Courses on Canada at UC Berkeley
Faculty and departments across campus offer a range of courses relevant to Canadian Studies. As an interdisciplinary program, Canadian Studies encourages students to take classes acrosss a variety of disciplines.
Spring 2025
Prose Nonfiction (ENGLISH 143N 001)
Instructor: Cecil S. Giscombe
4 units | M, W | 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Lewis 9 | Class #: 31175
This creative writing course will help students hone their writing abilities through the vehicle of the personal essay. The focus of the course will be on the prominence of travel in North American literature, and sense of motion it conveys. Course instructor Cecil S. Giscombe has written several travelogues, notably works tracing his possible relationship to a Black pioneer in inland British Columbia. Students will learn from other works including Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and BC-based author Gladys Hindmarch's Watery Part of the World.
Native American Literature and Culture (ENGLISH 154 001)
Instructor: Beth Piatote
4 units | Tu, Th | 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Lewis 9 | Class #: 33139
This survey course introduces several prominent genres of Native American literary production, including oral traditions, nonfiction essay, novel, short story, poems, and speculative fiction. Selections are drawn primarily from Native American/Aboriginal writers in the United States and Canada from the nineteenth century to present, including The Marrow Thieves by Canadian Métis author Cherie Dimaline. In addition to aesthetic and literary analysis, particular attention will be given to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which these works were produced.
A Cultural History of Montreal (FRENCH 103B 2)
Instructor: William Burton
4 units | Tu, Th | 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Dwinelle 206 | Class #: 31483
Montreal, Quebec, is one of the largest Francophone cities in the world, and the largest in North America. Located on a continent where most people speak English, this French-speaking metropolis lays at the crossroads of multiple histories of colonisation. This has given its authors and filmmakers a unique perspective on such common issues as urbanisation and industrialisation, sexuality, racism, and migration. In this class, we will study literature and film that depict the city over the course of the past century or so, which reveal how its concerns are related to, but distinct from, those of the continent’s Spanish– and English-speaking traditions. The semester will be divided into four units focusing on:
(1) francophone settlers’ efforts to construct a uniquely North American voice;
(2) the social and economic dislocations caused North American-style industrialisation;
(3) Indigenous resistance to colonisation in and around Montreal; and
(4) migration to the city in the wake of slavery and war in the francophone world.
This class is taught entirely in French.