The 2025-2026 timetable is now available in SOLUS.
For detailed course information please visit the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Calendar.
Topic course titles and descriptions for 2025-2026 listed below.
FALL 2025
INDG 301/3.0 Indigenous Ways of Knowing:
Section 001 Topic TBA
Instructor: TBA
INDG 395/HLTH 397/3.0 Topics in Indigenous Literature:
Section 001 Indigenous Health
Instructor: Jodi John
This course provides historic, contemporary, and conceptual foundations for understanding Indigenous health on Turtle Island today. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and class activities we will critically examine key determinants of Indigenous health including the historic and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. We will (re)consider and reflect on how dominant structures, and narratives, shape our own beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors, and impact the lives and health of Indigenous Peoples. By engaging with multiple Indigenous perspectives, worldviews, values, and ways of being we will center Indigenous-led solutions to persistent Indigenous health disparities.
INDG 495/ENGL 481/3.0 Topics in Indigenous Literature:
Section 001 Indigenous Poems of/as History
Instructor: Marshall Hill
In this course we will read a range of works by Indigenous poets that address history in myriad senses: from works focused on specific historical events; to personal histories of individual figures; to histories of colonialism and resistance as broader processes structuring our present; to works that interrogate history itself as a concept through the interaction of historical narrative and collective memory. We will also read these works as themselves emerging from historical contexts which they mediate in their form and style as well as content. A range of older and contemporary works will be read ranging from single poems to book length projects with accompanying theoretical and critical texts. Throughout we will be concerned with understanding poetry as a practice that bears and transforms history, asking what reading practices are adequate to engage such works in their own context while carrying them forward into our own. To do so will be to understand ongoing Indigenous histories in the Americas as sites of revolutionary potential within global modernity.
Readings may include: Simon Ortiz's from Sand Creek; Marilyn Dumont's The Pemmican Eaters; Armand Ruffo’s The Thunderbird Poems; Layli Longsoldier's ’38'; César Vallejo’s Spain Take This Cup from Me; and others. Excerpts from most texts will be supplied by the instructor except for a few book-length works of poetry that will be available at the campus bookstore.
Assessments will include short and long written assignments, presentations, and class participation.
LLCU 295/3.0 Special Topics:
Section 001 Critical Settler Family History and Canadian Identity
Instructor: Chris Hemer
This course introduces students to the topic of critical settler family history with a focus on the Canadian context. Students will critically examine their own family stories and situate them within the context of settler colonial Canada. We will consider how family stories shape one’s understanding of one’s identity, sense of place, and responsibilities to the past and present. We will discuss Canadian identity and positionality, settler colonialism and nationalism, genealogy and the archive, silences and omission, and the role of cultural production. This course is open to all students. No previous knowledge is required.
LLCU 295/3.0 Special Topics:
Section 002 Comics and Feminisms: Graphic Narratives Across Cultures and Global Relations
Instructor: Linghui Jin
This course explores the dynamic intersections between feminist theory and comic art, with a focus on how graphic narratives represent issues of gender, identity, and social justice. We will examine how comics have been used by feminist creators to challenge dominant narratives and to visualize alternative modes of storytelling, resistance, and care. Through a comparative lens, students will engage with a diverse range of comics and graphic novels from different cultural and linguistic contexts, including works from North America, East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, to consider how feminist themes are expressed across borders and shaped by local histories.
LLCU 395/3.0 Special Topics:
Section 001 The Semiotics of the Arts
Instructor: Donato Santeramo
A broad-ranging introduction to the role the arts play in human society through the study of the unique sign systems that make up what is considered an artistic production. Through the semiotics lens, students will explore how words, images and other signs produce meaning in art and in contrast, how or if, these signs’ meanings differ in non-artistic endeavors. Through a series of readings and image analyses, students will engage with arts' philosophical and abstract being and the practices that are embedded in cultures, politics and identities when creating a work of art. Paintings, sculptures, narratives, storytelling, and other art forms will be studied and discussed in the classroom both synchronically and diachronically.
WINTER 2026
INDG 395/3.0 Special Indigenous Topics
Section 001 History and Material Culture of the Métis Nation
Instructor: Danielle Lussier
In this course, learners and the lead educator will study the history and material culture of the Métis Nation. Learners will have the opportunity to engage in curated embodied Métis pedagogical practice in the classroom to facilitate building new relationships to ideas and will be expected to engage in individual artistic practice grounded in theories of Persuasive Aesthetic over the course of the term. No previous artistic experience is required; the lead educator, a Flower Beadwork Person, will support you. Note: threads of inquiry will include difficult topics including but not limited to The Reign of Terror and historic and ongoing Genocide of Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirited folx. The lead educator is committed to building a learning space centering love and community care and encourages learners to reach out with any questions or concerns.
