Courses

The following courses can be taken to meet the course requirements of the specialization. Required courses are MER 9000 plus a total of two half courses from the list below: One half course from your home program, and one half course from an outside program. To register for a MER approved course outside of your home program please contact the course instructor for approval, complete and sign the Request Form, and return the form to your home program’s graduate assistant for course enrollment. Contact departments or instructors for further course details.

MER 9000 - Colloquium Series in Migration and Ethnic Relations

Credited or Non-credited requirement (as determined by home department)
Haan, Full Year | Thursdays "roughly bi-weekly", 4:00 - 5:30 | 

Associated faculty, students, and guest speakers present their research. There will be at least ten colloquia per year, with some of the talks involving attendance at specific occasions in series organized by other groups. Besides the colloquia in which research is presented, there will be other scheduled meetings in which students will discuss professional issues, opportunities for collaboration, and other topics.

MER Specialization Courses 2024-2025

Please note that for all MER-related courses listed below, students must write their major paper for the course on a directly relevant MER topic.

Anthropology 9127A - Historical Material Culture
Trish Markert | Fall 2025
Material culture encompasses the relationships between people and their material world (e.g., objects, landscapes, written records, architecture). This course offers a hands-on approach to the archaeological theorization, identification, recordation, and analysis of material culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Students will work with real collections to complete term projects. Students will learn to identify, catalog, analyze, conserve, and curate historic materials including glass, ceramic, and metal, as well as practice methods like photogrammetry for recording objects and buildings. Partnering with local organizations like TMHC Inc and the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, students will work with real historic collections from Ontario to complete term projects, which include a public-facing exhibit design and a research essay/material culture analysis. (MER students registered in this course should write their essay related to Migration and Ethnic Relations)

CLC 9625B Cross-listed with SPAN 9029B
Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla | Winter 2026
From Saussure to Derrida, from Foucault to Butler, Marx to Žižek, Freud to Kristeva, Fanon to Hall and Muñoz, this course aims to introduce graduate students to the rich field of interdisciplinary cultural studies. Students will not only become familiar with relevant schools of thought but also practice and develop interdisciplinary strategies to analyze social/literary issues. Facilitating our ambitious project will be a number of cultural artifacts informing a conversation around the possible meanings around the concept of the “American dream,” its vices, virtues, its concomitant politics of inclusion/exclusion. Along the way, we will also be mindful of how this “dream,” or "dreams," play a role in the framing discourses of empire, intervention, migration, gender, sex, class and ethnicity/race. We will be in great company, fighting wars overseas with Chicanos; road tripping with Thelma and Louise, Tenoch and Julio Zapata. From a postwar touch of evil to the easy riding of the late 1960s, from stories of migration to the dream-dealers of the dystopian future, this course will wrestle with that ever-elusive concept of the American dream, the nightmare, the sham, the saving graces.

Hispanic Studies SP 9648B/CL 9722B - Testimony, Memory, and Fiction
 Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla | Winter 2026
This course will be devoted to the study of memory and its connections to writing modalities such as the testimonial, the memoire, auto-fiction and fiction, in Latin American and in US/Canadian Latinx contexts. The texts, films and artistic installations we will be exploring will range from those centered on the bitter fruits of the Cold War in Latin America, but also on more recent phenomena such as the various indigenous/student/feminist movements of self-determination, as well as on the complex migration flows across las Américas from the early 1970s to the present day. Along the way, we will be thinking about the nature of testimonial literature and its emergence in Latin America, its understanding as a literary genre and its positionality vis a vis the literary canon and vis a vis political action. The concepts that will inform our discussions will be subalternity, voice, social justice, human rights, transnational solidarity, reparations, and memory. We will be listening to the voices from various struggles, from women, youth, combatants, and the indigenous. We will end, finally, on a consideration of fiction as a potential tool for remembering and imaginative healing. (MER students registered in this course should write their essay related to Migration and Ethnic Relations)

History 9718B - Race and Gender on Imperial Frontiers: Comparative Settler Colonialisms
Laurel Clark Shire | Winter 2026
(contact instructor first for space availability)
Course Description: In this course we will read and discuss recent literature on the history of settler colonialism in North America alongside comparative studies of other settler societies around the globe. In the past few decades, scholars have begun to use “settler colonialism” to describe societies in which outsiders (white Europeans in most cases) invaded a place in order to settle there permanently, and used political, legal, cultural, and economic structures to transform it into their space, turning themselves into its “natives.” Unlike other kinds of imperial regimes, large numbers of women from the invading culture helped to colonize settler colonies, but they were otherwise very similar to other imperial ventures, and to varying degrees most combined the appropriation of indigenous land with resource extraction and forced labor. New gender norms and racial hierarchies arose from white settler colonial methods of taking land and extracting labor. These new relations of power and privilege had very different consequences for white settlers, displaced Indigenous people, and imported laborers. Due to time constraints, this course will focus mainly on the experiences and interactions of Indigenous peoples and invading settlers, with less time (though not importance) given to the forced migrants and enslaved people that European empires and settlers exploited. NOTE: For MER students, essay topics must be related to Migration and Ethnic Relations

Sociology 9147B
 Lora Phillips | Winter 2026

Sociology 9331B
 Anna Zajacova | Winter 2026