An exploration of how medieval and early modern societies encountered foreigners and accounted for foreignness, as well as for religious, linguistic, and cultural difference more broadly. Topics include: monsters, relics, pilgrimage, the rise of the university, merchant companies, mercenaries, piracy, captivity and slavery, tourism, and the birth of resident embassies.
Same as (IEEC51H3)
0.5 pre-1800 credit
Transnational Area

Social and cultural history of the Venetian Empire from a fishermen's colony to the Napoleonic Occupation of 1797. Topics include the relationships between commerce and colonization in the Mediterranean, state building and piracy, aristocracy and slavery, civic ritual and spirituality, guilds and confraternities, households and families.
0.5 pre-1800 credit
European Area

This course tracks the evolving histories of gender and sexuality in diverse Muslim societies. We will examine how gendered norms and sexual mores were negotiated through law, ethics, and custom. We will compare and contrast these themes in diverse societies, from the Prophet Muhammad’s community in 7th century Arabia to North American and West African Muslim communities in the 21st century.

Same as WSTC66H3

Transnational Area

This course examines the history and historiography of the formative period of Islam and the life and legacy of Muḥammad, Islam’s founder. Central themes explored include the Late Antique context of the Middle East, pre-Islamic Arabia and its religions, the Qur’ān and its textual history, the construction of biographical accounts of Muḥammad, debates about the historicity of reports from Muḥammad, and the evolving identity and historical conception of the early Muslim community.

Same as CLAC67H3
Pre-1800 course
Ancient World Area

This course reflects on the concept of Orientalism and how it informs the fields of Classical Studies and Anthropology. Topics to be discussed include the Orientalization of the past and the origin, role, and significance of ancient representations of the "Other" in contemporary discourses.
Same as ANTC58H3 and CLAC68H3

The migration of Caribbean peoples to the United States, Canada, and Europe from the late 19th century to the present. The course considers how shifting economic circumstances and labour demands, the World Wars, evolving imperial relationships, pan-Africanism and international unionism, decolonization, natural disasters, and globalization shaped this migration.
Same as AFSC70H3
Transnational Area

Using the methods of intellectual history, this course explores the connected histories of two distinct systems of social oppression: caste and race. While caste is understood to be a peculiarly South Asian historical formation, race is identified as foundational to Atlantic slavery. Yet ideas about race and caste have intersected with each other historically from the early modern period through the course of European colonialism. How might we understand those connections and why is it important to do so? How has the colonial and modern governance of society, economy and sexuality relied on caste and race while keeping those categories resolutely apart? How have Black and Oppressed caste intellectuals and sociologists insisted on thinking race and caste together? We will explore these questions by examining primary texts and essays and the debates they provoked among thinkers from Latin America, the Caribbean, the American South, South Africa, and South Asia.

African and Asia Area

The course will explore the history and career of a term: The Global South. The global south is not a specific place but expressive of a geopolitical relation. It is often used to describe areas or places that were remade by geopolitical inequality. How and when did this idea emerge? How did it circulate? How are the understandings of the global south kept in play? Our exploration of this term will open up a world of solidarity and circulation of ideas shaped by grass-roots social movements in different parts of the world

Same as GASC73H3
Africa and Asia Area

A survey of human mobility from the era when humans first populated the earth to the global migrations of our own time. An introduction to the main categories of human movement and to historical and modern arguments for fostering or restricting migration.

Transnational Area

Over millennia, urban communities globally have existed alongside, produced, harboured, and found ways to deal with whatever they considered dirty and disease-carrying – from sewage and smoke to cholera and COVID-19 to sex workers and pilgrim travellers. This course explores the history of urban sanitation and health in a variety of global cities, with a focus on the 16th to 21st centuries. You will travel through course your reading of research and primary sources we will travel to cities like London, Bombay, Hong Kong, New York, Mexico City, Istanbul, and Dar Es Salaam. Over the semester, you will follow the journeys of germs, pollutants, waste, and the humans and animals seen as their carriers or causes, as they were made subject to governments, the law, science, medicine, and technology striving to control or eliminate everything understood as dirt and disease, toward the goal of making cities that reflected frequently colonial, capitalist and nationalist ideals. Assessment will be through a combination of class participation, reading notes, primary source analysis and essays.

Soccer (“football” to most of the world) is the world’s game and serves as a powerful lens through which to examine major questions in modern world history. How did a game that emerged in industrial Britain spread so quickly throughout the globe? How has the sport been appropriated politically and become a venue for contests over class, ethnic and national identity? Why have wars been fought over the outcome of matches? In short, how does soccer explain the modern world?

