University of British Columbia

This course examines how art and visual culture in Europe and the United States both reflected and shaped the cultural discourses of politics, class, gender, race, religion, and science that accompanied these ongoing changes. Particular attention will be paid to processes of industrialization, urbanism, and colonialism and their effects on art’s making and reception from the French Revolution (1789) through the beginning of World War I (1914). In addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, we will chart the development of emerging media from new printmaking technologies to photography and early film. 

This course examines a major issue in comparative politics (e.g., the media, gender, nationalism, ethnic conflict). Topics will vary from year to year.

This course examines Western European thought from Augustine to the 14th century. Possible topics and authors include: Augustine; Abelard; the influence of Islam; the rediscovery of Aristotle; Aquinas; Scotus; Ockham.

This course examines the different ways in which people experience and explain supernatural phenomena across the globe. It will look at these varied understandings and people’s experiences of witches, witchcraft, vampires, zombies, and other supernatural phenomena across time and space. This course will address various questions, including how “the supernatural” is a category of beliefs, phenomena and experiences that did not fit within the narrative of a dualistic, scientific paradigm developed in the West as a result of the so-called “Enlightenment” era. It will also look at how this itself was “a myth of modernity” which ignored the fact that not infrequently magic and science coexist. As part of a process of decolonizing knowledge, we will also examine supernatural and occult traditions as they appear in the context of religion, narrative, healing, ritual and media accounts and representations in Western cultures. The primary focus in this course is not belief, but practice, and not what people say they do, but what they do and why they do it. This course seeks neither to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural phenomena, nor to make value judgments about people’s praxes. Rather, it takes an ethnographic, phenomenological approach, recognizing people’s lived supernatural experiences and the many different ways in which people inhabit and perceive this world. 

This course examines the connection of global and local environments. Case studies will include historical responses to climate change in Europe and North America, the transformation of indigenous foodways and the urban development of Vancouver. 

This course examines issues such as interstate conflicts, terrorism, environmental change, international crime. Topics will vary from year to year.