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 purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the major problems, paradigms, and literature on global modernity as seen through the lens of Japan. The course will begin with reflections on area studies as it has addressed questions of modernity and modernization in Japan, while also attending to recent criticisms of this body of knowledge. Although specific topics will vary from year to year, they may include considerations of nationalism, democracy, labor, social management, science, education, biopolitics, empire, temporality, gender and sexuality, culture and ideology, warfare, social conflict, and shifting understandings of human difference. Readings selected for their theoretical or comparative utility will complement those on Japan.

This course introduces students to the historical debates on religion and society in the eleven states that now constitute "Southeast Asia." Readings will address how religious practices in the region — animism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity — have served as forces for social and political change in the modern period. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of "religion" in the region's political transitions in the twentieth century, including the ways in which Southeast Asia's approach toward "modernity" directly relies upon religious authority.

This course introduces students to a series of important topics in recent scholarship on late imperial and modern Chinese history. It covers major methodological and theoretical issues and debates such as the relationship between history and interdisciplinary theory, Orientalism and postcolonial studies, women and gender study, print culture, history of emotions, nationalism and modernity, economic history, microhistory, archives and knowledge production, and rethinking of Chinese legal "tradition." The assignments could include research paper, one or more critical/reflective book reviews from a reading list, and/or critical reflection essays on the class readings.

Over the last few years, the task of rethinking the British Empire has involved reconnecting issues of race, class, gender, nation, and empire. This new imperial history is greatly strengthened by recent historical works which explore a range of issues including mixed-race liaisons, lascar seamen, the English language, conversion, and chain migration. This history connects the local and the global. This course offers a thematic approach focused on modern South Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Rim, and the British Empire. Through exemplary studies, it challenges conventional, uni-directional dichotomies of empire-periphery and homeland-diaspora. It discusses how multi-directional modes of imperial circulation and diasporic flows transform both our understanding of the British Empire, and of imperial and trans-national history writing.

This course interrogates the utility of the conceptual categories "empire" and "nation" in analyzing the modern history of East Asia and beyond. Chronologically, we will cover the collapse of the Qing empire, the arrival of Western industrial powers, the rise of the Japanese empire, the emergence of nationalisms in East Asia, and the ascent of China in contemporary geopolitics. In the final section of the course, we will move beyond the anthropocentric approach and the identity paradigm to explore the meanings of "empire" and "nation" in the context of the material and planetary turns.

Historians have often downplayed violence as a central theme in the foundation and governance of colonial empires. In this seminar course we consider the violence of conquest and resistance, colonial genocides, anti-colonial rebellions, everyday violence and the law, the impact on indigenous peoples, policing, settler violence, and links between violence in the colonial and post-colonial eras. What are the implications for new thinking about some of the major issues in recent history such as the Holocaust and world wars, the crisis of postcolonial states, the Cold War, continuing western military interventions in Africa and the Middle East, and issues of memory and forgetting? We will examine case studies from a variety of periods and places in a comparative framework.

Made up of several independent nations and overseas dependencies, the Latin American and Caribbean region is both the product of a tumultuous past and a site of constant reinvention. Once the home of hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, this fascinating region has witnessed centuries of dramatic changes: from the Iberian invasions of its indigenous heartlands to the Haitian Revolution, from the struggles to build independent nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the rise of military dictatorships and more recent efforts to rebel against an overbearing United States.

This course examines diverse debates within the study of Latin American and Caribbean History, from the pre-Colombian era to the present (specific topics and approaches vary from year to year, based on instructor preference). No prior knowledge of the region or of historical research is required; indeed, the course is open to students from any discipline and specializing in other regions of the world. The goal of this seminar is to provide students with a foundation in the historiographies of colonization, racialization, nation-state formation, gender and sexuality, and the environment (among other topics).

This graduate seminar is intended as an introduction to key issues, debates, and themes in the historiography of women and gender in the global south. With an emphasis on Africa, we will mostly focus on recent publications that aim to make new theoretical and empirical interventions into what has been an experimental sub-field, especially in terms of methodology. We will also, however, consider older, now more canonical texts that still underline the terms of interesting debates.

