400/500/600 Level Courses

R 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Travellers’ Tales

T 14:00-16:50

Topic: Classics & Right Wing Extremism

We will explore the history of Right-Wing Extremism (RWE) in North America and the role of the ancient past in RWE rhetoric and ideology. Students will critically examine the use of Greco-Roman material by various RWE groups, focusing on how the ancient past supports broad ideological positions, found within white nationalism, antisemitism, xenophobia, islamophobia, misogyny, and hate towards 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Through a nuanced exploration of rhetoric, imagery, and texts, students will analyze how RWE groups selectively interpret and weaponize narratives about Greco-Roman antiquity to advance their agendas.

W 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Archaeology of Roman Burials

M 17:00-20:00

Topic: The Medieval Body

This section of HIST 403/614 focuses on the medieval body. Although the physical medieval body did not differ significantly from our bodies today, the Middle Ages conceived of the body very differently. By reading and discussing groundbreaking and foundational scholarly texts, we will explore the medieval understanding of the body through the overlapping lenses of religion, medicine, gender, sexuality, and race.

T 9:30-12:20

Topic: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR

Sometimes, one may encounter the idea that the Soviet Union was dedicated to an internationalist creed and neglected the division of the people by their ethnic origin. Yet, to a large extent, this was exactly what the Soviet bureaucracy and government did. This class studies Soviet Nationalities policy within the broader debates on Empire, nationalism and decolonization in Eurasia. It examines the category of nationality (natsional’nost’) in the Soviet Union from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the USSR. Drawing on archival, published and oral sources, the course explores how nationality became a central category of identification in Soviet governance.

During the course, we will analyze how state practices - such as census classification, territorial-administrative division, and internal passports - constructed an immutable and ascribed category. Particularly, we will focus on the ways in which certain groups were defined as “enemy nationalities” leading to deportations, persecution, memory erasure and political repression during the Stalin era, as well as later processes of rehabilitation and revival. Throughout the seminar, students will engage with key historiographical debates on empire, nation-building, and state power in the Soviet context. This is of great importance, because it echoes into the modern conflicts and identity issues after the collapse of the USSR.

M 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Belarus: 1936 - 2026

T 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Celtic Christianity

After the departure of the last Roman legions in 410, amid ongoing invasions by Saxons and other continental peoples, Celtic Britons developed their Christian heritage in their own way. This course will consider the distinctive features of this development including its emphasis on monasticism, its interaction with local politics, its literary and artistic accomplishments, and its eventual clash with continental Christian norms.

M 9:00 - 11:50

Topic: Asia, Gender & State

This course investigates how Confucianism, modernization, imperialism, military conflict, and migration transformed women’s roles, gender norms, and sexuality. It also explores how Western powers imagined and represented Asian women, encouraging students to critically examine the intersection of gender, culture, and power across East Asia’s past and present.

W 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Sexuality in Modern US History

This course focuses on queer (LGBTQ+) histories in the twentieth century United States. Topics include how legislation has historically informed gendered identities, the Pansy Craze, the Lavender Scare, the gay liberation movement, and the AIDS crisis. Some topics will also include consideration of how events in the United States came to affect LGBTQ+ histories in Western Canada.

T 9:30 - 12:20

Topic: Talking Treaty: Understanding the Treaties of Canada

T 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: History of Spaceflight

The development of spaceflight to the present day. We will examine the wide range of events and factors (e.g. cultural and political) that have shaped that development. Although we will give most attention to the space programs and activities associated with the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, we will also examine international space efforts, as well as the space projects of other countries.

T 14:00-16:50

Topic: Classics & Right Wing Extremism

We will explore the history of Right-Wing Extremism (RWE) in North America and the role of the ancient past in RWE rhetoric and ideology. Students will critically examine the use of Greco-Roman material by various RWE groups, focusing on how the ancient past supports broad ideological positions, found within white nationalism, antisemitism, xenophobia, islamophobia, misogyny, and hate towards 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Through a nuanced exploration of rhetoric, imagery, and texts, students will analyze how RWE groups selectively interpret and weaponize narratives about Greco-Roman antiquity to advance their agendas.

MWF 14:00 - 14:50

Topic: Lucretius

The Epicureans were widely attacked for decadence in antiquity, and there is little literature advocating Epicurean philosophy. A major exception is Lucretius’ epic poem “On the Nature of Things.” In reading excerpts from the poem, we will not only study advanced grammar, metrics and poetic stylistics, but also consider how the poem reflects the doctrines of Epicurean philosophy.

