Current 2024-2025 Graduate Courses

DSR FALL GRADUATE COURSES BEGIN TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

DSR WINTER GRADUATE COURSES BEGIN MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2025

Please check back regularly for updates. This page last updated on June 24, 2024. 

Graduate students from other departments at U of T are welcome to enroll in DSR courses without completing a course add form. Non-DSR students should check with their home department to confirm if they require the form.

Please contact Director of Graduate Studies at graddir.religion@utoronto.ca, or the Graduate Administrator, Fereshteh Hashemi, at religion.grad@utoronto.ca, with any questions you may have about the Department for the Study of Religion.

DSR Graduate Timetable 

Current: PDF iconDraft DSR Grad Timetable 2024-2025_June 24.pdf

On this page:

→ DSR Courses - Year
→ DSR Courses - Fall
→ DSR Courses - Winter
→ U of T Language Courses
→ Other Courses of Interest

DSR Courses - Year

RLG1000Y – Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

Simon Coleman (Fall) and Marsha Hewitt  (Winter)
Tuesdays 10 am-12:30 pm JHB213

The seminar is the core course of the Department’s doctoral program. It is required of, and limited to, all first year Ph.D. students of the Department. The purpose of the course is to provide doctoral students with a general understanding of the study of religion through constructive engagement with a number of fundamental challenges--theoretical and methodological--that commonly confront researchers in the field. It revisits major interpretive controversies that have shaped the history of "religious studies" as an interdisciplinary field, inviting students to join in this ongoing scholarly conversation.

DSR Courses - Fall

RLG1006HF South Asian Religions Gateway Seminar

Srilata Raman
Thursdays 10am to 12pm, JHB213

This gateway seminar  will  introduce  students  to  the  field  of South  Asian  Religions,  both  as  an  interdisciplinary  academic  formation  and  as  a subfield of religious studies. It aims to provide students with a schematic account of the field’s history and the major questions that have animated research in it, as well as showcasing more recent or cutting-edge work. Students will gain familiarity with key research  tools  and  methods  and,  at  the  end  of  the  semester,  will  be  able  to construct a syllabus to teach South Asian religions at the introductory level.

RLG1200HF – MA Method and Theory

Nada Moumtaz
Wednesdays 12 pm - 2 pm,  JHB213

The M.A. Workshop Group is required of all first year M.A students of the Department. M.A. students will meet every week during the first term in a seminar course designed to provide rigorous training in method and theory in the study of religion. Topics considered include: historical development of religious studies, significance and application of interdisciplinary methodologies, key theorists and theoretical controversies.

RLG2005H Religion and Posthumanism

Frances Garrett
Mondays 1pm to 3pm, JHB208

This course examines religious, cultural, and philosophical perspectives on the human and other-than-human. Themes and religious traditions studied will vary by year but may include human-environment relationships; animal ethics; multispecies subjectivity and embodiment; legacies of scientific racism; ecological, legal, and ethical consequences of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism; religious uses of intelligent technology; global and historical transhuman movements; or religious responses to climate crisis.

RLG2041 Decolonizing Philology: Asian Textual Traditions

Alessandro Graheli
Mondays 10am to 12pm, JHB208

This course is an introduction to the basics of critical editing for students of Asian languages. Students will enter the atelier of critical editors of Asian works, with a focus on religious texts: they will understand the purposes of inventories, descriptions, and collations of textual witnesses, studies of their genealogy, examination and choice of the variants, and reconstructions of the best texts. The course may also select specific topics in Asian textual cultures, involve the study of sources in their original format, and convey specialized notions in paleography, codicology, bibliography, stemmatics, and digital humanities.This course is based on the assumption that philology is a hermeneutic enterprise that centers the text and is therefore neither Anglocentric, nor Eurocentric, nor simply obsolete. Indeed, every text has been historically transmitted, reconstructed, received, or even falsified. However, the present disciplines, categories, strategies, and techniques of classical philology were developed in a European milieu and tailored to the needs of European languages. The course will therefore critically assess these current Eurocentric categories, techniques, etc… in order to adapt them to the various Asian textual traditions, especially religious ones. The broader purpose of this course is to nourish the awareness that our historicity shapes our interpretation. As such, the course will be useful to all textually oriented students.

