Course Timetable
View the 2023-24 CDTPS graduate course timetable (pdf)
MA Required Courses
As an introduction to graduate-level theatre and performance history and historiography, this course will teach students how to do theatre and performance history. It will combine consideration of selected topics and case studies with methodological awareness of the problems and questions that arise in the writing of such histories. The course will endeavor to present theatre and performance history as a subject that encompasses dramatic literature, material culture, embodiment, visual culture—and even how history can itself be understood as drama. Emphasis will be directed towards learning how to contextualize and situate sources within their historical and cultural frameworks.
Instructor: Izuchukwu Nwankwo
Time: Fall, Thursday, 3-6pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
This course provides an experiential learning opportunity to MA students by allowing them to pursue a practice-based project of their design under the supervision of a faculty member and with feedback from their cohort. Major components of the course are the discussion and application of various models of integrating critical analysis into practice, the introduction of different modes of research-based and critical creative practice, the development of students’ individual projects toward a workshop-oriented presentation, and the practice of peer critique.
Instructor: Antje Budde
Time: Winter, Wednesday, 11am-2pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1
This course provides introduction to the overlapping fields of drama, theatre and performance studies at the graduate level. Engaging the key texts in these fields, the course also addresses recent scholarship and artworks. It may include playtexts, performance texts, and theory, and develops and refines critical reading and analysis of this material. The course also models how scholars in the three fields use case studies to integrate analysis with theory. It builds a foundation for scholarly inquiry by incorporating local, national and international scholarship, and examines interrelationships of scholarly and artistic works.
Instructor: Christine Balt
Time: Fall, Tuesday, 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
MA Thesis Option
This course provides a capstone experience to MA students by allowing them to pursue a major research project of their design under the supervision of a faculty member. It has two options: a written scholarly thesis of approximately 40-50 pages or a hybrid artistic and scholarly project comprising a practical component and a substantial, 20-page long critical essay explicating the project’s conceptualization and execution. This work is evaluated by the course instructor and two other readers assigned from within the faculty of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. The course develops students’ conceptual understanding and methodological competence.
Instructor: Nikki Cesare Schotzko
Time: Winter S Term/Summer F Term, Thursday, 10am-1pm
Location: Walden Room, UP103
PhD Required Courses
Sources and Concepts of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies I is the first of a two-part cycle of foundational PhD-level semester courses in international histories of intellectual and creative ideas that inform drama, theatre, and performance studies. The courses invite students to examine the most significant dramatic and theatrical developments—in both theories and practices—across cultures. They focus on the historically, methodologically and theoretically informed analyses of dramatic texts, theatre productions, and performances with reference to their formal and stylistic choices, performative significance, cultural systems and conventions, and historical contexts. The courses provide ways of integrating culture-specific theory/criticism/ideas into a comprehensive understanding of world drama, theatre, and performance. This cycle may not use a fixed structure. According to the course instructor’s pedagogical approach and academic expertise, the courses may be organized along chronology, around themes, with a focus on geography, or with a combination of the previous perspectives.
Instructor: Doug Eacho
Time: Fall, Thursday, 3-6pm
Location: TBA
Sources and Concepts of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies II is the second of a two-part cycle of foundational PhD-level semester courses in international histories of intellectual and creative ideas that inform drama, theatre, and performance studies. The courses invite students to examine the most significant dramatic and theatrical developments—in both theories and practices—across cultures. They focus on the historically, methodologically and theoretically informed analyses of dramatic texts, theatre productions, and performances with reference to their formal and stylistic choices, performative significance, cultural systems and conventions, and historical contexts. The courses provide ways of integrating culture-specific theory/criticism/ideas into a comprehensive understanding of world drama, theatre, and performance. This cycle may not use a fixed structure. According to the course instructor’s pedagogical approach and academic expertise, the courses may be organized along chronology, around themes, with a focus on geography, or with a combination of the previous perspectives.
Instructor: Signy Lynch
Time: Winter, Thursday, 2-5pm
Location: Walden Room, UP103
Modelling New Scholarship is a PhD-only seminar focusing on the practice of professional scholarship in drama, theatre, and performance studies. In the course, students cultivate the research, writing, and presentation skills necessary for success in graduate school and the professional sphere. It serves as an introduction to some of the most current scholarship in the field, and develops the tools—analysis, historiography, theory—required both to engage with and to produce original work. Students will examine how scholars translate their research into original contributions to the field: from dissertation chapters, to conference presentations, to journal articles, and monographs. Students will also gain an overview of the profession, including relevant organizations, conferences, and journals, and learn how to gear their writing toward a particular audience. The seminar also considers the ways in which scholarship in drama, theatre, and performance studies both intersects with, and distinguishes itself from, other disciplines, including cultural studies, history, ethnography, and literary studies. The course may include a public humanities and/or community-based component.