Transnational Area

The Qur'an retells many narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. This course compares the Qur'anic renditions with those of the earlier scriptures, focusing on the unique features of the Qur'anic versions. It will also introduce the students to the history of ancient and late antique textual production, transmission of texts and religious contact. The course will also delve into the historical context in which these texts were produced and commented upon in later generations.
Same as CLAC94H3

An examination of the relationship between language, society and identity in North Africa and the Arabic-speaking Middle East from the dawn of Islam to the contemporary period. Topics include processes of Arabization and Islamization, the role of Arabic in pan-Arab identity; language conflict in the colonial and postcolonial periods; ideologies of gender and language among others.

Asia and Africa Area

This option is available in rare and exceptional circumstances to students who have demonstrated a high level of academic maturity and competence. Qualified students will have the opportunity to investigate a historical field which is of common interest to both student and supervisor. Only standing faculty may serve as supervisors, please see the HCS website for a list of eligible faculty.

This option is available in rare and exceptional circumstances to students who have demonstrated a high level of academic maturity and competence. Qualified students will have the opportunity to investigate an historical field which is of common interest to both student and supervisor. Only standing faculty may serve as supervisors, please see the HCS website for a list of eligible faculty.

This seminar will expose students to advanced subject matter and research methods in history. Each seminar will explore a selected topic.

A seminar exploring the social history of translators, interpreters, and the texts they produce. Through several case studies from Ireland and Istanbul to Québec, Mexico City, and Goa, we will ask how translators shaped public understandings of "self" and "other," "civilization" and "barbarity" in the wake of European colonization.
Transnational Area

An exploration of the global problem of crime and punishment. The course investigates how the global processes of colonialism, industrialization, capitalism and liberalization affected modern criminal justice and thus the state-society relationship and modern citizenry in different cultures across time and space.
Same as GASD06H3
Transnational Area

A comparative analysis of transnational histories, and cultural and gendered ideologies of children and childhood through case studies of foundlings in Italy, factory children in England, orphans and adoption in the American West, labouring children in Canada and Australia, and mixed-race children in British India.

Transnational Area

An examination of approaches to historical analysis that take us beyond the national narrative beginning with the study of borderlands between the United States and Mexico, comparing that approach with the study of Canada/United States borderlands and finishing with themes of a North American continental or transnational nature.
United States and Latin America Area

This course offers an in-depth and historicized study of important issues in historical and contemporary Asian, diasporic, and borderland societies such as migration, mobility, and circulation. It is conducted in seminar format with emphasis on discussion, critical reading and writing, digital skills, and primary research.

Same as GASD01H3

Asia and Africa Area

This seminar type course addresses issues related to the relationships between ancient Mediterranean and West Asian societies and their hydric environments from 5000 BC to 600 AD.
Same as CLAD05H3
0.5 pre-1800 credit
Ancient World Area

The course will focus on major developments in art and ideas in early twentieth century Europe. We will study experimental forms of art and philosophy that fall under the broad category of Modernism, including painting, music, literature, and film, as well as philosophical essays, theoretical manifestos, and creative scholarly works.

European Area

This is a seminar-style course organized around a selected topic in Modern European History.

European Area

A comparative exploration of socialist feminism, encompassing its diverse histories in different locations, particularly China, Russia, Germany and Canada. Primary documents, including literary texts, magazines, political pamphlets and group manifestos that constitute socialist feminist ideas, practices and imaginaries in different times and places will be central. We will also seek to understand socialist feminism and its legacies in relation to other contemporary stands of feminism.
Same as WSTD16H3
Transnational Area

This seminar/lab introduces students to the exploding field of digital history. Through a combination of readings and hands-on digital projects, students explore how the Web radically transforms how both professional historians and others envision the past and express these visions in various media. Technical background welcome but not required.

This D-level seminar course examines Black women’s history. It will investigate how a multi-play of gender, class, sexuality, and race has shaped the historical experiences of Black women in Canada and the African Diaspora. We will explore important concepts and themes such as Black feminist thought, Black feminist methodologies, and such key issues as transnationalism, migration, slavery and freedom, consciousness, Black women sexualities, community building, leadership, civil rights, and activism, work and labour, family, education, the Black press, and spirituality. The course is taught from a feminist and critical race perspective grounded in the concept of intersectionality.

An applied research methods course that introduces students to the methods and practice of Oral history, the history of Scarborough, the field of public history and community-based research. A critical part of the class will be to engage in fieldwork related to designing and conducting oral history interviews.
Canadian Area

A seminar exploring the evolution of American thinking about diversity -- ethnic, religious, and regional -- from colonial-era defenses of religious toleration to today's multiculturalism. Participants will consider pluralist thought in relation to competing ideologies, such as nativism, and compare American pluralisms to formulations arrived at elsewhere, including Canada.
Transnational Area

This course explores the origins, growth, and demise of slavery in the United States. It focuses on slavery as an economic, social, and political system that shaped and defined early America. There will be an emphasis on developing historical interpretations from primary sources.

United States and Latin America Area