Courses

Not all courses are offered in a given year. For an up-to-date statement of course offerings, please consult the Registration Instructions and Class Schedule booklet published in the summer.

F, W, S indicates term of offering. Courses offered in the fall and winter are followed by T. The number following the letter indicates the credit weight of the course: 1 denotes 0.5 credit, 2 denotes 1.0 credit, etc.

Compulsory Core Courses

CLMD 6101 T2 Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory (Credit value 1.0)
This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those issues in cultural theory of the twentieth-century that inform current interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media: the nature of the text and textuality; the status of representation; the role of technologies of production and reception; the formation of the subject and modes of subjectivity; the construction of difference (gender, ethnicity, social class); the functioning of ideology; the problematics of affect and corporeality; and the meaning and ethics of cultural value.

Specific works from literature, film and other cultural practices, including new media, will be introduced in relation to questions of theory.

While the course does not aim to survey the entire body of twentieth-century cultural theory, students can expect to become familiar with key theoretical texts in and across a number of disciplines that address the issues in question and to acquire a knowledge of the historical and intellectual contexts within which such work was produced. It is expected that the theoretical issues at hand and the debates they provoke will be situated both within and against the dominant Western tradition.

CLMD 6900 T2 Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Credit Value 0.5)
Students will be introduced to a range of methods of inquiry, procedures and practices across related disciplines, using both traditional and electronic research tools. The immediate aim of the course is to help students develop research methods that will enable them to prepare, write and defend the doctoral dissertation successfully in either print or electronic form. Students will also become familiar with the practices of academic publishing, the preparation of conference presentations and academic articles, along with private and public sector writing and research protocols.

Half-Credit Core Course Options

Students are required to complete successfully at least two of the courses listed below in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree.

These five courses articulate the complex formed by the conjunction of the context, the work, the individual and the apparatus. They are intended to address specific works of literature, film and other cultural practices both from inside and outside the dominant Western, cultural tradition. Because cultural forms and practices themselves generate particular ways of knowing and seeing, these courses will consider how specific examples of print, visual, aural and electronic culture speak to epistemological, social and libidinal operations that continually call for new conceptual and analytical approaches.

CLMD 6102 F1, W1, S1 Issues in Transnationalism  (Credit Value 0.5) 
This course will consider cultural production in the context of global exchange, examining the processes of mediation —  conflict, collaboration, transformation and hybridization —  that govern the movement of populations, objects, and ideas as they travel across borders and between societies.

CLMD 6103 F1, W1, S1 Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation (Credit Value 0.5) 
This course will examine how works from different cultures or works in the same or different media from the same culture pose questions about the nature of representation, interpretation, meaning and affect. The emphasis will be upon the relation between the social intelligibility of these practices and their textual features. Intertextual and interdiscursive cultural practices invite questions about the epistemological consequences of formal and stylistic overlap between these practices and about the way in which one practice may change the conditions of production and reception of another.

Examples might include narrativity in literature and film; the roles and practices of avant-gardes; the issue of realism; problems of signification in music; issues of signification and affect in music and cinema; the film, video, and mixed media work of specific practitioners; the problematics of applying “first world” theoretical and interpretive protocols to “third world” cultural practices; the challenges of new media simulacra to old media representations.

CLMD 6104 F1, W1, S1 Issues of Subjectivity and Difference (Credit Value 0.5) 
This course will concern itself with understanding the theory of the subject and its relations, with examples from specific cultural practices in literary studies, film, music, art, popular culture and new media.

CLMD 6105 F1, W1, S1 Issues in the Technologies of Culture (Credit Value 0.5) 
This course concerns itself with the role that the technologies of print, visual and auditory cultures plays in changing models of literacy, visuality and aurality. The technologies of the cultures of print, vision and sound will be discussed through specific examples of cultural practices in various media. The course will be informed by an understanding of technology as a cultural and social practice. The course will therefore raise questions about the objective and subjective foundations of knowledge.

Examples to be discussed could include the technologization of the body; the urban world as a visual and aural space; the relations between global information systems and local knowledges; geographies of culture; the construction of time and space; the inter-related histories of cinema and sound, music and soundcarriers, film and painting, or literature and image-making; cultural practice and the law; the scopic and auditory regimes instituted by film, video, changing soundcarriers and electronic applications.

CLMD 6106 F1, W1, S1 Issues in History and Culture (Credit Value 0.5) 
This course will consider history as an object of representation and a condition of human experience. It will examine historical approaches to print, visual, and auditory culture in relation to theoretical texts and specific periods and genres. Topics may include history and the novel, visual culture in history, and historiography.

Special Topic and Reading Course Electives

Students may elect to complete one or more of these courses successfully in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree.

CLMD 6901 F1, W1, S1 Directed Reading in Cultural Mediations (Credit value 0.5)
This tutorial is designed to permit students to pursue research on topics chosen in consultation with members of faculty and the Graduate Supervisor.

