Graduate academic calendar 2012 - 2013 - Trent University

GRADUATE PROGRAMS Theory, Culture & Politics
102
M.A. Program in Theory, Culture & Politics
Telephone: 705-748-1011 ext. 1809
Fax: 705-748-1829
E-mail: theory@trentu.ca
Web: www.trentu.ca/theorycentre
Interdisciplinary in spirit and theoretical in emphasis, this M.A. program focuses on contemporary
issues in the humanities and social sciences from the perspectives of contemporary critical, cultural
and political theory. The program responds to a situation in which the human sciences, without having
resolved traditional problems concerning strategies for, and the status of, their various kinds of inquiry,
have been overtaken by new problems in which once founding categories and assumptions have been
radically challenged from a variety of philosophical and political directions so that a new intellectual
agenda is beginning to emerge.
The aim of the program is to enable students to engage these issues in the context of intensive
collegial discussion and substantive projects of research. In addition to background courses, student
work centres on a core seminar (T5000) and on a Master’s thesis. An annual speakers’ series is
organized in conjunction with the T5000 seminar. The degree program is intended both as a
preparation for doctoral studies, and as a qualification in itself for those pursuing a non-academic
career, for example, in teaching, media, law and government service.
Areas of emphasis within the program are: textuality, semiotics and discourse; nature, culture and
technology; gender, body and psyche; science as knowledge and discourse; social and political theory.
The program is connected to the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture & Politics, which
encourages faculty and student research, publications, visiting speakers and conferences. Each year
the Centre and the program adopt a loosely overarching theme for the main speakers’ series and
seminar. Past themes have included the practice of theory, media and discourse, time and historicity,
science and culture, borders and boundaries, rethinking the political, and culture and the political. The
current theme is Re-presentations. For further information about the Centre, the program and current
activities, please visit our website at www.trentu.ca/theorycentre.
Graduate Program Director
D. G. Holdsworth, M.Sc. (McMaster), Ph.D. (Western Ontario)
Canada Research Chair
D. Panagia, B.A. (Manitoba), M.Litt. (Oxford), M.A., Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins)
Faculty and Research Areas
Anthropology
P. Manning, B.A.(Reed) M.A., Ph.D. (Chicago), Linguistic anthropology, semiotics, anthropology
of romance, anthropology of politics, liberalism and neo-liberalism, colonialism, technology and
nature, landscape, the anthropology of the preternatural
A. Meneley, B.A. (McGill) Ph.D. (New York), Middle East, Islam, religion and world views, ethnographic
methods, histories of anthropological theory, and global circulations of food commodities.
Cultural Studies
Z. Baross, B.A. (UBC), M.A. (London), Ph.D. (Amsterdam), ethics of testimony and witnessing,
question of community/ hostility/hospitality, relation between political and the philosophical, lure of the
Image.
J. Bordo, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. (Yale), condition of modernity, with reference to visual art, architecture,
landscape and monumental sites, cultural transmission, the (post)modern sublime.
V. de Zwaan, B.A. (Trent), M.A. (McGill), Ph.D. (Toronto), narrative and genre theory; experimental
fiction; history of the novel; literary theory; comparative literature; hypertext and new media fiction.
R. Dellamora, (Emeritus), M.A. (Cambridge), Ph.D. (Yale), Victorian studies, aestheticism and
decadence, literature/visual arts/opera in relation to gender and sexuality, cultural construction of
masculinities, critical theory (Foucault, Barthes and Derrida).