Program
Application Period is now open for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Second Year
Second Year Courses:
Dr. Nina Zitani leads second-year SASAH students through the Department of Biology's Zoological Collections
SASAH 2230G - Digital Tools, Digital Literacies
What are the implications of “the digital turn,” and what does it mean to pursue “literacy” in an era of seemingly endless information? This course examines the development of information systems and technologies by considering their past, present, and potential future trajectories. We also explore how we shape (and are shaped by) these technologies with hands-on activities and collaborative research projects. Course materials survey how digital researchers and historians, web and software developers, artists, authors, activists, and theorists inform and engage our digital landscapes—posing critical questions of social, political, economic, and creative significance. We discuss the discipline of the Digital Humanities and evaluate the impacts and effectiveness of a variety of digital tools on our research: understanding and applying large language models (LLMs); engaging critically with social media and content platforms through introductory design skills and creation (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, metadata); implementing research and citation tools; navigating search engines, databases, and a range of digital archives; understanding and troubleshooting barriers to information access; using text mining and analytics software to explore and express large amounts of data.
Prerequisite: 75% or higher in SASAH 1020E or the former ArtHum 1020E. 3 hours/week, 1.5 course
SASAH 2240G – Foundations of Theory in the Arts and Humanities
This survey of literary theory and criticism introduces students to some of the most important genealogies of cultural, aesthetic, and political thought since antiquity. By developing tools to analyze the ineffable “products” of culture—such as race, desire, power, fantasy, and ideology—theory helps us navigate our cultural landscape. To that end, we will explore psychoanalysis, structuralism, postcolonial criticism, black studies, queer theory, and other theoretical movements that have transformed how we interpret the world. Throughout the course, we will remain mindful of how urgent questions of race, gender, class, and geopolitics are not to be treated separately from theory and criticism, but are instead embedded in aesthetic, cultural, and social thought from the outset. In other words, rather than treating movements like feminism or postcolonial criticism as though they exist in a vacuum, we will consider how race, gender, class, etc. have always informed theory.
Prerequisite: 75% or higher in SASAH 1020E or the former ArtHum 1020E. 3 hours/week, 1.5 course
SASAH 2290F - Research Topics in the Arts and Humanities
Our world involves interpretation all the way down, from the unpredictability of climate change to the intimacy of interspecies interactions to the uncertainty of particle physics. Just as much as it’s an intellectual, solitary, critical, and readerly way of making meaning in the world, interpretation is embodied, social, creative, and writerly. Getting it right requires mastering a set of skills specific to a practice though applicable in others. This course teaches interpretation through the conjunction of two hands-on practices, poetry and beekeeping, and then cultivates tools for generalizing this art to the rest of our lives. Working alongside bees and through decades of literary criticism and extra-literary exegesis, students will recover—neither as populist nostalgia nor technocratic optimization but as enlightened experience—the universality and humanity in university humanities education. Students will leave with advanced techniques in poetics and apiculture.
Prerequisite: 75% or higher in SASAH 1020E or the former ArtHum 1020E. 3 hours/week, 1.5 course
SASAH 2291F - Research Topics in the Arts and Humanities
Advocacy is defined as generating support for a particular cause in the public sphere, and it can be an important space where political purpose and civic engagement meet and foster change for the better. Advocacy movements take myriad forms, and actions may be directed toward advocating for the self, toward advocating for others, or toward advocating for total systems change at the local, national, and cultural levels. Advocacy encompasses movements for climate justice, food security, political participation, labour rights, human rights, cultural awareness, legal justice, medical advocacy, and so much more. As a citizen, what is your current relationship with advocacy? Have you ever felt compelled (or even forced) to advocate for yourself, for a friend or family member, or for a group?
In this course, we will focus locally to explore histories of advocacy within London and the surrounding region. Students will let your own personal advocacy concerns guide your explorations of a local archive of advocacy, and you'll learn archival research strategies and techniques to navigate a unique array of physical materials. You will also be challenged to bridge the past and the present by bringing your case study research into contact with current advocacy movements. We will also meet with advocacy leaders who work on the ground with various civic and community partners. Throughout the course, we'll be developing a language for advocacy: thinking through the kind of advocacy we can do in our own lives, examining important critiques of advocacy movements, and engaging challenges for advocating critically and effectively in the digital present.
Prerequisite: 75% or higher in SASAH 1020E or the former ArtHum 1020E. 3 hours/week, 1.5 course