Instructor: Barry Freeman
Time: Fall, Monday 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
This course is designed to acquaint students with contemporary approaches and issues in teaching and learning as they pertain to the interdisciplinary field of drama, theatre and performance studies. Emphasis will be on the theory and practice of knowledge construction and transmission. By the end of the course, students will have developed a stronger understanding of the history of pedagogy in the field, considered important theoretical paradigms in relation to their practical applications, been introduced to Indigenous and non-Western perspectives on teaching and learning, developed and experimented with specific teaching techniques appropriate to their individual professional goals, and positioned their own values and practice in relation to a community of learning, producing a statement of teaching philosophy.
Instructor: Elliot Leffler
Time: Winter, Friday, 10am–1pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1
This course has three components: (1) students prepare for and compose their dissertation proposal; (2) methodological training through which students further develop their research skills pertaining to their specific dissertation projects; and (3) logistical guidance as the students fulfil language requirements, secure a supervisor, and compile a supervisory committee. This course is CR/NCR.
Instructor: Xing Fan
Time: Fall, Thursday 10am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
Electives
This course explores plays, playwrights, and writing/theatre styles in the African dramatic oeuvre. It engages critically with the socio-cultural and historical cum philosophical contexts within which the plays under discussion were written. The focus is on dominant dramatic styles and traditions, and play samples will be drawn from central, eastern northern, southern, and western parts of the continent as a way of showing the rich diversity of written play forms across Africa. Significantly, the course explores the syncretic nature of these writings, particularly identifying the unique blend of indigenous performance traditions and other dramatic formats within these texts. Plays from, but not limited to, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thing’o, Stella Oyedepo, Tewfik Al-Hakim, Ama Ata Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, Femi Osofisan, Athol Fugard, Tess Onwueme, Ola Rotimi, will be read, discussed, and critically examined in class to give students first-hand experiences of how African plays have been presented in the written form over time.
Instructor: Izuu Nwankwọ
Time: Winter, Monday 11am-1pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
Course Description coming soon
Instructor: Xing Fan
Time: Winter, Tuesday 2-5pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
I offer a critical examination of noteworthy dynamics, movements, figures, and dramatic texts within the history of African American theatre and performance. Beginning with the horrors of American Slavery, this course examines the myriad ways in which theatre and performance have shaped, reflected, and impacted the lives and culture of African Americans and the American populace at large. We will discuss The African Grove Theatre, early Broadway musicals, lynching plays, the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights theatre, and the Black Arts Movement. In so doing, this course investigates important developments, pioneering artists, and paradigmatic texts to survey the rich history of theatre and performance of African Americans.
Instructor: Leticia Ridley
Time: Fall, Thursday, 3-5pm
Location: Front & Long Rooms
Course Description coming soon
Instructor: Antje Budde
Time: Fall, Tuesday 3-5pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1
Days before seizing power, Benito Mussolini declared, “We have created our myth. Myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality to the extent that it is a goad, a hope, faith, courage.” A more performative theory of politics could scarcely be found. Fascism, ever obsessed with representations and projections, while also insistent on its devotion to the corporeal, has from its origins forged close ties to performance and the performing arts. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Shōwa Japanese Empire, and Vichy France commanded the respect and even commitment of numerous theatrical modernists, including Filippo Marinetti, Adolphe Appia, Gertrude Stein, W. B. Yeats, Mary Wigman, and Rudolph von Laban. Their afterlives invited ironic retrospective devotion from playwrights Mishima Yukio and Peter Handke, rock band Laibach, and several J-Pop idol groups. This turn to playing the fascist stamps our present. We face a set of rather theatrical fascists, as figures such as Narendra Modi or Donald Trump often seem more intent on casting themselves into the public imagination of a dictatorial ruler than they are with affairs of state. What does the stage do for fascism?
