Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This course introduces students to bibliographic and research methods, theoretical models, and professional skills and issues related to English and Film Studies. The course is required for all MA students, and attendance is compulsory.

Note: The student’s performance in the course will be graded as either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” Failure to complete EN600 or to obtain a grade of “satisfactory” may result in suspension from the MA Program. A student’s final grade for the course will not be assigned as “satisfactory” until a grade of “satisfactory” has been obtained in all of the sessions.

• Professor: Jing Jing Chang
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

Media and feminist film scholar Sarah Projansky argues that “All girls are spectacular” (2014). This graduate seminar will interrogate Projansky’s proposition by examining the complex relationships between girls and cinema through historical and contemporary representations of girls and girlhood across global cinema, documentaries, animation, independent films, and transnational art cinema. Girlhood is understood not merely as a legal category and a transitional stage toward womanhood, but rather as a critical site of surveillance, discipline, desire, and cultural anxiety shaped by intersecting frameworks of gender, race, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, nationality, and class. Drawing on scholarship in Girl Studies, Girlhood Studies, feminist film theory, queer theory, transnational feminism, and critical race studies, including works by Carol Gilligan, Angela McRobbie, Anita Harris, Sarah Projansky, Angharad Valdivia, Catherine Driscoll, bell hooks, Laura Mulvey, among others, the course will cover a wide range of girlhood experiences beyond cis girls to encompass trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and queer youth. Questions that will guide our inquiry include: How have films spectacularized some girls while marginalizing others? How do girls produce counter-narratives through cinema? And how might we unearth alternative girlhoods in both dominant and resistant film narratives? Topics may include beauty myths and body politics, the age of consent, celebrity culture, moral panics surrounding girlhood, queer and trans girlhoods, Global South girlhoods, and the transnational circulation of girl images. Films examined may include Lolita (Kubrick 1962), Pretty Baby (Malle 1978), Christiane F. (Edel 1981), Lonely Fifteen (Lai 1982), Clueless (Heckerling 1995), The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999), Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce, 1999), Whale Rider (Caro 2002), Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro 2006), XXY (Puenzo 2007), Pariah (Rees 2011), The Hunting Ground (Dick 2015), and Kpop Demon Hunters (Kang 2025).

• Professor: Eleanor Ty
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA
  

An examination of a selection of contemporary graphic novels produced by artists and writers primarily from Canada and the U.S. Emerging from comics books and comics strips, which were perceived as cheap ephemeral entertainment for children and a mass audience, the graphic novel has now gained recognition as a respectable literary genre for adult and young adults. Critical and theoretical essays about the development of the genre are studied alongside the graphic novels.

• Professor: Dr. Kate Carter
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

“A diary is not only a place of asylum in space; it is also an archive in time….” Phillipe Lejeune (On Diary 324)

“The physical pleasure of finding a trace of the past is succeeded by doubt mixed with the powerless feeling of not knowing what to do with it.”   (Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, 11)

“Trying to think despite ourselves” is a phrase that captures something about the motivations of diary writing, in much the same way that it describes the philosophical turn to new materialisms in theoretical work that attempts to re-centre the human subject. Re-centering the human subject has obvious consequences for work in the field of autobiography and life writing which generally takes the human subject as it primary topic, and the aim of this course is to investigate diary writing and diary manuscripts using theoretical frameworks, mostly borrowed from new materialism, to yield new insights about diaries as archival records, manufactured and carefully edited texts, historical evidence, published documents, material objects, as well as autobiographical processes. This course asks one question from many different angles: what do we do (what should we do? what can we do?) with diaries? The first section of the course thinks about how we “keep” diaries: in material books, in archives, or in specific formats. The next section of the course thinks about the relationship of the diarist to the world outside of the diary, and the final section looks at graphic representations of the diary format.  

Our readings will draw from examples that highlight the form and medium of diary content and production, and it spans examples from the early 19^th century (cryptic diary writing by Anne Lister, for example, or the diary entries embroidered onto a jacket in a German sanitorium) to the 21^st century (such as the cell phone diary of Behrouz Boochani, published in 2019 as No Friend but the Mountains).  We will examine diaries that explicitly engage with power structures such as the Victorian diary of housemaid Hannah Cullwick and investigate the techniques of more recent graphic diaries such as 365 Days by Julie Doucet (2007), and My Picture Diary by Fujiwara Maki (1982).  Films that experiment with the diary format, such as those by David Holzman (1967) and Jonas Mekas (1976), will help to broaden our vocabulary about what the diary format can do. 

• Professor: Katherine Spring
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This seminar examines key methods, debates, and archival discoveries that have animated the work of film historians over the last half-century, from the "historical turn" of the 1970s through to more recent scholarship on media archaeology. Through weekly film screenings and readings drawn from the disciplines of film studies, philosophy, and history, we ask questions such as: How do historians analyze and reconstruct the past for contemporary readers? What patterns of narrative, if any, characterize historical writing? Why do some histories enter a discipline's canon while others remain marginalized or excluded? The first unit, "Principles and Methods," considers philosophies of history and how film historians have appealed to three rhetorical devices - causation, objectivity, and narrative discourse - as they develop their arguments. The second unit, "Debates," examines controversies that have arisen in film historiography over the last half-century, including those concerning teh emergence of nickelodeon theatres in the 1900s, the consolidation of Hollywood's studio system in the mid-20th century, and subsequent transitions to "post-classical" and digital cinemas. The third and final unit, titled "Whither Film History?," introduces examples that expand the boundaries of canonical film historiography. For their final papers, students develop research projects that engage with primary archival resources.

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This course offers a critical genealogy of youth; we study how youth identity is shaped by historical context and we explore the governing scripts for youth subjectivity in Canadian literature from the end of the 19th century to the present. We analyze juvenile, YA and adult literature alongside a social history of Canadian youth and we draw on feminist, structural,and aesthetic theories of Bildung to help us consider how the traits and developmental trajectories of our literary protagonists have been conceptualized in relation to the development of the nation.

• Professor: Tamas Dobozy
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

The Poetics of "The Troubles" will introduce students to the texts emerging out of sectarian conflict and paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland circa the period 1967-1998. Course readings will engage with the ways in which the myriad and intricate politics of the period came to be embodied in discrete literary/filmic works which were themselves often material contributors to the discourses they emerged out of, responded to, and in turn helped inform. The reading list may include writers such as J.G. Farrell, Bernard Maclaverty, Christina Reid, Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Anna Burns, Ron Hutchinson, Michael Hughes, Eoin McNamee, as well as films such as Yann Demange's ’71, or Steve McQueen’s Hunger.