The seminar will be a space for intellectual exploration and learning, for the forming and sharpening of ideas, and for discovery about some of the ways women and gender historians (and our colleagues from related disciplines such as historical anthropologists) have been making histories, working in a variety of fields and archives, defining and theorizing problems and using evidence-based research.

The requirements are designed to give students great flexibility in developing work that will be most useful to their various personal research interests and needs.

An investigation of selected topics in social, economic and political history from the earliest times to the present. The emphasis will be on Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to East, Central, and Southern Africa. In any one year topics chosen will include some of the following: iron age cultures; precolonial states and economies; slavery and the slave trade; religious innovations; colonial conquest and resistance; migrant labour and mobility; changing identities; segregation and apartheid; nationalism and decolonization; violence, armed struggle and civil wars; demography, health and environmental management. Students are welcome to suggest areas of personal interest. Coursework includes a research or historiographical paper and class presentations.

This course examines the production, experience, and politics of space in modern Africa from a historical perspective. How is space — local, national, and imperial — produced? In what ways does power inscribe these spaces? This course will explore these questions through a variety of readings examining historical examples and cases from across the continent from the late 19th century through to the present.

This course explores the long process of the 'unfinished revolution' of abolition in the Atlantic World from the 18th to late 19th century Atlantic World. It will take a comparative and transnational approach, with materials that include primary printed sources, classic texts, current historiography, literature, explorations of the history of emancipation through digital and visual culture. We will examine scholarship and historical debates about abolition in the Caribbean, North and South America, West Europe, and Africa.

This course will provide students with a forum to examine the history of the region from prehistoric times to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the Axumite, Zagwe, and Solomonic dynasties, to the India Ocean and Red Sea trade routes, to relations with Egypt, the Sudan, Somalia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to the adoption of Middle Eastern religions. U of T has a rich collection of unique online resources, including Mazgaba Se’elat (user ID and password: student), a database of 75,000 original images of Ethiopian art and culture; the entire collection of 219 manuscripts (18,000 folios) from the 15th-century monastery of Gunda Gunde, and a growing collection of interviews with craftsmen currently involved in chiseling out churches from the rock.

A popular saying in various parts of Latin America is that "Mexicans descended from Aztecs, Peruvians descended from Incas, and Argentines descended from boats," which posits that some countries construct their identities in relationship to pre-Colombian indigenous histories, and others to processes of immigration. Who gets excluded from the national body in these framings? And how have those marginalized groups sought to create more inclusive conceptions of citizenship and belonging? To answer these questions — which trace their roots to Latin America’s colonial period, took on contentious implications during the independence era, and remain at the heart of contemporary discourse throughout the region — this course will guide students through an examination of historical documents, scholarly analyses, and various forms of cultural production.

For a millennium, most of the world's Jews lived in Islamic lands. The result of this extended encounter was that Jewish literature and culture developed in intimate dialogue with Muslims. This course explores key facets of that Jewish-Muslim relationship, including: the political and legal institutions that shaped the Jewish experience of minorityhood; the Islamic religious milieu which simultaneously challenged and inspired Jews; and the popular and scholarly culture which Jews both consumed and contributed to. A major focus of the course will be on investigating the promises and challenges provided by different genres of primary sources, most of which were written between 900 and 1600. We will examine legal, documentary, and literary sources, and consider the strategies that scholars have developed to draw information from them. Prior course work in either Jewish or Islamic studies is recommended. All texts will be provided in English although students with knowledge of Hebrew and/or the languages of the Islamic world will be encouraged to put those skills to use.

This seminar explores the making of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Framed in a comparative historical perspective on revolutions, it interrogates the cultural and political peculiarities that made possible the rise of Shi'i clerics to power after the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty in February 1979. This course particularly focuses on the pre-revolutionary conception of a diseased "social body" that required the intervention of "spiritual physicians" to restore the moral and spiritual health of society.