RLG2066H/RLG423H Great Critics of Religion

James DiCenso
Tuesdays 3pm to 5pm, JHB213

An advanced study of the work of critical thinkers such as David Hume on the topic of religion. Works studied include the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Natural History of Religion, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

RLG2081H/TRP6523H Trauma, Healing & Transformation

Marsha Hewitt
Tuesdays 1pm to 3pm, location TBC

Study of key theoretical concepts in psychoanlaytic theory, i.e. the unconscious, repression, aggression, sexuality, dreams, unconscious fantasy, transference and projection and their implications for understanding religious experience and belief in the work of Sigmund Freud, D. W. Winnicott, R. D. Laing, and other analytic writers. Freud was consistent in asserting that theory must reflect and elaborate clinical observation. Thus, the course will also include extensive discussions of clinical case material in order to illustrate the ways in which these concepts illuminate and help explain not only internal psychic experience but also the ways in which culture, society and politics structure and shape the human mind. The course will also examine the historical trajectories of psychoanalytic concepts, including some of the main controversies and debates around issues such as repression, dissociation and trauma.

RLG3217H Social Networks and Elective Cults in Antiquity

John Kloppenborg
Wednesdays 9am to 12pm, JHB213

Social networks are critical keys to the transmission and exchange of various non-material and material commodities, including rumours, information, employment opportunities, influence, infections and religious cults. Social Network Theory provides useful models to account for the diffusion of elective cults within the deregulated religious environment of the ancient Mediterranean World (300 BCE--300 CE). The course will examine selected elective cults, reconstruct the social networks in which they are embedded, and develop theoretical models by which to account for the successes or failures in propagation.

RLG3516H Islamic Law and Society: The Family in Islamic Law 

Sara VerskinTuesdays 1pm to 3pm, JHB213

This course places Islamic Law within the wider debates on law and society, a field that evolved out of the social scientific study of law, with a special focus on the anthropology of Islamic Law. It is organized thematically, and combines readings from different periods, emphasizing the profound changes to Islamic law and society since the nineteenth century. The course will be mostly focused on the early modern and modern Islamic history and will not delve into the debates of the formation of Islamic Law, legal schools and genres. Each session will combine theoretical readings addressing the questions we will be tackling in the nexus of law/ society, and we will address various substantive topics (like gender, property, punishment, war).

Topics to be covered in Fall 2024 include:

  • Contracting marriage in legal theory
  • Divorce in medieval theory and practice
  • Inheritance: money and family
  • Extending family: "adoption," milk-siblinghood, and the sleeping fetus
  • Contraception and abortion in medieval Islamic thought
  • Defining adulthood: ritual, responsibility, and consent
  • Household labor: obligation and compensation 
  • Siblinghood
  • Anthropology of family in 20th-century rural Egypt and Iran

RLG3622H/RLG433H Maimonides

Ken Green
Wednesdays 3pm to 5pm, location TBC

An introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, and to some of the basic themes in Jewish philosophical theology and religion. Among topics to be considered through close textual study of the Guide: divine attributes; biblical interpretation; creation versus eternity; prophecy; providence, theodicy, and evil; wisdom and human perfection. Also to be examined are leading modern interpreters of Maimonides.

RLG3634H Worship and Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Judith Newman
Mondays 1pm to 3pm, JHB213

This graduate seminar will examine selected psalms, prayers, and hymns and other less overtly "liturgical" texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls.  We will consider the performative role of such texts in the Qumran movement and their relation to the evolving growth of the Hebrew Bible in the two centuries before and after the common era.  The relationship of these texts to later Jewish and Christian liturgical texts (e.g., the book of Psalms) and the New Testament will also be considered. Seminar participation, seminar presentations, major paper. Requires working knowledge of Hebrew.

DSR Courses - Winter

RLG1003H Islamic Studies Gateway Seminar

Suleyman Dost
Mondays 10am to 12pm, JHB213

This gateway seminar will introduce students to the field of Islamic studies and the basic research methods of the field. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the history of Islamic studies and the major questions that has animated it as a field in religious studies. Since Islamic Studies is made up of various subfields, each week will be devoted to one particular branch of Islamic studies. For each of these subfields we will cover the history of the discipline, the research tools and the most recent developments. Students become familiar with the research tools and methods available and learn how to utilize them in their own research projects. By the end of the course students will have a metahistory of the field as well as an ability to construct a syllabus to teach Islamic studies at the introductory level.

