence; such as what is the place or role of the human in the universe? What are the ethical and moral imperatives of being human? What responsibilities do humans have, if any, to other aspects of creation? As the ecological challenge forces the human family to deeply query social, economic, political, cultural, and ethical traditions, many are beginning to argue that the reading assistance of the world's religious traditions in - 2 - 2, answering such queries might be helpful, and perhaps necessary, for an informed and effective response to the world's current ecological plight.

The participation of religions in environmental movements is of course not unproblematic. Certain religions have been fingered and faulted for their accent on transcendence, and for their patriarchal, hierarchical systems, which help engender a disregard for the earth and the women who have been historically associated with it--as ecofeminism suggests. Moreover, religions, as institutions, have not been at the vanguard of the environmental movement, and many potential pitfalls, such as sectarianism, fundamentalism, and triumphalism, surround the involvement of the world's religions in environmental questions.

While much of the religious discourse around ecology has entailed ontological, doctrinal, and cosmological or "worldview" questions, there have also been religious responses that take issues of class, race, gender, poverty, and justice seriously. Indeed, many tensions have surfaced and continue to exist between these two broadly outlined ecological approaches. Thus, the question has emerged whether the ecological contributions of the world's religions are chiefly in the realm of worldviews, doctrine, and cosmology, or in the realm of a political and economic critique.

Through weekly seminars, we will probe sundry ecological worldviews, religious and otherwise, and how they help shape environmental discourse, practice, and theory.

This course situates students and campuses within the context of broader movements for more ecologically rational and socially just food systems. Topics include critical food systems pedagogy; the political economy of campus food systems; student food (in)security and health; campus food systems alternatives; campus food growing spaces; student/campus-based food movements; campus-community partnerships. The course is praxis-driven and will provide students with opportunities to engage in change-making on their campus, and beyond, through an action-focused project with a campus and/or community partner.

Sustainability is a priority for universities worldwide, including the University of Toronto. Many universities are developing operational sustainability goals in addition to placing emphasis on educating students about sustainability. For some concrete examples at U of T, see the 2020 Annual Report of the President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS) of which this course falls under the 'Campus as a Living Lab' section. By bridging sustainability goals, sustainable research and education about sustainability, modern university campuses and operational contexts can be increasingly labelled living laboratories of sustainable practice. Such living lab approaches offer a potential for universities — and their students — to play a role in the transition to sustainable higher education.

This course will apply the living lab concept to operational sustainability concerns at the University of Toronto. We will begin by looking at the literature on university sustainability and the living laboratory concept. Most of the course will engage students in an applied research project on an aspect of campus sustainability while working in close cooperation with U of T staff. Students will develop the skills needed to present information relative to these real-world problems and develop proposed solutions integrating their own fields of study with new topics and practical, quotidian university concerns.

As the world faces an era of environmental change, particularly in the area of climate, the question of how humanity can anticipate and respond in a sustainable manner is receiving increasing attention. This special topics course will introduce students to a wide range of topics and issues as they relate to adaptation and resilience. Through readings, coursework, and discussion, students will use a transdisciplinary approach to explore the adjustment of natural and human systems to change, in order to reduce harmful impacts and take advantage of beneficial opportunities. In addition, students will explore the ability of such systems to absorb change, maintain their function, and evolve in ways that improve their future sustainability. Topics for examination may include extreme events (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfires), gradual changes (e.g., permafrost, sea level rise), urban scale (e.g., public safety, public health, food security) and the wider Canadian context (e.g., natural resources, food production, and biodiversity).

Human-induced global environmental change has emerged as one of this millennium's defining scientific and societal challenges. This special topics course will introduce students to a wide range of topics and issues as they relate to global change science. Through readings, coursework, and discussion, students will study a range of topics that may include the different components of the Earth's environment, from the atmosphere to the ocean to the biosphere, and of the many ways they interact. Students will approach course content through a transdisciplinary approach. For example, as the full impact of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere depends on a complex set of feedback effects, students may analyze changes in ocean chemistry, ocean circulation patterns, biological processes in plants and soils, atmospheric convection and cloud formation, and geological processes such as rock weathering.

Environmental worldviews — the assumptions, values, norms and paradigms used to understand the human relationship with nature — have enormous influence largely because they are unexamined and taken for granted. This special topics course will use a transdisciplinary approach to introduce students to a wide range of topics and issues as they relate to social sustainability. Through readings, coursework, and discussion, topics may address issues of equity, diversity, social cohesion, quality of life, behavioural sustainability, and democracy and governance as related to the human-nature relationship. Topics may also encompass the social components that allow for change or that prevent change towards sustainable solutions, such as public policy and market activity, societal attitudes toward nature, organizations, and social movements.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has put in place a system of infrastructure, production, markets, public policy, values, and culture based on fossil-fuel energy. Today, we are tentatively beginning to make changes in all those areas, starting the transition to a low-carbon economy and a sustainable society. This special topics course may examine areas such as the challenges and opportunities in our scientific understanding of the impacts driving the transition; the role of the ICT (information & communication technology) revolution; energy-system technologies; core economic concepts related to environmental and resource sustainability; societal perceptions, values and norms; and issues of governance and politics, lifestyle, human settlement, livelihood, culture, economic activity, and trade. As these challenges constitute an interconnected system spanning civil society, state and market, the course content will be examined through a transdisciplinary approach.

This is a mandatory course for students in the Master of Environment and Sustainability program that will provide an opportunity for students to explore and develop a thesis topic under the guidance of their supervisor(s). The course will bring students together as part of a larger seminar series on transdisciplinary research methods in environment and sustainability. As part of this, students will be introduced to primary concepts relating to environmental sustainability and the conceptual and methodological tools needed to conduct interdisciplinary research. Students will be expected to develop a research proposal under the guidance of their Master’s thesis supervisor(s), that will include a description of their identified research topic, a literature review and a proposed research methodology.