CLMD 6902 F1, W1, S1 Special Topic in Cultural Mediations (Credit value 0.5)
This in-class course offers selected topics in interdisciplinary studies of culture not
available in the regular course offerings.

CLMD 6903 F1, W1, S1 Special Topic in Cultural Mediations (Credit value 0.5)
This in-class course offers selected topics in interdisciplinary studies of culture not available in the regular course offerings.

CLMD 6904 F1, W1, S1 Special Topic in Cultural Mediations (Credit value 0.5) 
This in-class course offers selected topics in interdisciplinary studies of culture not
available in the regular course offerings.

Comprehensive I

CLMD 6907 Comprehensive I (Credit value 1.0) 

The first comprehensive will be a general examination of the broad range of cultural theory of the twentieth-century as it informs interdisciplinary work today and the historical, intellectual and cultural frames of reference that this work invokes. The full credit core course, 25.611, may be considered preparatory to the writing of this comprehensive. To complement the preparation provided by the core course, a list of key texts for study will be drawn up by the graduate committee of the program. The examination will normally be set and graded by a board of at least two core faculty attached to the program and who have been involved in the instruction of the full credit core course, 25.611. Students will normally sit this comprehensive within twelve months of their registration in the program.

Comprehensive II

CLMD 6908 Comprehensive II (Credit value 1.0) 

The second comprehensive will be a discipline-specific examination in a specialised area of study chosen by the student in consultation with the graduate supervisor. Four comprehensive areas have been identified 1) Literary Studies 2) Visual Culture 3) Musical Culture 4) New Technologies. Within his or her comprehensive area, a student may choose to specialise in a national cinema, a field within a national literature, a musical tradition, world musics, etc. Based on a list of key texts in the discipline (primary, critical, theoretical), the examination will be set and graded by a board of at least two core faculty attached to the program who have the disciplinary background in question. Students will normally sit this comprehensive within twenty-four months of their registration in the program.

On the official University transcript of the student’s academic record, he or she will receive the notation of a “Specialisation” to indicate a research concentration based on the choice of the comprehensive area, as per:

• Specialisation: Literary Studies
• Specialisation: Visual Culture
• Specialisation: Musical Culture
• Specialisation: Technology and Culture

Such a notation will help to identify the research areas of the program in a shorthand way for the purposes of public knowledge and give the student some advantage by communicating on the transcript and the curriculum vitae his or her strengths.

Thesis

CLMD 6909 Thesis (Credit value 5.0) 

Course Listings for the 2025-2026 Academic Year

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.  

Fall 2025 Courses

CLMD 6101T (CRN 31096)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory

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 (CRN 31101)
Interdisciplinary Research Methods

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 6102F (CRN 31097) / ARTH 5112F / MGDS 5002E
Issues in Transnationalism: Sovereignties of the Imagination: Worlding and Visual Activism

This course takes Barbadian writer George Lamming’s Sovereignty of the Imagination (2004) as a starting point for imagining more just and equitable worlds through making that would challenge hegemonic conceptions of Being worlded from the European Enlightenment (Wynter). It considers how new vocabularies of freedom, of the freedom to be, have been produced through acts of refusal and resistance, by artists and other makers from the multiple geographies of the global majority. We are interested in practices such as beadwork, inkpainting, calligraphy, pottery, textiles, protest, music and dance that propose new imaginations of what is possible by making and remaking the modern world through objects, artworks and discourses in the context of various degrees of unfreedom. It is through these condensations of cultural feelings or art practices that new sensibilities emerge, which articulate modes of fashioning possible possibles (Escobar), for being otherwise in structures of impossibility. Reimagining modernities other than those which centre progress and a liberal world order, Sovereignties explores the possibilities and limitations of projects that articulate new and wayward worlds (Hartman). The course is being taught in collaboration with Wayne Modest, Director of Content, Wereldmuseum, and Professor, Vrije University Amsterdam. It is part of a larger project, which includes exhibitions, seminars, performances, reasonings, and publications.

CLMD 6104F (31098) /ENGL 5610F
Issues in Cultural Politics: New Life for Old Things

In this course, we will consider contemporary writers and image-makers who use the past to grapple with the crises of our present, including pandemic, rising fascism, environmental catastrophe, and war. We will examine a range of media including photography, film, and sculpture but our focus will be on narrative nonfiction. Here are some of the questions we will pursue together: How do writers use the biographies of earlier writers, theorists, and artists to structure and complicate their reflections on present? What forms of continuity do they construct between the present and the distant past (telling the story of very old trees, for example) that might provide contemporary readers a kind of sustenance? How do the cultural producers we study innovate—in their use of narrative structure, unusual imaging technology, or hybrid form—to defamiliarize the relationship between the past and the present? And how are traumatic events that continue to haunt retold and imaged?

