Graduate seminar course descriptions

In this seminar, we will explore "history" as a field of knowledge, a critical orientation, an instrument, a praxis, and a philosophy. Our weekly trajectory follows major issues and shifts in historiography since the mid-20th century. Topics will include: social history and the influence of Marxism; cultural and linguistic turns provoked by poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and race-critical theory; environmental history in the midst of ecological breakdown; as well as methods and critiques in public and oral history. This course is challenging - with a heavy reading load and strong emphasis on engagement - but also rewarding. Students will leave this course with a solid foundational understanding of the most salient theoretical and methodological questions and approaches in this discipline; they will be able to use this knowledge to assess and critique different works of historical writing and apply these approaches to their own work.

This seminar introduces students to recent scholarship in the history of science and technology. Since the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and with an increasing emphasis on material undertakings rather than abstract thinking as legitimate scientific practices, scholars have expanded the meanings of science and technology by problematizing the three implicit modifiers: “modern,” “Western,” and “innovative.” We will visit many unlikely sites of knowledge production, such as artisans’ workshops and early modern households, to explore how ordinary people gained knowledge of nature through experiments and observation beyond the modern science lab. We will also investigate how science and technology have been made and remade through circulation of objects and people across different parts of the world, questioning unidirectional assumptions about their flow from the West to the rest of the world. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of “non-heroic” sciences and technologies that are by no means considered “new” or “innovative” and yet are crucial to the maintenance of our society.

This course is designed to help MA students frame and develop the first stages of their theses. It will allow you to think in a deliberate way about the various components of historical research: conceptualizing a topic, framing a central research question, locating appropriate sources, reading (and keeping track of) secondary sources, putting new research in dialogue with existent scholarship, writing and revising. The end product of the course will be a substantial thesis proposal which will be the basis of your research in subsequent terms.

This seminar will explore a series of themes in the social and cultural history of Quebec in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will develop and deepen their appreciation of the issues and perspectives that have stimulated research and debate among Quebec historians in recent years. Themes such as modernity, gender, religion, the environment, social class, ethnicity, law, family, and indigeneity will be among those considered. While not neglecting rural society or the regions, participants will have ample opportunity to focus on the diverse and dynamic experiences of Montrealers over the long period bounded by the rebellions of 1837-38 and the 1995 referendum.  

Oral history is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that seeks to understand the lived interior of history.  This advanced seminar will enable students to workshop their own oral history methodology through the various stages of a project. Students will go through ethics, conduct two interviews, transcribe and data-base the interviews, and interpret them.  All the while, sharing their practice-based learning with the group.

This seminar offers a forum to reflect deeply about the challenge of writing compelling stories while also presenting cutting-edge, question-driven historical research. There are no temporal, geographical, or subject boundaries in this course; students will read path-breaking works of history from sixteenth-century Europe to the transatlantic slave ship, from the environmental history of the Artic Sea to the Eastern European origins of the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. They will also read several major works of literature - spanning contexts such as slavery in the United States, premodern worlds in Latin America, and the late twentieth-century Middle East - whose authors base their stories on a deep immersion in history, and whose prose can inspire historians to push their own writing to new heights. The only yardstick for our reading material is that the writing we encounter be in some way breathtaking and boundary shattering with it comes to telling stories about the past. A handful of historians somehow learn to tell history by writing beautifully crafted and compelling stories. Yet history departments generally do not teach students that skill, or even challenge them during their studies to see it as worth taking on. This seminar is an experimental journey driven by a simple question: Can we make that objective a central part of our learning and training as historians? 

For scholars and publics seeking to explore how non-Western worlds – African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American – have shaped our political present, the “new global history” has become a touchstone. Methodologically too, much of this work has led experimentation over how to best craft historical narratives combining an attunement to globe-spanning structural forces with a feel for granular detail and the narrowly-channeled, contingent paths through which historical change takes shape. This course is a tour of cutting-edge scholarship in global history, exploring phenomena such as capitalism, slavery, the Enlightenment, empire, modern law, anti-colonial movements, revolt, and revolution. It also focuses on creative approaches to the past and allows students to complete a piece of historical writing that can serve as the foundation for an academic or public-facing essay.

As human and other life on the planet hangs in the balance, fossil fuel extraction and consumption continue apace. Indeed, fossil fuel consumption is still increasing, which it has done so by around eight-fold since 1950, roughly doubling since 1980. Though fossil fuels encompass coal, oil, and gas, we will ask specifically, why oil. In this seminar we examine the geopolitical history behind the rise of oil and its emergence as a natural resource that humans ostensibly cannot do without. Rather than focus on the physical properties that make its burning and its transformation indispensable to life, we will inquire into how oil and power are connected via social and political networks. We will do this by mostly tracing the connections through 20th-century Middle Eastern history, but we will take detours to consider the global scale of oil’s geopolitics and political-economy, as well as global cultures of oil and resistance in the present.