T 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Celtic Christianity

MWF 13:00 - 13:50

Topic: Age of Nero

Nero is a controversial figure. One of the most hated emperors in the ancient tradition, he often receives a more favorable evaluation in modern scholarship. His age saw a flourishing of Latin literature, with major works written by authors like Petronius, Seneca and Lucan. In translation, we will examine the ancient sources for his reign (esp. Tacitus and Suetonius) and read a number of excerpts from famous works written during his reign to see what it was about Nero that inspired positive reactions in some people and loathing in others.

MWF 13:00 - 13:50

Topic: Cleopatra: The Last Pharaoh of Egypt

The doomed queen Cleopatra VII, the final Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, has been a figure of fascination for nearly two millennia but remains an enigma. Intelligent, charismatic, and ambitious. Cleopatra secured the allegiance of two of the most powerful men in the Roman world: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. In this course, we shall examine how Cleopatra ascended the Ptolemaic throne, gained the loyalty of her people through the adroit use of spectacle and the masterful spinning of her own image, and maintained Egypt as an independent kingdom through successive Roman attempts to annex it. Cleopatra left no written records of her own, and so her story has been told by others, from biased and xenophobic ancient biographers to William Shakespear to Hollywood. In this course, we shall attempt to sort through the drama, romance, and sensationalism of tradition on Cleopatra to reconstruct the goals and achievements of one of the most powerful women of the ancient world.

W 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Houses and Households of Ancient Greece

TR 12:30 - 13:50

Topic: Greek Lyric & Elegiac Poetry

This course will explore Greek Lyric & Elegiac Poetry of the Archaic and Classical Periods. Students will further their knowledge of Ancient Greek vocabulary and grammar at an advanced level, acquire some background in Ancient Greek dialects and develop their comparative skills relating to styles and motifs among lyric and elegiac poets such as Archilochus, Sappho, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis, Mimnermus and Pindar.

M 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire

From 1273 until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, members of theHabsburg Dynasty often sat on the Imperial throne. Every head of the Empire from 1438 until 1740 was from that family. This seminar will study the institutions of the Empire in connection with the men and women who ruled it, focusing particularly on the developments between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1648). A combination of primary and secondary sources will be discussed.

W 9:00 - 11:50

Topic: Medieval Iberia

W 14:00-16:50

Topic: A Jumbled Mosaic? Gregory of Tours and His Ten Books of Histories

Along with saints’ Lives and miracles stories, Gregory of Tours (c. 539-594) wrote a sprawling narrative entitled Ten Books of Histories, more commonly though erroneously known as The History of the Franks. This composition remains the principal source for our understanding of sixth-century Gaul. The events he records range widely, from civil wards to meteorological phenomena. Certain modern interpreters, “puzzled” and “exasperated” by Gregory’s account, thought of the Histories as a “jumbled mosaic.” At the same time, Gregory’s Christianity, rooted in the Bible, offered him a coherent religious lens through which he viewed the past and his own times. On his pages, we encounter a world in which violence and benevolence, miscreants and saints, juxtapose each other. Such a world will engage those concerned with the crucial question of whether history has “moral meaning”.

T 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Nazi Germany

F 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Life Behind the “Iron Curtain”

The purpose of the seminar is to explore the phenomenon of daily life of the ordinary citizens in the Communist countries during the Cold War. This seminar will help you to understand a complex, even paradoxical nature of the societies living in a “grey zone” between Communist utopia and social reality. Students will be working with primary sources, which include feature films, political jokes and anecdotes, fiction etc.

F 9:00-11:50

Topic: Central European Migration to Canada: Biographical Histories

This is a hands-on research seminar: students conduct original historical research and see their own work published. Working from original sources, students research and write biographical case studies of individuals who migrated from Central Europe to Canada in the 20th century, building a collective, research-based history.

M 12:00 - 14:50

Topic: Law and Society in US History

Class will explore the history of law in the United States, from the early modern British colonial era through the 20th Century. Topics include the Salem witchcraft crisis, crime and punishment, 19th Century family relations law and constitutional legal history.

M 9:00 - 11:50

Topic: Chinese Migration and Global China

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the experiences of Chinese migrants and the communities they created across the world from the nineteenth century to the present. Living between homeland and host society, Chinese migrants developed diverse strategies to adapt, survive, and prosper while maintaining connections that cross national borders. Through discussion around films, poems, oral histories, memoirs and scholarly literature, students will explore how migration shaped both modern China and the wider world.

M 14:00-16:50

Topic: Orientalism

W 14:00-16:50

This seminar investigates select key methodological and historiographical debates in history through a focus on three historical sub-fields: gender history, environmental history, and public history. This course is required for students in the History Honors program, but is suitable for all students interested in the dynamic and contested ways that knowledge is constructed in the discipline of History.

TR 14:00 - 15:20

Topic: Emperors Behaving Badly

W 9:00 - 11:50

Topic: Medieval Iberia

M 14:00 - 16:50

Topic: Orientalism