CLMD 6105F (31099) / FILM 5002F 
Issues in the Technology of Culture: Media and Emotion 
Please also register in CLMD 6105 FF (31100)/ FILM 5002F 

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.

CLMD 6904F (31104) / ENGL 5002F
Special Topics in Cultural Mediations: The Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought – Critiques of Liberal Modernity

This seminar examines the Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought as reactionary critiques of democracy, egalitarianism, and Enlightenment rationality. Emerging from the digital peripheries of techno-capitalism, these movements—articulated by figures such as Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land, Thomas Carlyle, and Carl Schmitt—reject liberal modernity and propose alternative governance models ranging from monarchy to corporate rule. As these ideological formations seek to reshape contemporary power structures, how do literary and cultural texts resist, unsettle, or aesthetically disaffirm the world they envision?

Situating the Dark Enlightenment within critical theory, biopolitics, and affect studies, we will read reactionary texts alongside literary and cultural works that interrogate the seductive lure of authoritarianism, the racialized logics of techno-capitalism, and the necropolitical structuring of the future. Drawing on Foucault, Berlant, Butler, and Mbembe, among others, we will trace how reactionary modernity constructs itself through esotericism, nostalgia, and technocratic legitimacy. Throughout the course, we will engage with literary fiction, film, and speculative media that expose the fractures in this reactionary imaginary—whether through satire, dystopian critique, or aesthetic experimentation.

Winter 2026 Courses 

CLMD 6101T (CRN 11062)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6101 in the first semester. It 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 6900T (11067)
Research and Professional Development: Interdisciplinary Research Methods
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6900 in the first semester. See above for course description.

CLMD 6102W (11063) /ENGL 5004W /EURR 5201B /MGDS 5002D
Issues in Transnationalism: Black Europe

This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical works that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Reframing European history and culture from Black perspectives, these works challenge an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space.

The range of topics will include: European travel narratives by Black authors (from W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin to Caryl Phillips and Johny Pitts); Black musical performers and genres in Europe from the 19^th century to the present (classical, vaudeville, jazz, rap, hip hop); novels of the “Windrush generation” of early postwar Caribbean immigrants to Britain; Black German activist poetics and autobiography from the 1980s onward; and recent artistic and curatorial interventions that recuperate Black women muses of white European writers and painters (Baudelaire, Dégas).

The interdisciplinary design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional disciplinary lenses. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art history, and music.

CLMD 6103W (11064) /CDNS 5301B /ENGL 5900W
Issues of Cultural Mediation & Representation

This graduate seminar will contend with urgent socio-cultural challenges in Canada through contemporary approaches to the study of national culture on Turtle Island, asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can culture and its study offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies foster a site of relation making between communities, or rather, make relations right?

In our discussions we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s cultural industries and national 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 feminisms, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies). We will focus on questions of relationality in Canadian cultural production and is open to both Masters and PhD students.

CLMD 6104W (11065) /ARTH 5218W /HIST 5702
Issues in Cultural Politics: Towards an Indigenous Museology: Encounter, Exchange and Relational Practice

This course will present Indigenous history through careful examination of moments of encounter as they have been mediated through visual and material culture and display. In drawing from the work of Mary Louise Pratt and her understanding of “the contact zone,” this course aims to foreground the interactive material dimensions of encounter and will seek to explore these cross-cultural exchanges by complicating simplified models of conquest/domination and stimulus/response, and instead will present a primary focus on the agency of Indigenous peoples in the ongoing interactions of the contact zone. Topics revisited throughout the term will include issues of trope and stereotype, histories of collecting, the politics of display, imposed systems of colonial control, cross-cultural understandings of value, and the movement towards Indigenous and decolonial museologies. Working from a pedagogical framework centered on visiting, relationality and “kitchen table talk,” this course will consider the ways in which Indigenous and decolonial practices have- and continue to- generate and mobilize epistemologies of resistance and liberation within and beyond the museum walls.

CLMD 6105W (11066) / MUSI 5020W 
Issues in the Technology of Culture: Sound Studies

Music and Cultural Theory II is intended to explore, in depth, a limited range of debates within contemporary theory and culture and to assess their relevance to music. Sound Studies is a relatively new but well-established, interdisciplinary field that includes a diverse range of objects of study addressed through an equally diverse range of disciplinary concerns and methodologies; in recent years, some of its foundational works and epistemologies have been critiqued from the perspectives of race, sexuality, and decolonization. While “music” falls within the range of phenomena investigated within sounds studies, music is neither its primary focus nor the termination point of much of the theorizing within the field. Nevertheless, adopting some of the theoretical perspectives within sound studies (and their critiques) is useful in challenging how we think about music and, conversely, music may allow us to discuss and analyze some of the limits of sound studies as it has come to be defined.

CLMD 6902W (11069) 
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations: Making and Re-making the World: Cross Disciplinary Activations of Geographical Thinking

This 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.