INDG 495/HLTH 493 /3.0 Special Indigenous Topics:
Section 001 Indigenous Food Sovereignty
Instructor: Jodi John
Indigenous Food Sovereignty highlights the innate ability of Indigenous peoples to be in charge of their own food systems, including the ability to define one’s own food sources and processes. This course will explore the reciprocal nature of food sovereignty, foregrounding the interdependent relationships humans have with the land, plants, and animals that give their lives for sustenance, as well as Indigenous Food Sovereignty’s inherently anti-colonial foundations, which prioritize the resurgence and revitalization of Indigenous cultures and ways of being that support physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.
Note: INDG 495/HLTH 493 will be taught in Winter 2025 by the Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Community Health, and the course focus may be subject to change.
INDG 495/3.0 Indigenous Beadwork:
Instructor: Danielle Lussier
In this course, learners and the lead educator will consider Indigenous beadwork traditions in historical and contemporary contexts, engaging with theories of cultural resilience, resistance, revitalization and resurgence, amongst others. Threads of inquiry will also include beadwork mobilized in the academy as an academic research method and as a tool for both research creation and extra-intellectual knowledge mobilization.
Pedagogical methods for this course will include engagement with embodied practices in a classroom setting. Learners will have the opportunity to move from theory and the written word to praxis, engaging in guided beadwork practices including but not limited to appliqué, “lazy stitch,” and bead looming. No previous artistic experience is required; the lead educator, who is Red River Métis and a Flower Beadwork Person, will support you. The lead educator is committed to building a learning space centring community care and encourages learners to reach out with any questions or concerns.
LING 490/3.0 Special Topics in Linguistics:
Section 001 Language, Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Sarah Shulist
This course addresses major themes and approaches to the study of language and gender and of language and sexuality. Students will engage in critical examination of how cultural paradigms of gender and sexuality are constructed, expressed, challenged, and transformed through linguistic practice and performance, as well as how language is involved in the construction of social identities and communities. This course will consider gender and sexuality in a crosslinguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Students will learn to apply sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories to the study of gender, sexuality, and social power.
LLCU 295/3.0 Special Topics:
Section 001 Languages, Nationalism, and Popular Culture in South Asia
Instructor: Samia Khan
The role of nationalism and its intersection with linguistic and cultural minorities in shaping the popular culture (cinema, literature, visual culture, music, etc.) in countries like India. The course will engage with and unpack nationalism theories and what it means in the context of South Asia, what is the political significance of linguistic minorities in south Asian politics, society, and culture. For the course we will explore literature, cinema, and popular culture to understand nationalism.
LLCU 295/3.0 001 Special Topics:
Section 002 Diasporas and Cultural Return
Instructor: Mohammed Ali
This course explores the cultural, religious, and linguistic identities of transnational diasporas through the lens of “cultural return” practices, with a focus on Somali communities in Europe and North America. Drawing on primary research and cross-cultural case studies, students will examine how migrant and refugee families navigate integration in host societies while preserving, renegotiating, or reasserting cultural identities through practices such as Dhaqan Celis—the return of youth to East Africa for cultural rehabilitation. Topics include multiculturalism, post-migration parenting, transnationalism, integration policies, and the politics of identity in global contexts. Students will engage with texts, films, oral histories, and various scholarly work to assess how diasporas both adapt to and resist dominant integration frameworks. The course encourages comparative thinking across linguistic and national contexts, and offers tools to critically assess how culture travels, transforms, and returns.
LLCU 395/SPAN 352 3.0 Special Topics:
Section 001 Modern Latin American Fiction
Instructor: Claudio Palomares Salas
A survey of the major authors and works of Latin American literature from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Readings will include texts from all genres and will illustrate the main cultural and historical trends and movements.
LLCU 395/3.0 Special Topics:
Section 002 Decolonizing Indigenous History
Instructor: Ian Fanning
Decolonization is an ambiguous term produced by a colonial world still attempting to understand, and often to justify, colonization. Can film mitigate the ambiguity associated with the terms colonization and decolonization? In a time when various mediums are considered research and artifact, film offers a potentially useful investigation into the complex notions of decolonization. With a focus on the colonization of Indigenous people in what is now known as Canada, this course aims to critique the processes of colonization through the use of film. We will reflect critically on the potential of film to contribute to our analysis of gendered settler colonialism, as well as the potential for films to act as agents of re-colonization in contemporary times.
Please note that information listed in the Arts and Science Academic Calendar supersedes information listed within the LLCU website.