RLG1005H Jewish Studies Gateway Seminar

Yigal Nizri
Thursdays 5pm to 7pm, JHB213

This gateway seminar will introduce students to the field of Jewish studies, both as an interdisciplinary academic formation and as a subfield of religious studies. It aims to provide students with a schematic account of the field’s history and the major questions that have animated research in it, as well as showcasing more recent or cutting-edge work. Students will gain familiarity with key research tools and methods and, at the end of the semester, will be able to construct a syllabus to teach Jewish studies at the introductory level.

RLG2015H/RLG414H Comparing Religion

Reid Locklin
Thursdays 11am to 1pm, location TBC

Few methods have been more foundational to the scholarly study of religion, or more subject to searching criticism, than the practice of comparison. This seminar offers an advanced introduction to comparative method in the contemporary academy by means of a close study of 4-6 significant comparative projects published in the last decade. Examples will be drawn from different sub-disciplines of Religion, including but not limited to ritual studies, philosophy of religion, comparative theology and/or ethnography.

RLG2045H Modern Buddhist Fiction

Christoph Emmrich
Mondays 3pm to 5pm, JHB213

Buddhism, the Buddha, and indeed a Buddhist twist on storytelling have shaped modern world literature from its very beginnings. One could in fact argue that one of the many beginnings of modern fiction in many parts of the world is Buddhist and further that Buddhism has consistently played a role in recurring renewals of how to write fiction since the onset of modernity. In this course students will explore that role by analysing key works, in English or in English translation and written between 1879 and today, which either modernize motifs drawn from premodern Buddhist texts or process contemporary material by adopting a Buddhist aesthetic or philosophical stance. That will involve not only reading modern religious fiction in its own right and within the context of its composition and reception in mind, but also confronting the works with the classical sources, both narrative or doctrinal, which they draw from. Students will explore: the beginnings of modern Buddhist fiction in Europe and Asia with Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and Niṣṭhānanda Vajrācārya’s Lalitavistara (1914), confronting European Orientalist aesthetics with religious reform literature in Asia, the secularization of Buddhist hagiography in Dalit and Marxist 1940-50s narrative literature by B. R. Ambedkar and D. D. Kosambi, 1920s and 1950’s Germanophone and US-American counterculture Buddhist literature with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958), the emergence of post-war Japanese modernism through the processing of WWII in Michio Takeyama’s The Burmese Harp (1946), the influence of Buddhism on postmodernist and experimental writing in Roger Zelazny’s SF classic Lord of Light (1967), the collection Nixon under the Bodhi Tree (2004), and in George Saunders’ much-acclaimed Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), right up to recent feminist and queer retellings of the life of the Buddha’s wife Yashodhara in the homonymous novels in Telugu and in Canadian English by Volga (2017) and Vanessa Sasson (2021), respectively, as well as, staying with Canadian literature, in Shyam Selvadurai’s latest novel Mansions of the Moon (2022). Each session will focus on one book which will be embedded in select readings drawn both from related contemporary Buddhist-inflected writing and from classical Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Newar Buddhist sources in translation. The larger question this course will ask is about the importance of religion for poetics and the role of the novel as a space in which authors and readers can experiment globally with both with religious hybridity and literary innovation.

RLG3124H Biblical Reception Histories

Jeremy Schipper
Fridays 2pm to 4pm, JHB 208

Over the centuries, biblical literature has captured the imagination of countless scholars, writers, artists, religious leaders, and members of the general public. This seminar explores the interpretative histories of select biblical texts and characters as reflected in not only scholarly literature and literature from various religious traditions, but also popular literature and culture. The specific types of reception discussed may differ from semester to semester depending on instructor’s interests and specialization.

RLG3203H The Talking Book

Nyasha Junior
Wednesdays 9am to 11am, JHB213

The trope of the “Talking Book” appears within early Black American literature. Those who were not yet literate regarded others moving their lips and reading aloud as seemingly “talking” to the book. The Bible was one of the central works that Africans in the Americas confronted as a written and oral text. This course explores the history and development of biblical interpretation by Black biblical scholars in North America. It considers how these scholars address the use, impact, and influence of biblical texts in African Diasporic cultures and traditions. It examines the disciplinary and methodological diversity of their work as well as their challenges and contributions to academic biblical studies.

