Syllabi

Course Description: In this course we will examine the History of the Body in two interrelated ways: as a topic and as a methodology. As a topic, we will talk about how ideas about physical attributes, body parts, and bodies in general have developed over time, space, and cultural context. What does hair or scars or height or skin colour say about us, to whom, and how does this change from context to context? How have people worked within or resisted these ideas? Who has had the power to make pronouncements about the body and how have these pronouncements shaped the world we live in?  Thinking about the histories of bodies and body parts will lead us to examine health, science, religion, and ideas about sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and many more “categories of difference” that some argue are biologically “true” and others contend are cultural assumptions. Who decides “the Truth” about bodies, now or in the past?  Modules within the course will be based on the histories of certain body parts or bodily processes: bones, eyes, stomachs, penises, legs, and so on. As a methodology,we can think of the body as a perspective from which we can analyze any historical topic, not just ones that are pointedly about bodies. We will study how ideas about the abled versus the disabled body changed over time and how they offer us unparalleled insight into power structures of the past. We will also study how people worked within and fought against various kinds of ableism.
tl;dr This course is about three things: 1) how ideas about bodies and body parts have changed over time; 2) how we can better understand all historical contexts by thinking about them from the perspective of the body; and 3) how ableism and the concepts of the abled versus disabled body have been fundamental to societies in the past and present.   Most – but not all — case studies we will look at will be from European history.

This is the winter half of a first-year survey course on “The Making of Europe.”  Course description:  This course surveys the origins, development and continuities of the dominant European societies from Antiquity through to the present day.  The Fall term of the course explored the development of the physical, cultural, and political space that would become known as Europe from Antiquity to the Renaissance.  The Winter term will follow these themes from the seventeenth century to the present, considering the rise of new social and intellectual communities, the development of nation-states and modern empires, and how European culture both shaped and was shaped by substantial interaction with the wider world.  This course provides a general overview of European history by focusing on key themes:
·       forms and uses of power
·       the creation and control of religious belief and worship
·       social and cultural exchange
·       transformation of communication structures and forms of cultural representation
·       gender/sex/sexuality/class/race
In addition to providing an overview of the history of Europe, this course teaches students the basic tools of academic historical inquiry.  Lectures will offer an outline of major historical currents and ask the student to engage with many different ways of doing history.  In discussion groups, students will read, analyze, and discuss primary sources under the direction of a Teaching Assistant. Students will be asked to adopt a critical attitude towards the past and to understand what sorts of questions can be answered by different types of sources.

This is a third year course in European imperial/colonial histories. Course description: “Globalization” and “imperialism” are both terms fraught with ambiguity and overuse.  Some, believing in visions of inevitable progress, argue that as populations have grown and technologies have become more sophisticated, the world has naturally become more “globalized” or more integrated in political, social, economic, and even cultural ways.  Others argue that this interconnectivity has come about not because of natural growth but through projects designed to exploit peoples around the world.  They read the term “globalization” as a kinder, gentler way of describing Western imperialism in its present day incarnation. By examining various empires in world history and with particular emphasis on modern European imperialism, this course will explore the relationship between empire and globalization. Four themes will be: difference; intermediaries; resistance; the global. Specific content to be discussed will include: mercantilism, the Atlantic slave trade, science and medicine, time, religion and civilizing missions, the colonial archive, racialized and gendered categories of difference, reproduction and sexuality, métissage, technology, bureaucracy, nationalism and citizenship, decolonization, Commonwealth, postcoloniality, and indigenous resistance movements.

This is the 2nd half of a first-year survey on World History. This half uses Donald Wright’s book The World and a Very Small Place in Africa as its main textbook.  Course description: The Winter term will continue to expose students to historically informed, critical analyses that frame contemporary discussions about globalization but we’ll do so by focusing on three interrelated lines of inquiry:
·      How have relationships between the “local” and the “global” changed over time and why is this important? Who and what are local and who and what are global?
·      What can the histories of hybridity and appropriation tell us about world history?
·      How can we study the relationship between globalization and power inequality and how it has changed over time? Why should we?
We’ll be examining historical case studies from about 1250 CE to the present.  These will include discussions about the Mongol Empire, the Indian Ocean World, the histories of various global commodity chains, European empires in the nineteenth century, the rise of fascism as an anti-globalization stance, transnationalism, transnational resistance movements, and the digital revolution.