In light of recent developments, the copurse will examine contemporary developments in Lebanon in the context of other revolutions and counter-revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) between 2011 and 2019. Drawing on David Hirst's Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, this course highlights Lebanon's and Syria's entangled social, political, and legal history, the history of the Palestinian revolution as well as their roles in international politics since the 1940s.

This course introduces graduate students to the use of travelogues as a historical source by focusing on the literature produced by and about Middle Easterners from the 19th century. We will examine the ways in which travellers' journeys intersected with the geopolitical aims of empire and colonialism in the production of knowledge. We will also look at how travellers' experiences of foreign cultures were shaped by such factors as religion, gender, and ethnic identity. Finally, we will explore the phenomena of spiritual awakenings, orientalism, and cultural appreciation and appropriation. All sources will be provided in English translation. Students with knowledge of other languages will be encouraged to put those skills to use.

This course problematizes the repositories from which historians derive empirical evidence and interpretive authority. It asks how we might think of archives and libraries not as inert containers of information to be mined, but as social processes and historically evolving institutions shaped by contingent material-cum-textual practices of truth-making. Case studies spanning a wide spatial and temporal arc will offer a comprehensive introduction to a transnational historiographical field and a set of conceptual frameworks and methods for further work at the intersection of Book History, Anthropology, Archival Studies, Media Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies. Readings will focus on topics such as the emergence and transformation of imperial archives, the long shadow of Eurocentrism in both Book History and Archival Studies, the role of scribes, archivists, and cataloguers as cultural intermediaries, the entanglements between state, corporate, and family archives, and the constitutive role of myriad archival practices in varied regimes of evidentiality and governmentality, from medieval scriptoria to Indigenous digital platforms. In particular, the course will thematize the centrality of mobility — of textual/visual artifacts, technologies, genres, scribal practices and practitioners — across presumed divides (manuscript:print:digital; pre:modern; metropole:colony; north:south; east:west) in the making of "documents" and "archives," "books," and "libraries" as objects of study.

Slavery has existed in many human societies throughout history. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European empires pioneered a new system of racial chattel slavery predicated on enslaving Native Americans and the transportation of enslaved African captives to plantation zones in the Americas. This course examines the history of slavery in British North America and the United States (c. 1619-1865). We will explore both the Atlantic and domestic slave trades; Indigenous and Atlantic slaveries; the codification of racial difference that accompanied slavery's expansion; gender and the reproduction; enslaved people's lives and politics; the economic history of slavery; the politics of slavery in the United States (1776-1865); and the destruction of chattel slavery during the Civil War (1861-65). We will conclude by taking up what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlives of slavery in post-war American history.

In what ways are human rights and empire entangled? What rights discourses developed in the colonies and territories across the global South and how did they shape the imperial subject? How did human rights in turn take shape at the end of empire and within the postcolonial world? This course uses a thematic approach to explore the connections between human rights and empire in the modern era, beginning with the New Imperialism of the nineteenth century to the present day. Emphasizing Asia and Africa, topics include theories and genealogies of human rights, personhood and sovereignty, individual-state relations, revolution and mass social movements, humanitarian intervention, anticolonial nationalism, and international law.

The United States is home to five percent of the world's population but nearly twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners, including a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos. "Mass Incarceration" has been enormously profitable for corporations despite generating large public deficits and social crises in communities of color. It has also provoked public and scholarly debates about the history, ethics, and function of incarceration in modern societies. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary approach to politics, race, state-formation, capitalism, and empire, this course explores the origins of the U.S. carceral state and considers it alongside other twentieth-century carceral states in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

This course will explore relationships between Indigenous peoples, empire, and capitalism since the late fifteenth century. It will focus on questions of the embeddedness of economies in a wide variety of both Indigenous and imperial societies and cultures while paying particular attention to critiques of both empire and economic systems, whether feudalism, gift or other indigenous economies, or capitalism. The course will also explore the imperialism of the discipline of economics, its scientific discourse of universal laws, and the ways in which these have driven the expansion of the market system, influenced recipes for "improving" Indigenous society, and continue to profoundly shape historical analysis.

