Fall/Winter 2015-2016
Fall 2015
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory – CLMD 6101T [1.0 credit] (CRN 31100)
This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those issues in cultural theory of the twentieth-century that inform interdisciplinary work today in literature, film, music, art and new media. This course is continued in the 2nd term.
Instructor: Barbara Leckie
Seminar: Thur. 14:35-17:25, Room SP201D
Research and Professional Development – CLMD 6900T [0.5 credit] (CRN 31104)
Students develop research methods to prepare for their second comprehensive examination and to write and defend the doctoral dissertation successfully. Practices of academic publishing, conference presentations and academic articles; grant writing, ethical conduct in research and private and public sector employment opportunities.
This course is continued in the 2nd term.
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
Seminar: Mon. 11:35-14:25 Room SP201D (every 2nd week)
Issues in Transnationalism: Diaspora Theory – CLMD 6102F/ ENGL 5004F [0.5 credit] (CRN 31101)
Diaspora is an ancient term that has gained new currency in our contemporary moment. This course traces the emergence of diaspora theory from the early 1990s through to the present. Taking Jewish and Black historical experiences as our starting points, we will consider a variety of approaches (comparative diasporas, postcolonial diasporas, queer diasporas) as well as modalities (time and memory, space and place, indigeneity and diaspora). Our readings will illustrate how and why diaspora has become ubiquitous across the disciplines, emerging as a central category of analysis for scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences.
Examining tensions between positivistic and cultural approaches as well as between high theory and creative genres, our particular focus will be on the expressive forms and aesthetic modes that have been generated by the lived experience of diaspora. In the course’s final weeks, students will have the opportunity to explore the implications of diaspora theory for the particular genres, media, and ethnic histories that drive their own research interests.
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
Seminar: Thurs. 8:35-11:25, Room SP201D
Issues in the Technologies of Culture: Technology and Imagination – CLMD 6105F [0.5 credit] (CRN 31102)
Technology is often thought of as the means for extending basic human capacities, primarily bodily capacities. Tools have extended our abilities to lift, carry, transport and modify materials and objects in the world, expanding our mobility and motive powers. They have also extended our sensory and cognitive capacities. With the telescope, and later the television, for example, we may see over great distances, while mirrors, flags and other signaling devices, and then telephones and radios, have extended and enlarged our ability to communicate – to hear and to speak.
With such sensory and cognitive extensions, our tools seem to affect the human imagination, arguably extending our ability to imagine – or at least enlarging the range of our imaginative interests to things we can see and hear at a distance. This course will introduce students to some of the major philosophical and theoretical accounts of technology as a social and cultural phenomenon, and to some important theories of the imagination. We will read various accounts by theorists and philosophers of what we may call technologies of the imagination, or tools for imagining.
We will ask what the various relations between technology and the imagination may be. If the imagination is indeed susceptible to technological extension, we will ask whether new technologies – including the modern media of photography, film, television and computers – are more acute and significant instances of such extension, compared to earlier print and visual media. We will also consider what effects new technologies of the imagination have had on traditional notions of art and artistry.
Instructor: Marc Furstenau
Seminar: Mon. 14:35-17:25, Room SP201D
Issues in History and Culture – CLMD6106F/ HIST5906F/ ENGL5900X/ARTH5112F [0.5 credit] (CRN 31103)
This course takes a deliberately broad view of historical representations as they arise in a variety of historically-minded genres, including history “proper,” biography, historical novel, and history painting. Students are encouraged to extend this range still further in their term papers. The focus of our common readings is on narrativity and historical distance as exemplified in the historical thought of the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th.
Our starting point will be the idea that history is essentially a mediatory art and therefore that a central issue for historical representation (whatever the genres or media) is the problem of what we will call “historical distance.” Drawing on a variety of theoretical discussions as well as primary readings in history, biography, fiction, and art theory we will explore the idea of “distance” as a tool for analyzing structures of historical representation in a number of different kinds of narrative – including historiographical, philosophical, fictional, and visual.