This seminar will explore what the history of the fascist performing arts can offer a contemporary understanding of performative fascist politics and their opposition. Our readings will draw from primary texts, scholarship on fascist-affiliated performing artists, and from a century of competing theorizations of fascism (Bataille, Adorno, du Bois, Césaire, Davis, Reich, Deleuze & Guattari) and the “post-fascist” (Griffin) or “late fascist” (Toscano) present. We will develop critical concepts of how race, modern technology, and erotics structure the fascist appeal. Particular attention will be paid to globalizing our spatialization of fascist modernity and postmodernity, encompassing Indian, Argentine, Israeli, and US American examples.
Instructor: Doug Eacho
Time: Winter, Wednesday, 3-5pm
Location: Luella Massey Theatre GM1
This interdisciplinary graduate course explores the collision between the arts and technologies with all of its creative potential, unintentional collateral damage, compelling attraction, and complex social implications. It brings together scholars, artists, and students from Drama/Theatre, Visual Studies, Comparative Literature Music, Engineering, and Computer Science who are already excited by and engaged in this intersection. For students coming from an arts background the course offers direct experience of emerging technologies and chance to explore their applications to their research. For students with a technology background, the course provides the opportunity to integrate their research into an art-based, publicly presented project. The course exposes all of the students to rigorous interdisciplinary practices and their conceptual, practical and theoretical challenges through group discussions, concept generation, practical experimentation and research, and engagement with visiting artists. The course will culminate in a collaborative performance project.
Please note: entry into this course requires an interview. Contact Prof. Rokeby at david.rokeby@utoronto.ca.
Instructor: David Rokeby
Time: Fall, Wednesday, 10am-12pm
Location: Underwood Room H012
The seminar explores the rich and diverse landscape of African theatre and performance. Through critical analyses, practical workshops, case studies, and multiple readings, the course delves into historical, cultural, and socio-political contexts of theatre and performance expressions across the continent. The course also examines how Africa performance practices intersect with identity, resistance, and varying artistic modes. Through the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of African performance traditions and their global impact.
Instructor: Izuu Nwankwọ
Time: Fall, Monday 3-6pm
Location: Robarts Library Building, RL 14190
What does “Asian theatre and performance” embrace, on page and on stage? How do practitioners in Asian cultures define and accomplish aesthetic pursuits? When do “traditions” begin and end in their cultures? And, how do Asian classical theatre and performance relate to contemporary experiments in a global age? In Asia, theatre, dance, and music are real-life events through which participants celebrate the happiness, joy, coincidence, misunderstanding, crisis, and pain, in both the secular and the sacred worlds. Asian theatre and performance contribute to breathtaking and colorful practices, and unique and inspiring aesthetics. This course invites students to explore foundational theories in Asian theatre and performance, to integrate hands-on experience in their aesthetic analysis, and to conduct further research based their academic interest.
Instructor: Xing FanTime: Summer F Term 2023-24, Mondays & Wednesdays, 2-4pm
Location: Online
Reading and Research Courses
Our departmental policy regarding reading or research courses:
- PhD students can take up to one Y or two H reading/research courses during their studies in our program. MA students may take one H reading/research course.
- Generally, PhD students who take two H reading/research courses should choose different topics for those and change instructors with a new H course. Exceptions can be made on a case to case basis pending approval of the department’s director or associate director. However, this will not happen on a regular basis.
To request a reading/research course you must:
- Write a proposal for such a course.
- Find an instructor who is willing to take you on as a student for such a course on the basis of your proposal.
- Submit your proposal (after revisions by your instructor) along with the completed Request for Reading and/or Research Course form and a tentative reading list. Make sure, that you and the instructor agree on the number, deadlines and grade value of the course assignments. Make sure that you provide information about the frequency of meetings with your instructor (i.e. bi-weekly 2 hours, weekly 1 hour, monthly four hours).
- Sign the form, get the signatures of your instructor and finally the signature of the associate director (after approval you can be enrolled by our Graduate Administrator). Always check the School of Graduate Studies deadlines for course enrolment.
Cross-listed Courses
The following courses may be of interest to CDTPS students. Please note that enrolment may be limited as students enrolled in these departments have enrolment priority.