An introduction to historical studies of law and space, this course will cover themes such as legal histories of colonization and the corporation, emergency, legal geographies of national spaces, frontiers and urbanism, the constitution of public and private property, and bodily space. In addition, the class will consider methodological reflections on jurisdictions, temporality, scale, and place-making for historians. Readings will be cross regional and comparative but focus on colonization in Asia, Africa, and North America. Open to students of anthropology, geography, and law.

This reading seminar examines how modern cities have been conceptualized in historiography and related interdisciplinary literature. The urban types and global moments that we are covering include colonial/postcolonial cities, industrial/postindustrial cities, socialist/postsocialist cities, Cold War cities, as well as science/smart cities. At stake here is to think about how to (re)write urban history when cities of the global South have increasingly become the sites for us to imagine urban futures. Special attention will also be given to the roles of war, ideology, capital, aesthetics, technology, and ecology in the making urban landscapes and infrastructures.

Historical anthropology' as a distinct, appealing, and influential mode of enquiry seeking to combine historical and anthropological approaches to analyze social and cultural processes through time, emerged from important dialogues and engagements between historians and anthropologists over the past three decades. Through a critical examination of the propositions of 'historical anthropology,' the course will probe how its practitioners have grappled with the constitutive, if problematic relationships between 'culture,' power, and history and ethnography and the 'archive.' Equally, it will assess the extent to which historical anthropology has elaborated new research methodologies, shaped historiography, and facilitated conversations and encounters between disciplines. In this regard, course readings will draw attention to recent strategies proffered by scholars grappling with the possibilities and dilemmas of historical anthropology in spaces deeply marked by colonialism, nationalism, and globalization like South Asia. Course materials will draw upon, but will not be limited to readings from South Asia.

This course will look at the history of human rights globally in the twentieth century. Students will focus on a range of rights debates across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The goal of this course is to engage with key moments in human rights history, with a focus on the emergence of major human rights movements and institutions, and their interactions with liberalism, colonialism, capitalism, and social justice. The readings for this course will be mainly within the field of history, but will also include law, anthropology, and political science. This course invites students to read human rights history from the perspectives of activists as well as lawmakers. As such, we will read a variety of secondary and primary sources.

Notions of value are central to a wide variety of human activities, informing spirituality, morality, economics, social relations, public policy, and our relationship with the natural and built environments. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences, though, rarely do anything more than invoke an implicit understanding of the concept. Is value innate in people, places, and things? Or is it actively defined and redefined, whether by individuals or society as a whole? This course focuses on value in a series of contexts, including the value of money, commodities, and human life as well as the values promulgated by religion and morality. In doing so, it draws on the insights of political economy, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, cultural studies, and history to both demonstrate the value of deliberate reflection with respect to the use of concepts and to deepen our understanding of this incredibly important concept in particular.

The course will explore historical examples of decision-making in international affairs. The choice of case studies will vary from year to year, but might allow attention to a wide range of issues: e.g., decisions to go to war; economic globalization and instability; energy and environmental crises; regional tensions around indigenous, ethnic, or religious divisions; post-colonial political adjustments involving law, gender, and institutional development. Readings, research, and discussions will consider whether greater sensitivity to historical roots and complexities might have improved the results produced by decisions and solution efforts.

This course will introduce students to historical methods, analytical problems, and new modes of inquiry involved in the study of contemporary international history (CIH) as reflects faculty area of expertise and current scholarly trends. As a hands-on methods training course, students will delve into recent historiographical questions, develop research and writing mechanics, interrogate archival practices, and explore different aspects of the profession and discipline in the context of the highly dynamic and expanding CIH field. The course will emphasize global, transnational, and international approaches to the recent histories of all regions, allowing students to work on their research interests at the same time.