Instructor: Mark Phillips
Seminar: Tue. 14:35-17:25, Room SP201D
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations: Great Lakes Indigenous Arts across Four Centuries (2015-16) – CLMD 6902F/ARTH5210F [0.5 credit] (CRN 31106)
This seminar will examine the interrelationships of historical and contemporary visual arts made by Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Wendat First Nations of the Great Lakes region. We will examine the aesthetic, social, economic and political purposes served by artistic production as well as the (mis)fit of Western conventions of periodization, definitions of genre, and hierarchies of fine and applied arts in different historical periods
Instructor: Ruth Phillips
Seminar: Tue. 8:35-11:25, Room SP201D
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations: Michel Foucault, Undisciplined (2015-16) –
CLMD 6903F/ENGL 5002G [0.5 credit] (CRN31107)
This seminar hopes to offer an undisciplinary overview of the intellectual trajectories of Michel Foucault’s thought. We will study representative texts—published theory, interviews, lectures—from the various (and contested) periods of Foucault’s career: structuralism/poststructuralism, discourse, power, sex, biopolitics, subjectivity, the care of the self, and ethical life.
The final weeks of the seminar will be structured around graduate student interests. Students will either focus on one (or more) of Foucault’s interlocutors or will propose a Foucauldian analysis germane to his or her particular field of research. This will allow us to see some of the ways that Foucault’s work has been taken up by scholars and how it remains relevant for disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship today. In these weeks, students will suggest supplemental course texts, which can be architectural, evental, filmic, literary, theoretical, visual, etc. We are seeking a variety of perspectives: Anthropology, Communication, Cultural Studies, Film, Gender Studies, Health, Human Rights, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Race, Sociology, etc.
Instructor: Stuart Murray
Seminar: Wed. 14:35-17:25 Room DT1816
Winter 2016
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory – CLMD 6101T [1.0 credit] (CRN 11066)
*This course is a continuation of the fall course.
Instructor: Barbara Leckie
Seminar: Thur. 14:35-17:25, Room SP201D
Interdisciplinary Research Methods – CLMD 6900T [0.5 credit] (CRN 11070)
This course is a continuation of the fall course.
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
Seminar: Mon. 11:35-14:25 Room SP201D (every 2nd week)
Issues in Transnationalism / Curatorial Practice: Decolonizing Centres – CLMD 6102W/ARTH 5218W [0.5 credit] (CRN 11067)
In recent years, cultural historians have made enormous strides generating a substantial body of scholarly and curatorial work that recovers multiple modernisms around the world, creating an accumulation of previously invisible narratives that can now be used to account for the geographic complexities of the 20th century.
However, in order to truly rethink the Eurocentrism of 20th century, studies in literature, film, art history and music cannot remain additive, focusing their energies on historically-defined peripheries. They must also interrogate Modernism’s putative centres, demonstrating their fundamentally transcultural and multivalent characters. These centres– London, Paris, New York–the products of imperialism and colonialism, were sites of domination, but they also functioned as contact zones, enabling carefully negotiated cultural borrowings, interventions, responses, solidarities, rejections and debates.
The tinderbox cultures produced at these centres have been coded as metropolitan, producing a discourse of the center as origin, disseminating its avant-garde culture to the periphery. This class, situated at the intersection between diaspora studies and area studies, proposes a critique and a methodological shift in the ways that cultural centres are historicized, and will focus on public forms of knowledge dissemination such as exhibitions, anthologies, and festivals.
Instructor: Ming Tiampo
Seminar: Tue. 14:35-17:25, Room SP201D
Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation – CLMD 6103W/ANTH5807W/ARTH5218B [0.5 credit] (CRN 11068)
Museums and Difficult Histories: This course will explore the growing prominence in world museology of museums that represent histories of oppression and genocide and contextualize them in terms of precedents set by museums that commemorate the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We will examine the mixture of memorialization, revisionist history, therapeutic impact and future-oriented social activism that inform such museums, as well as their relationship to the evolving discourse of human rights and theorizations in anthropology, trauma studies, art history, and other disciplines.
Instructor: Ruth Phillips
Seminar: Tues. 8:35-11:25, Room SP201D
Issues of Subjectivity and Difference – CLMD 6104W/ ENGL 5002W [0.5 credit] (CRN 11069)
Queer Reading
This course invites a conversation between queer theory—including foundational texts and recent debates—and queer fiction, to consider how these two genres inform, influence, illuminate, and complicate one another.
Queer theory has been largely generated by literary critics and philosophers who have drawn influential critical insights from their reading of modernist literature and history. Certainly, modernist and contemporary fiction that focuses on queer sexuality and gender actively theorizes issues that have preoccupied queer theory, including identity, queer affect, normativity, temporality, history, epistemology, power relations, and sociality. Rather than “applying” theory to literature, this course aims to chart the symbiotic interactions across queer critical and literary practices, between queer reading and queer writing
Instructor: Jodie Medd
Seminar: Tues. 11:35-14:25, Room DT 1816