This is a full year, first-year level survey of World History from the 4th century CE to the present. Course description:  This course examines the growth of global connections over the last sixteen hundred years, from about 400 CE to the present. We will begin by looking at how people, ideas, and things travelled over vast distances throughout the Pacific, American, Mediterranean, African and Eurasians worlds, stimulating commodity trades, religious innovation, and the intermingling of populations. This increase in traffic supported many far-flung empires, including those in Scandinavia, West Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and northern Asia. The first semester of the course will be devoted to tracing connections and analyzing the hybrid political and cultural formations that were engendered as people promoted, resisted, and negotiated their way through growing translocal networks. The second half of the course will be focused on the last three hundred years, the so-called modern era. We will discuss the systems and effects of the past few centuries of globalization in terms of mass migrations, industrialization, environmental change, global communications infrastructure, universalist ideas, the international system, multinational corporations, consumer culture, world war, and transnational activism. In addition to learning the content of global history, students will also develop the skills necessary to write history: identifying the difference between primary and secondary sources, analyzing and interpreting evidence, engaging in research, crafting historical arguments, and evaluating historical claims in today’s popular culture.

This course is an introduction to public history in Canada. Through lectures, discussions, assignments, and activities, we explore how and why Canadian history has been interpreted or represented in public, and consider why it matters. Units explore common professional settings for public historical work in Canada; how historical interpretation enters our lives in more everyday ways; and controversies or points of contention in public history in Canada today. Like other 200-level courses in the UBC History department, HIST 236 is also designed to introduce key areas of historical practice including primary source analysis, historical writing, library and media skills, and (of course) public history.

This is a 200-level course with no pre-requisites, and is designed to be suitable for students with little or no background in Canadian history. (This means that the course doubles as an introduction to public history and an introduction to Canadian history.) In this version (2017-18), the assigned materials are almost all publicly accessible sources, and I am teaching the course with a parallel “light” version on Twitter that is intended to allow interested members of the public to follow along with course content – making the course both about public history, and a form of public history itself.

This is a syllabus for HIST 2500: Canadian History. This is an introductory survey course in Canadian history taught at York University in 2016-17.

This course examined the complex history of Indigenous education during the colonial era, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the American context, how Native American children experienced boarding schools and federal education policies will be compared with the diversity of approaches missionaries, Church officials, bureaucrats sought to erase Indigenous identities and culture using Christianity to ‘civilize’ and educate. Students will study the history and legacies of schools, federal policies, inter-generational trauma to consider the processes of decolonization, reconciliation and healing in contemporary society.

This course explored Canada’s history using material history methods and material culture research. Using inter-disciplinary approaches including, but not limited to archaeology, art history, Indigenous studies and museum studies, students examined and contextualized artifacts and objects to learn about Canada’s past. The course followed a thematic approach that included a consideration of pre-Contact material cultures, New France, British North America to the twentieth-century. Students were introduced to digital tools to display artifacts and to systematically analyze sources and objects relevant to Canada’s material past. Students will have opportunities to visit and become familiar with collections from institutions like the Canadian Museum of History, the Canadian War Museum, the Museum of Science and Technology and the Library and Archives Canada. Students went on a walking tour and visit to Laurier House on Laurier Street. Students evaluated, interpreted and created history through their course work throughout the session.

This course may be taught with a blended learning model. A survey of student access to the Internet and devices for learning will be undertaken during the first week to determine how to approach this element of the source. We may have some flipped classes where students will watch relevant tutorials and lectures related to key concepts and then trouble shoot and collaborate in-class and using Adobe Connect.

This course was a general survey of U.S. history from the American Revolution (War of Independence) to the Civil War and if time permits, a consideration of the Reconstruction era. Lectures and readings provided students with an overview of the major social, political, cultural, economic, and demographic trends that affected and challenged the American republic between 1776 and the 1870s. Students considered how history was constructed and specific historical events have been commemorated and depicted over-time.
Students used the Valley of the Shadow website to complete their final research project by doing history. Students were also introduced to digital tools to further enhance their analysis of the past.