Current Graduate Courses
Note: This page is currently being updated.
2026-27 course descriptions will be added as they become available.
Students are responsible for insuring that your selected courses meet the program requirements stated in the Calendar. If, however, you feel that you need additional information or guidance please contact us. Our Graduate Administrator (kristopher.waddell@carleton.ca), will be able to advise you on all administrative matters.
Fall 2026-Winter 2027
FILM 5002W Capitalism and Critique in Film and Fiction – Winter Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Philip Kaisary
- DESCRIPTION: Debates over contemporary capitalism abound: in mass-market books, on television and radio, in the pages of such publications as The Financial Times and The Economist, in the reports of global management consultancies, and throughout social media and the blogosphere, discussion of contemporary capitalism’s stagnation, failures, manifold crises, and whether or not it can be fixed has become commonplace. As part of this broad debate, cultural forms – including, but not limited to, film, fiction, painting, and photography – have for long constituted a valuable resource for better understanding and articulating critiques of capitalism. An awareness of this deep history undergirds this course in which we will watch and discuss a corpus of fiction films, art films, and documentary films, produced between the 1990s and the present, that address the inequality, unevenness, and sacrifices that are part and parcel of world-wide or global capitalism. Key concepts and categories that will inform our endeavour will include the idea of ‘savage’ capitalism, techno-capitalism, petro-capitalism, capitalism and class stratified society, and capitalism and the contemporary global migrant crisis. In small groups, we will also read a sample of recent speculative fiction addressed to the concept of “techno-capitalism.” These readings will deepen our understanding and develop our project of critique. Reflecting capitalism’s global reach, our corpus of primary materials are drawn from locations including Argentina, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. To enrich our viewing of the films and our reading of the fiction, we will draw on various works of critical social and political theory.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Attendance and participation: 20%; Audio (podcast) assignment: 30%; Presentation: 20%; 2-hour, open-book exam: 30%
- READINGS: TBA
- CROSS-LISTED AS: FILM 4901/ENGL 5901
FILM 5010F Film Theory, Historiography & Critical Methodologies I – Fall Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Marc Furstenau
- DESCRIPTION: This course offers an overview of the discipline of Film Studies, providing students with a foundation in film theory and film history. We will explore key concepts in Film Studies, including national cinema, genre, and authorship, among others. In the course, students will work on their analytic, writing, research, and communication skills, while formulating original research project proposals.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBD
- READINGS: Book chapters and articles.
FILM 5107F Cine-Archival Theory, History and Practice – Fall Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Aboubakar Sanogo
- DESCRIPTION: The archive has, in recent years, become one of the most exciting and dynamic fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Taking this into account, this interdisciplinary seminar will explore theories, histories and practices pertaining to the archival, with the moving image as its point of entry and focus, while in conversation with other relevant media and fields concerned with the archival (museum studies, library and information sciences, philosophy, political science, history, heritage and memory studies, the hard sciences, etc.). It will revisit some of the most important theories of the archival along with lesser-known ones. It will also critically retrace the history of the moving image archival movement from its inception to the present. In addition, it will explore the major debates and issues pertaining to archival practice including safeguarding, preservation, restoration, heritage, collecting, cataloguing, access, curating and programming, policy, the analog vs digital, the status of film-related materials, as well as examine the significance of such identity formations as race, gender, sexuality, the national, etc. for a reimagining and reconfiguration of the archive.
Past contributors to the course have included both Canadian and international archival institutions, organizations and projects: Library and Archives Canada, the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and affiliates, the Media Ecology Project (MEP), the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), as well as filmmakers, academics, curators and critics and film preservationists from around the world. - METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- CROSS-LISTED WITH: CLMD 6105/CURA 5003/HIST 5702
FILM 5109F Topics in Film and Philosophy: Cinematic Representation and the Problem of Depiction – Fall Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Marc Furstenau
- DESCRIPTION: We live in a world of pictures—of images, visual representations, or depictions—that are increasingly complex in form and function, combining various audio-visual components, distributed through a wide variety of means. In this course students are introduced to the concept of depiction, to the philosophical debates about the nature and effects of pictures, which can be traced back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. The most basic debate is about the relation between the depiction and what is depicted, between the picture or image and the objects or events being represented—between visual representation and the world, image and reality. We will trace the history of these philosophical debates, considering photographic and cinematic depiction specifically, in relation to older forms such as drawing, painting, and sculpture, but also new ones, such as computer-generated images, virtual reality, and AI.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Choice of various optional assignments: Reading Memos (10%); Reading Reports (20%); or Essay (40%)
- READINGS: Book chapters and articles
- CROSS-LISTED WITH: FILM 4301 A
FILM 5203W Making and Re-Making the World: Cross-Disciplinary Activations of Geographical Thinking – Winter Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Malini Guha
- DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar will ask students to engage in “geographical thinking” as it pertains to historical and speculative acts of world-making across a range of case studies, including films. The course will be designed in accordance with the logics of traction and flight; as we will study repeatable structures and forms, such as the property form and its links to the making of settler colonial worlds while also studying scholarly, artistic and critical propositions for new structures, formations and ways of inhabiting the world that are rooted in anticolonial and anti-carceral thinking and aspirations.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- CROSS-LISTED WITH: CLMD 6902
FILM 5506B Special Topics in Moving Image Culture: New Queer Cinema – Winter Term
- INSTRUCTOR: Ryan Conrad
- DESCRIPTION: This course offers an in-depth exploration of New Queer Cinema (NQC), the influential independent film movement that emerged in the early 1990s anglosphere and reshaped the possibilities of queer representation on screen. Through a close analysis of films by directors Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Gregg Araki, Derek Jarman, Shu Lea Cheang, and others, students will examine how NQC challenged dominant cinematic norms by embracing experimental aesthetics and unapologetically queer narratives. This course situates NQC within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, including the AIDS crisis, the culture wars, accelerated globalization, and shifting understandings of both sexuality and gender. This course highlights how filmmakers used cinema as a site of resistance, radical expression, and queer world-making. This course also introduces students to affect theory as a framework for understanding how the emergence of NQC marked a collective shift in consciousness and aesthetics.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Attendance & Participation (15%); Podcast Episode Proposal (20%); Podcast Episode (35%); Podcast Peer Feedback (20%); Response to Podcast Peer Feedback (10%)
- READINGS: TBA
- CROSS-LISTED AS: FILM 4002 / WGST4812 / WGST5902