RLG3555H The Prophetic Family

Shafique Virani
Tuesdays 5pm to 7pm, JHB213

The conception of the ahl al-bayt, the family of the Prophet Muhammad, plays a vital role in Islamic history, thought and piety. In the tashahhud portion of the ritual prayers, Muslims of all persuasions supplicate daily, “O God! Bless Muhammad and his family (āl) as you blessed Abraham and his family.” From the Arabic teachings of the Prophet’s cousin ʿAli and the Shiʿi Imams descended from him, to the legitimacy drawn from their sayyid lineage by Sunni religious and political leaders, from the Persian poetry of countless Muslim mystics to the Indic and Turkish stories about members of the hallowed lineage, this course draws on both primary and secondary sources to explore the significance of the Prophet’s family in the Islamic tradition.

RLG3744H Hindu Epics (The Mahabharata)

Arti Dhand
Wednesdays 11am to 1pm, location TBC

Advanced study in specialized topics on Hinduism such as Ramayana in Literature: This course explores how this conception is the result of a historical process by examining documentable transformations in the reception of the Ramayana. Our focus will be on the shift in the classification of the Ramayana from the inaugural work of Sanskrit literary culture (adi-kavya) in Sanskrit aesthetics to a work of tradition (smrti) in theological commentaries, the differences between the Ramayanas ideal of divine kingship and medieval theistic approaches to Ramas identification with Visnu, the rise of Rama worship, and the use of Ramas divinity in contemporary political discourse.

Prerequisite: RLG205Y; Instructor’s permission required for admission to course.

RLG3800H The Anthropocene: Indigenous Perspectives

Kevin White
Tuesdays 1pm to 3pm, JHB213

Discourse on the Anthropocene engages scientific thought, religious studies, and philosophy to think about humanity’s impact upon the earth at the eological stage. This course will analyze the Anthropocene from Indigenous perspectives. First we will examine how the Anthropocene is understood from Western theological, philosophical, and scientific understandings. Next we will engage and enrage the Anthropocene from an Indigenous perspective drawing up on Indigenous scholarship and critique of the Anthropocene. The course will also bring forth many perspectives from within Turtle Island itself. While we have overlaps under the frameworks constructed around “Indigenous,” we have profound differences as well between regions and different geographic perspectives based on our home territories or lands.

JPR2058H/JPR458H Postsecular Political Thought: Religion, Radicalism and the Limits of Liberalism 

Ruth Marshall
Wednesdays 5pm to 7pm, location TBC

This seminar in theory examines the postsecular as a series of questions opened by the so-called return of religion to public debate, the rise of politicised religious movements, and the limits of liberal democracy’s ability to respond to the challenge of religion and religious otherness. The course will examine the debates on religion’s public, political role as articulated by thinkers such as Habermas, Rawls, Brown, Zizek, et al by focusing on politically radical or revolutionary challenges to liberalism that are grounded upon or draw their inspiration from religious traditions, doctrines and practices. We will focus especially on challenges emerging from the colonial and post-colonial world in response to colonialism and the globalization of liberal democracy and capitalism, from thinkers such as Ghandi, Qutb, Ali Shariati, Gutierrez, recent contributions by postcolonial theorists to a ‘postsecular’ debate that is dominated by Western thought, as well as examining forms of globalized ‘fundamentalist’ thought.

NMC2055H The Qur’an and its Interpretation 

Walid Saleh
Wednesdays 6pm to 8pm, BF201

This course is designed to orient students to the field of contemporary Qur’anic studies through reading and discussion of the text itself in Arabic and of significant European-language scholarship about the Qur’an as well as through examination of the principal bibliographical tools for this subject area.

Prerequisites: At least two years of Arabic, or advanced reading knowledge, or the permission of the instructor.

U of T Language Courses Available to Graduate Students

GER6000HF/S Reading German for Graduate Students

Fridays 2 pm - 4 pm

In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.

FSL6000HF/S Reading French Course for Graduate Students

Tuesdays, 4 pm - 6 pm

This course is designed to develop students' reading skills particularly as they pertain to research interests. Some remedial grammar, but the primary emphasis is on comprehension of a wide variety of texts in French. NOTE: THIS COURSE IS TAUGHT IN ENGLISH.

Latin graduate courses through the Centre for Medieval Studies

Greek and Latin graduate courses through the Department of Classics

Tri-Campus Language Courses at the Undergraduate Level

Other undergraduate language courses such as Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish, Yiddish, can be found by using the U of T Timetable Builder

Other Courses of Interest

The departments below may also be offering courses of interest to DSR students. Please follow the links for details.