Curatorial Studies Courses

 Fall 2026 Courses

CLMD 6101T (31045/11042)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory, Prof. Rebecca Schein

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 6102F (31046) / ARTH 5112F / MGDS 5002E / ENGL 5004F
Issues in Transnationalism, Prof. Sarah Casteel

Topic: 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 texts that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Together, we will read, look at, and listen to works by Black European intellectuals, activists, writers, artists, performers, and musicians. Challenging an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space, these works reframe European history and culture through Black perspectives.

The interdisciplinary, or “undisciplined,” design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional frameworks. 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, and music.

CLMD 6105F (31047) / FILM 5107F / HIST 5702F / CURA 5003 
Issues in the Technologies of Culture, Prof. Aboubakar Sanogo
Please also register in CLMD 6105 FF (31048)

Topic: Cine-Archival Theory, History and Practice

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.

CLMD 6106F (31049) / HIST 5702G / CDNS 5601A 
Issues in History and Culture, Prof. Peter Hodgins

Topic:  Playing with Memory and Heritage

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that “Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.” This course will examine how artists (understood broadly), activists, electronic and analog gamers and others play with what Hobbes described as the blurry lines between memory and imagination in a variety of media and for a variety of purposes ranging from political transgression to entertainment to friendship. Topics may include: the use of satire and transgressive humour in contemporary “historical” artistic practices; digital and analog historical/fantasy gaming; the intersections between memory, desire, nostalgia, and trauma in cultural and spatial texts and practices. There will be gallery visits and workshops.

CLMD 6900T (31050/11046)
Research and Professional Development, Prof. Pascal Gin

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 6901F (31051)
Directed Readings in Cultural Mediations

This tutorial is designed to permit students to pursue research on topics chosen in consultation with members of faculty and the graduate supervisor.

CLMD 6908 (31052)
Comprehensive II

A discipline-specific examination in a specialized area of study chosen by the student in consultation with the graduate supervisor. Students will choose from one of the following comprehensive areas: Literary Studies; Visual Culture; Musical Culture; New Technologies.

CLMD 6909F (31053)
PhD Thesis

Winter 2027 Courses 

CLMD 6101T (11042)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory, Prof. Stuart Murray

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 6103W (11043) /CDNS 5301B /ENGL 5900X
Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation, Prof. Peter Hodgins

Topic: After AI: reinjecting the “human” back into the humanities

The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 deepened an ongoing crisis of legitimacy and relevancy in the humanities. Even before the emergence of LLMs, enrollments in the humanities had been declining over the previous decades in the face of claims that they did not adequately prepare students for the work world. The retort of defenders of the humanities was that they taught their students to write, to analyze, to research, and to synthesize. However, as we now know, LLMs can do those things as well (but, as we also know, not always all that well).

Recently, a new defense of the humanities has emerged which emphasizes the “human” in the “humanities”. As Nesrine Malik writes in The Guardian: “Writing is about the particular alchemy of a single individual drawing on their own unique profile to construct an idea. It is about the way their brain works, the quirks they have picked up along the way, their politics, their history, their relationships, the very way they see the world.”

In this course, we will read texts by prominent Canadian feminist/decolonial scholars such as Anne Cvetovich, Julietta Singh, Dalie Giroux, and Sophie Tamas. Even before AI, they have worked in different ways to reinject the singular, the quirky and “the human” back into humanities writing by playing with, and often refusing, the lines between autobiography, memory, and history, between fact and fiction, between writing and other media, between research and creation, between the personal and the political. The assignments in this course will encourage students, as emerging humanities scholars, to use the work of these and other writers as models for their own writing.

CLMD 6104F (11044) / ENGL 5002W
Issues in Cultural Politics, Prof. Paul Keen

Topic: Marxism Without Guarantees

This course, which takes its name from a Stuart Hall essay, explores the theoretical work of a tradition of Marxist and leftist critics aligned with what Edward Said has described as radical humanism. The first half of the course will focus on three of the most prominent writers within this tradition: Said, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. The second half of the course will then focus on some of the major influences on these thinkers, such as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Lucien Goldman before finishing by discussing more recent theorists who have positioned themselves within and responded to this tradition. Some of the issues we will explore will be their work on questions of agency and hegemony, competing definitions of ideology, the role of the critic, historical materialism, the changing meaning and role of culture, and the changing contexts of Marxist theory today. We will focus on two essays each week, with suggested background readings for those who wish to do further work in any of these areas.

CLMD 6105W (11045) / ARTH 5500W / CDNS 5003C 

Issues in the Technologies of Culture, Prof. Carol Payne

Topic: Photography, Memory, Archive 

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.”   

–Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography  

This seminar will address the role that photography plays in conceptualizations of memory. The class will engage with the rich body of theory drawn from Memory Studies, Photo Studies, and the critique of the archive.  As part of our exploration of photography and memory, we will also draw on work from photographic archives in the National Capital.

CLMD 6900T (31050/11046)
Research and Professional Development, Prof. Pascal Gin

This course is a continuation of CLMD 6900 in the first semester. See above for course description.

CLMD 6901F (11047)
Directed Readings in Cultural Mediations

This tutorial is designed to permit students to pursue research on topics chosen in consultation with members of faculty and the graduate supervisor.

CLMD 6902W (11048) / FILM 5203W
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations, Prof. Malini Guha

Topic: 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.

CLMD 6903W (11049) / MUSI 5200B / CURA 5003X
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations, Prof. Ellen Waterman

Topic: Research Creation: Theory and Method

CLMD 6908W (CRN 11050)
Comprehensive II

A discipline-specific examination in a specialized area of study chosen by the student in consultation with the graduate supervisor. Students will choose from one of the following comprehensive areas: Literary Studies; Visual Culture; Musical Culture; New Technologies.

CLMD 6909W (CRN 11051)
PhD Thesis