COL5122H TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA
This course examines new forms of textualities and textual practices that are emerging in the digital era. It highlights an understudied dimension of the text, i.e. the medium that forms its material and technological infrastructure such as scroll, codex, book, CD, e-book, the Internet, and smartphone. The course starts with a historical investigation into the printed text and print culture. Then it moves on to the question of how digital technologies shape reading and writing as well as other text-based cultural practices. While the course revolves around the mediality of the text, it distances itself from technological determinism by stressing the facts that digital technologies are always embedded in and shaped by historically specific political, social, and cultural conditions. This course is designed for students who are interested in questions and issues related to literary production in the digital era and more generally the materiality of the text. Theoretical and scholarly works we will engage with in this course include, but not limited to, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (McLuhan, 1964), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Adrian Johns, 2000), Writing Machines (N. Katherine Hayles, 2002), Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Jay David Bolter, 2001), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Mark Hansen, 2006), The Interface Effect (Alexander R. Galloway), The Language of New Media (Lev Manovich, 2002), Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009).
Instructor: R. Bai
Time: Winter, Wednesday 11-2pm
COL5109H
JEAN-LUC NANCY: RETREATING THE AESTHETIC
Instructor: J. Ricco
Time: Spring term, Thursdays, 10-12
Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on art, aesthetics, and sense has achieved widespread significance in contemporary philosophical, art historical, and theoretical discussions and debates on the relations between art, politics, and ethics. This course provides students with an opportunity to engage with close readings of his work, in order to develop an understanding of the specific priority granted to the praxis of art and aisthesis in his thinking on sense, existence, and being-with. Books by Nancy such as The Muses, The Ground of the Image, Being Singular Plural, Corpus, The Pleasure of Drawing, and Noli Me Tangere, will be read along with the work of other philosophers who have informed Nancy’s own thinking (e.g. Hegel, Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida).
ENG2017HF
Early Modern Asexualities
Instructor: L. Blake
Course Description:
This course will have two main goals. First, we will read and discuss modern scholarship on asexuality, the sexual orientation often characterized by or defined as a lack of sexual attraction. We will investigate asexuality as a queer identity, and talk about how the study of asexuality has the potential to bring new perspectives to queer theory. Second, we will think about what it means to look for and read for asexuality in history. We will read sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, asking what it means to look for asexuality and aromanticism beyond the twentieth century. We will continually ask not just how to build an “asexual archive”—how to find traces of asexuality and aromanticism in the past—but also how the particular shapes of asexuality that we find in early modern texts might help us rethink modern allonormativity (the assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the assumption that most people should be striving to be in romantic pairings or couples).
The class does not assume any prior knowledge of asexuality.
Course Reading List:
Possible primary readings include: William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing [play]; Anon, The Four Prentices of London [play]; Margaret Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure [play]; William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis [long narrative poem]; Thomas Nashe, “The Choice of Valentines” [short narrative poem]; John Marston, Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image [erotic epyllion]; Katherine Phillips, metaphysical poetry of friendship; Abraham Cowley, The Mistress [a collection of poetry that caused Samuel Johnson to call him a “philosophical rhymer who had only ever heard of the other sex”]; C17 “Platonic Love” poetry movement and its opponents
Possible secondary readings include theory and criticism by Ela Przybylo, Danielle Cooper, Kim F. Hall, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Christine Varnado, Eunjung Kim, Mel Y. Chen, Simone Chess, Michael Cobb, Melissa E. Sanchez, Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, as well as asexual blogs and other public writing from the online ace community.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Class participation, class presentation, targeted research writeups, annotated bibliography, final paper
Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 9:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 100A (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2226HS
Early Modern Manuscripts
Instructor: M. Teramura
Course Description:
While the digitization of early English printed books has revolutionized literary scholarship, a massive field of textual production, one that permeated every facet of early modern life, remains comparatively understudied: manuscripts. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, letters, diaries, depositions, wills, recipe books -- the rich and varied manuscript archive offers ever-expanding horizons for research as new digitization projects are making manuscripts around the world more accessible than ever before. This seminar will introduce participants to a wide range of manuscript genres while providing sustained practice in paleography. We will begin by examining the kinds of manuscripts most closely relevant to literary study (authorial holographs, verse miscellanies, dramatic scripts, playhouse documents) before exploring and move on to other forms of manuscript production of the time (letters, government documents, commonplace books, financial records). The goals of this seminar are: to introduce participants to the scope of early modern manuscript culture; to develop participants' skills in reading a variety of early modern hands; to provide orientation to the resources that will allow participants to locate and access manuscripts; and to give participants a sense of the new research possibilities on manuscript sources.
Course Texts:
Primary readings will include manuscripts of works by authors such as John Donne, Queen Elizabeth I, John Milton, and Hester Pulter; while many of these texts will be short, the most substantial will likely be the collaboratively authored play Sir Thomas More (Arden edition), and The Concealed Fancies by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley. Primary readings will be paired with secondary texts on manuscript culture from a range of historical, literary critical, and paleographical perspectives.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Participation 20%; Mini-Assignments 20%; In-Class Presentation 10%; Final Project 50%.
