Please note: students are responsible for ensuring that their selected courses meet the program requirements stated in the Calendar. If, however, you feel that you need additional information or guidance please contact us.

Ph.D. in Cultural Mediations
Course Listings for the Academic Year 2023-2024 

The PhD in Cultural Mediations offers graduate students a range of engaging research seminars with a strong interdisciplinary focus. Most of these seminars are cross-listed and can be applied towards different graduate programs.

Fall Courses 2023-2024

CLMD 6101T: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Keen

This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media. ‎This course is continued in the second semester.

CLMD 6900T: Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins

The primary goal of this year-long, workshop-based course for second-year doctoral students is to help students prepare for the second comprehensive examination and dissertation research. The class will offer students a supportive space in which to workshop their second comprehensive examination lists and their preliminary dissertation proposals. Students will work together to develop and exchange ideas about their teaching fields and dissertations with their peers and to benefit from constructive criticism. Be prepared to engage with other students’ scholarship fully and constructively as we discuss, develop and refine plans for future research. The second major goal of the course is to foster practical skills and knowledge necessary for academic success at the doctoral level and beyond. The course will help students master various aspects of the academic profession including: writing OGS and SSHRC plans of study, becoming acquainted with library resources, academic publishing, conference paper presentations, research ethics and other professional concerns. Further topics will be introduced in response to student need. This course is continued in the second semester.

CLMD 6902F/ENGL 5900G/LAWS 5904F:
Instructor: Philip Kaisary

This course critically analyzes themes, approaches, and debates in the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and the related field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities’ (‘LCH’). The first half of the course begins by tracing the formation of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement from c. 1965 to the present day, paying particular attention to its goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Observing the movement’s Eurocentrism, the tendency of scholars working in the field to reference only an attenuated corpus of literary and cultural materials, and its indebtedness, on the one hand, to liberal humanism, and, on the other, to post-structuralism, we will assess the productive capacities and critical limitations of the field as it is presently constituted.

CLMD 6102F/ARTH 5112F: Issues in Transnationalism: Worlding, Diasporas and Difficult Histories
Instructor: Ming Tiampo

This interdisciplinary course is situated at the intersection of Critical Global Studies and Diaspora Studies. The course will provide an overview of recent theoretical discourses, examining and distinguishing terms and concepts such as world (music, art, literature), global, diaspora, worlding, pluriversal, postcolonial, decolonial, and post-imperial and investigate how they can be productively put into conversation. The course will consider how we configure ideas of the global on four levels—as scale, as actor theory, as method, and as temporal practice. We will investigate multiple intellectual models of theorizing the global and the diasporic, and also consider their limits in a number of disciplines in the humanities, with some focus on art history.

CLMD 6104F/ENGL 5610F: Issues in Cultural Politics: Documentary and Crisis
Instructor:  Franny Nudelman

This course considers crisis documentary from 1945 to the present. We will study documentary filmmakers, photographers, and writers who respond to the unanticipated and often incomprehensible crises of their age and, in the process, create new forms of documentary expression. Taking an expansive view of the field, we will consider documentary texts that deal with war, forced migration, climate emergency, poverty, and a resurgent white supremacy. We will ask: How do documentarians represent what they cannot yet fully understand? What role does literary and visual culture play in making disruptive change real? How have documentarians helped to define an ethics of witnessing? How are the methods and aims of documentarians transformed by new technologies and alternative forms of collectivity? Cases may include: Lee Miller’s photographs from Dachau; Spike Lee’s reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Maggie Nelson’s narrative account serial murder; Richard Mosse’s immersive rendering of contemporary migrations; recent essays that grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout, we will explore the power of documentary to respond to catastrophic events and uncharted social conditions as they unfold.

CLMD 6903F/FILM 5002F: Media and Emotion
Instructor:  Aubrey Anable

This graduate seminar will consider the ways that emotion figures in theoretical and historical accounts of film and related audio-visual media. Questions about emotion and “affect” are at the root of contemporary debates about identity, subjectivity, politics, and representation. Yet, the body—its sensual capacities and vulnerabilities—is often figured as that which media technologies and those who study them must overcome or entirely deny. Our primary concern will be tracing this intellectual history and the ways contemporary media culture and recent theoretical shifts reframe the relationship between media and emotion. We will use screenings and readings as materials to think (and feel) with.

Winter Courses 2023-2024

CLMD 6101T: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Keen

Please note: This course is a continuation of CLMD 6101 in the first semester.

This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media.

CLMD 6900: Research and Professional Development: Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins

Please note: This course is a continuation of CLMD 6900 in the first semester.

The primary goal of this year-long, workshop-based course for second-year doctoral students is to help students prepare for the second comprehensive examination and dissertation research. The class will offer students a supportive space in which to workshop their second comprehensive examination lists and their preliminary dissertation proposals. Students will work together to develop and exchange ideas about their teaching fields and dissertations with their peers and to benefit from constructive criticism. Be prepared to engage with other students’ scholarship fully and constructively as we discuss, develop and refine plans for future research. The second major goal of the course is to foster practical skills and knowledge necessary for academic success at the doctoral level and beyond. The course will help students master various aspects of the academic profession including: writing OGS and SSHRC plans of study, becoming acquainted with library resources, academic publishing, conference paper presentations, research ethics and other professional concerns. Further topics will be introduced in response to student need.

CLMD 6103W/ARTH 5210W/CURA 5003A: Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation: Defining Beauty/Towards Indigenous Aesthetics
Instructor: Carmen Robertson

Pathways toward articulating Indigenous aesthetics emerge from deep considers of cultural epistemologies and ontologies with Indigenous arts. Because this is an emergent area of study within the Academy, few scholarly readings exist and as a result we will consider written texts from a variety of sources in this seminar. Together, we will develop new understandings of how to consider aesthetics through Indigenous perspectives. Through a series of interdisciplinary readings, observations, and oral narratives, notions of Indigenous aesthetics in relation to art expressions will be addressed. Connections to land and to story are key components of this seminar and will help formulate new research directions. We will also consider ethics, methods and consider other challenges related to conducting such research.

CLMD 6902W/CDNS 5301W Special Topics: Canadian Cultural Studies
Instructor: Orly Lael Netzer

In this course we will explore cultural studies on Turtle Island from their inception vis-a-vis the Canadian nation-making project to their de-colonizing trajectories and aims. Our discussions will be guided by asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can cultural studies offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies make relations between communities, or rather, make relations right? To begin answering these questions, we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s national industries and identity, historicize the study of culture in/about Canada, and examine contemporary and emerging theories and approaches in cultural studies (from multiculturalism, to critical refugee studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, black feminism, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).

CLMD 6903W/ENGL 5900X/HIST 5906Y Special Topics: Co-writing the Climate Crisis
Instructor: Barbara Leckie

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.

CLMD 6904W/MUSI 5004W Special Topics: Sound Studies and Beyond
Instructor: Paul Theberge

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.