Courses
Fall 2025
HIST 3218 | Crossroads of Empire: Ireland, Canada, and 19th-Century Anglo-American Relations | Instructor: Brendan Shanahan | T 1:30-3:20
This seminar examines the role of Ireland, Canada, and Irish (North) Americans in the development of U.S.-U.K. relations and the (geo)politics of Anglo-American empire in the long nineteenth century. It explores the countless examples of fracture, détente, and alternatively competing and collaborative imperial projects that defined Anglo-American relations in the long nineteenth century (prior to rise of rapprochement, alliance, and the eventual “special” U.S.-U.K. relationship of the twentieth century). The course pays special attention to the importance of international relations to the domestic politics of each respective polity and the transnational forms of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics that emerged from them. The class primarily engages the fields of (North) American political history, migration history, diplomatic history, comparative empire, and U.S. and the World scholarship. Students also workshop original research methods and makes use of Yale’s Library and Archival Collections.
Spring 2025
EVST 300 | Canada's Response to Global Environmental Wicked Problems | Instructor: Dawn Bazely | TTh 11:35-12:50 | WLH 112
This seminar course surveys Canada’s responses to eleven Global Environmental Wicked Problems that have emerged into the public consciousness and discourses over the last ten to fifteen years. We discuss how (1) evidence-based policy, and (2) science research that might have informed politics and politicians, either prevailed or failed in Canada.
Fall 2024
HIST 168J | Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present | Instructor: Jay Gitlin | T 3:30-5:20m| DC 215
The history of Quebec and its place within Canada from the Constitutional Act of 1791 to the present. Topics include the Rebellion of 1837, confederation, the Riel Affair, industrialization and emigration to New England, French-Canadian nationalism and culture from Abbé Groulx to the Parti Québécois and Céline Dion, and the politics of language. Readings include plays by Michel Tremblay and Antonine Maillet in translation.
HIST 154J | Neighbo(u)ring Democracies: Representative Politics in the United States and Canada, 1607-Present | Instructor: Brendan Shanahan | T 1:30-3:20 | WLH 014
This seminar examines how representative politics have evolved in the United States and Canada from the turn of the seventeenth century to the present. Students learn diverse ways in which forms of liberal democracy—republicanism and constitutional monarchy in particular—have emerged in North America, how processes of democratization have operated, and the degree to which representative governments in Canada and the U.S. borrow from and emerge out of common and/or disparate contexts. Special emphasis is placed on—but is not limited to—the history of suffrage and voting rights in the United States and Canada.