Term: S-TERM (January 2023 to April 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 616 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2506HF
Shakespeare's Theatrical (After) Lives
Instructor: H. Syme
Course Description:
In this course we will investigate how the texts, meanings, and ideological affordances of Shakespeare's plays have been shaped and reinvented by successive generations of theatre artists from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a focus on Anglophone theatre, primarily in Britain and the US, we will trace how and why certain plays by Shakespeare disappear from the repertory and reemerge at other times, sometimes in radically altered forms, even as Shakespeare (in markedly different configurations) remained central to the Anglophone theatrical tradition over the centuries. Our investigations will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, the changing status of the text in discussions and practices of theatre making, and the effects of the rise of the scholarly textual editor on theatrical practices; and on the other hand, the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as occasions for negotiating questions of gender, race, and (nationalist) politics.
Course Reading List:
Plays including (but not limited to) _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and _Richard III_; archival materials ranging from 18th-century prompt books to contemporary stage managers' accounts from Shakespeare's Globe; works by scholars including Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, Robert Hornback, M. J. Kidnie, Judith Pascoe, Richard Schoch, Ayanna Thompson, and many others.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Final paper 40%
Conference-style final presentation 15%
Paper proposal and brief annotated bibliography 10%
Assigned reading presentation 15%
Participation 20%
Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Thursday / 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
Please contact gradadmin.music@utoronto.ca to enroll.
ITA1540HF
Renaissance Italian Theatre
Prof. Laura Ingallinella
Mondays 10am-12pm
This course will investigate the representation of identity and difference in Renaissance Italy by interrogating spectacles designed for a public or private audience. By using an interdisciplinary approach, this course will combine close reading and book history with diverse critical frameworks such as gender performativity, Marxist theory, premodern critical race studies, and disability theory. Our goal will be to investigate how critical theory, in its varying facets, can help expose power structures and tensions within Renaissance and early modern literary artifacts—in this specific case, dramaturgical texts—as they relate to gender, sexuality, class, religious difference, and race. Representative authors to be studied are: Isabella Andreini, Pietro Aretino, Lodovico Ariosto, Feo Belcari, Maddalena Campiglia, Niccolò Machiavelli, Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonia Pulci, Beolco-Ruzante, Gian Giorgio Trissino
SJE5041HS
Disability Studies Through Narrative Inquiry
Instructor: Devon Healey
Winter 2024
Mondays, 5:30 – 8:30 PM; Online.
Making use of narrative inquiry as a disability studies orientation, this seminar course will examine the life of disability as it is written and narrated in contemporary Western culture. We will explore the narratives of disability found in various professions such as medicine, rehabilitation, special education and disability studies itself. These narratives act as the dominant cultural background upon which stories of disability emerge. Ironically, this dominant narrative provides the ground and possibility for radical and critical disability stories. The latter are written and narrated by disabled people. The overall aim of this course is to demonstrate that disability appears to all of us, disabled and non-disabled people, as a story to be told and lived. Thus, this course demonstrates and exemplifies Thomas King’s (2003) “insight” that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 2).
SJE5059H
Disability Studies & the Culture of Vision
Instructor: Devon Healey
Summer 2024
Mondays & Thursdays, 5:30 – 8:30 PM; Online.
This Disability Studies course will explore vision as culture. Even though vision is typically understood as the physiological process of seeing and, therefore, of perceiving the world, this course will show that culture is necessary for any seeing and perception. After all, it is culture – how we live, the customs and norms we live by, our understanding of reality - that implicitly defines the world before any perception of it takes place. This suggests that it is not the eyes that see, but instead it is people who see. Thus, this course will explore the cultural processes and practices of vision including how we look, how we are looked at, how we see and, how we are seen. Not only will this course deal with vision understood as culture, it will also explore the consequences of such an understanding, its’ effect on social identity and marginality as well as how vision, when framed as culture, can change our pedagogy and politics. The culture of vision is addressed through an examination of theorists and narratives that highlight the features, norms, and values of vision with a particular focus on that which is typically considered its opposite, namely blindness. Blindness, especially as it appears in popular culture, education, and the arts will be our primary guide for this examination.
Students whose interests can be served by courses offered in other departments should consult the Associate Director, Graduate about their choices. A few examples include: