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the heart of contemporary discourse throughout the region — this course will guide students through an examination of historical documents, scholarly analyses, and various forms of cultural production.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.

This course is the common experience of all post-Medieval History MA students. It provides the occasion for you to reflect on the discipline through an examination of theoretical and methodological writing, as well as some historical works exemplifying important currents of historiography. Emphasis in the course is on reading and discussion.

Independent study/directed reading courses offer MA and 1st year PhD students the opportunity to explore a topic not currently offered as a graduate course. Students are responsible for finding a graduate faculty member willing to work with them. In collaboration, the graduate faculty member and the student or group of students will create a syllabus clearly outlining the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. The supervising faculty member must have a School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Graduate Faculty Membership Appointment through the Department of History or another unit in the university. These are not meant to replace existing curriculum where sufficient course offerings are available. HIS1999H courses may count towards a student's course requirements at the discretion of the Associate Chair (Graduate). They should fill a gap in knowledge required for the 2000 paper/PhD dissertation.

Independent study/directed reading coursesoffer MA and 1st year PhD students the opportunity to explore a topic not currently offered as a graduate course. Students are responsible for finding a graduate faculty member willing to work with them. In collaboration, the graduate faculty member and the student or group of students will create a syllabus clearly outlining the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. The supervising faculty member must have a School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Graduate Faculty Membership appointment through the Department of History or another unit in the University. These are not meant to replace existing curriculum where sufficient course offerings are available. HIS1999H courses may count towards a student's course requirements at the discretion of the Associate Chair (Graduate). They should fill a gap in knowledge required for the 2000 paper/PhD dissertation.

Independent study/directed reading courses offer MA and 1st year PhD students the opportunity to explore a topic not currently offered as a graduate course. Students are responsible for finding a graduate faculty member willing to work with them. In collaboration, the graduate faculty member and the student or group of students will create a syllabus clearly outlining the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. The supervising faculty member must have a School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Graduate Faculty Membership Appointment through the Department of History or another unit in the university. These are not meant to replace existing curriculum where sufficient course offerings are available. HIS1999H courses may count towards a student's course requirements at the discretion of the Associate Chair (Graduate). They should fill a gap in knowledge required for the 2000 paper/PhD dissertation.

The Directed Research of 2000 paper is intended to help students develop skills in research, in the use of primary-source evidence and in defining and defending an argument with a substantial body of evidence within a limited space. It is an original research paper in the format of an article, making extensive use of primary sources available in Toronto or accessible by interlibrary loan set within the framework of the existing historiography. The paper should be about 7,000 to 8,000 words (approximately 35 pages), the expected length of a submission to a scholarly history journal.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to some of the key conceptual developments in the history and philosophy of science and technology. History of science and philosophy of science tend to operate at a distant remove from each other: they often employ different methodologies to address different kinds of questions. The objective of this course is to carve out common ground in which historians and philosophers may productively engage with one another, and at the same time to survey various issues in the history and philosophy of biology. We will do this in an unorthodox way. We will focus on the 'problem of the organism.' Organisms, of course, are the subject matter of biology. They are at the same time problematic sorts of natural phenomena. We will the changing approaches to understanding (or ignoring) organisms throughout the history of biology, as a lens through which to discuss issues in the philosophy of science such as explanation, the metaphysics of science, experiment, modelling, laws of nature.

Normally, 1 full or 2 half-courses allowed per program. Instructor's permission required. Topic is chosen by the student, with approval of a particular faculty member, who meets with the student regularly to discuss readings. Involves the writing of at least one essay. Can also be taken during the summer.

Normally, 1 full or 2 half-courses allowed per program. Instructor's permission required. Topic is chosen by the student, with approval of a particular faculty member, who meets with the student regularly to discuss readings. Involves the writing of at least one essay. Can also be taken during the summer.

Normally, 1 full or 2 half-courses allowed per program. Instructor's permission required. Topic is chosen by the student, with approval of a particular faculty member, who meets with the student regularly to discuss readings. Involves the writing of at least one essay. Can also be taken during the summer.

The purpose of this course is for students to demonstrate their ability to conduct original research in their chosen field of interest that shows promise of eventual publication. Students pursue research projects of their own design over the course of the year in consultation with both the faculty member leading this seminar and with a faculty advisor specializing in their field of expertise. This course is required for all PhD students, and all students must pass this course with an A- or above to continue in the program.

This seminar offers a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Topics and approaches vary depending upon instructor, but may include history and/or philosophy of medicine, science, and/or technology. See the IHPST website for current offerings.

This course offers MA students the opportunity to pursue a substantial original research project in an area of their interest. Students will pursue research projects of their own choice and design within the context of a seminar that meets regularly and with outside supervision from a faculty member in their area of topical interest/expertise.

A study of selected topics in the history of mathematics, with emphasis on moments of debate, novel developments, and the social, political, and cultural contexts of mathematical thought and practice.