To register for graduate courses, please contact the Graduate Assistant at gradcinema.studies@utoronto.ca.
For students from outside of Cinema Studies, please inquire about spaces in these courses in August.
For all room information, please consult ACORN in August each year after registration and course enrolment.
2026-27 (Under Construction; content may still change)
Master of Arts Core Courses
CIN1101HF - Theories and Practices of the Cinema
FALL | Mondays 1-5 | Kass Banning
Organized around a series of issues that have incited ongoing discussion and debate among scholars, cultural critics, and filmmakers, this course takes a topical approach to the study of film theory. In the process it both revisits some of the most canonical texts in the field and attends to more recent attempts to think through our contemporary moment, when digitality and transnationalism are radically changing the nature of film as well as the manner in which it is produced, distributed, exhibited, and viewed. Among those issues to be discussed are medium specificity, spectatorship, narrativity, affect, and the relationship between aesthetics, economics, and politics.
CIN1102HS - Key Developments in Film History
WINTER | Mondays 1-5 | Rakesh Sengupta
This course will examine a limited number of important developments in the history of cinematic media. It will extend the in-depth study of these developments in technique, technology, and text to include considerations of the sociocultural forces, economics, theories of the cinematic and aesthetics that have played a role in their development, or in the ways in which we have studied them. The course will cover a wide range of distinct time periods, geographical areas, and stylistic tendencies, and will engage with a range of scholarly approaches to key developments in cinematic media. The course aims to ensure that students' knowledge of the history of film and media is enhanced, and that they have the opportunity to engage more critically with the issues surrounding the historical study of cinema and related media that are of interest and importance to them.
This course invites students to reimagine cinema not just as an art form but as a dynamic medium of historical, technological, and political inquiry. It will explore film as a medium deeply entwined with the histories and technologies of our present. By examining the key developments within the medium of film in both its analog and digital eras – and the liminal spaces in between – students will gain insights into how cinema operates as a living, evolving force within contemporary media systems. We will read a range of texts spanning foundational scholarship and cutting-edge research in film and media history. Through interdisciplinary readings and curated screenings, students will explore how cinematic images function as archives, datasets, commodities, codes of modernity, racial and colonial ideologies, possibilities of resistance, and techniques of imagination and automation. Through a media archaeological approach to film history, students will be encouraged to think about the future of the moving image as well as its role in shaping social and political power.
CIN1006Y - Major Research Paper in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
This course provides each student with the opportunity to write a major research paper on a topic to be devised in consultation with an individual member of the Cinema Studies core faculty. Students will be encouraged to make use of the special collections housed with the Media Commons as the basis for their research projects.
CIN1007Y - Internship in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
A variety of placement settings connected to film culture. Each placement will entail some form of film-related research and/or examination of / participation in how organizations use and study film and disseminate it within a broader cultural field. Students will produce a report at the end of their internship outlining the learning experience and the implications for research and film scholarship.
Doctor of Philosophy Core Courses
CIN2100HF - History and History and Historiography of Cinematic Media
FALL | Tuesdays 5-7, Wednesdays 5-7 | Scott Richmond
In 1824, the influential German historian Leopold von Ranke described the aim of history as "to show what actually happened," assuming the possibility of an unambiguous access to the past. Today few theorists of history would be as confident. And yet, if an unmediated past is inaccessible – if history is instead inevitably a personal construct, shaped by the historian's perspective as a narrator – how is one to assess the historical enterprise? What can it mean to think historically, and what are the unique characteristics of historical inquiry? And what clues can cinema, as a supposedly "referential" visual form, provide about history, as a similarly (and also supposedly) "referential" discourse? Broadly stated, the class can be defined in terms of three major goals: to investigate the range of hermeneutic perspectives from which film history has been written; to assess and to theorize the kind of archival sources that film historians have conventionally drawn upon; and to confront cinema's status as a technology and the pressures that technological change (in particular, digitization) has placed on history and cultural memory. Rather than deny or avoid these pressures, this course seeks ultimately to suggest ways of running positively with them; ways of "doing history in the postmodern world" – arguably the world we live in.
CIN2999HF - Research Seminar
FALL | Thursdays 9-11 | Sara Saljoughi
This course is required of all second-year PhD students in the Cinema Studies Institute. Structured as a workshop, it aims to develop students' skills for surviving and thriving in the doctoral program, as researchers and teachers in the fields of cinema and media studies, and as professionals in the academy and beyond.
In 2026, we will ask what it means to produce scholarly labour at this historical conjuncture. What is the status of the university? Why are we writing, and for whom? We will contend with these questions alongside workshops dedicated to the craft of writing, with a particular emphasis on process and the structure of a writing life.
Elective Courses
CIN1005HF - Special Studies in Cinema
FALL | Wednesdays 1-5 | Brett Story
Seminar format. Drawing on the scholarly interests of faculty, courses may include intermediality, film genres, corporeality, and transnationality.
Artist Scholars and Research Creation: In recent decades, the insertion of creative practices into scholarly training has expanded troubled disciplinary boundaries of knowledge and power, often by insisting that aesthetics—how the world presents itself to our senses— is integral to meaningful understanding. This course investigates approaches to visual media research-creation projects, a term increasingly used to describe practice-led, transdisciplinary research methods that produce novel combinations of artistic practice and scholarly inquiry. Over the semester, which is organized as a series of research-creation case studies focused on individual artists and collectives, we will explore the history of and contemporary potential for the emerging ways of knowing that have been facilitated by the complex intersections of moving image media, art and scholarly research. Artists whose work provides jumping off points for our inquiries include: Isaac Julien, Allan Sekula, Trevor Paglen, Deborah Stratman, and Onyeka Igwe. Students in the course will work on their own research-creation projects, which are intended to support students by generating new research tools with which to approach cinema and media studies history and theory in their MA and PhD research.
CIN3010HF - Topics in Film and Media Theory
FALL | Wednesdays 9-11, Thursdays 11-1 | Nadine Chan
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media theory not covered by the core curriculum, such as theories of the viewing subject, film and phenomenology, or reviewing spectator studies. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Media, Environment, Infrastructure: Description forthcoming
CIN3101HF - World Cinemas, Cinematic Worlds
FALL | Tuesdays 9-1 | Elizabeth Wijaya
What are the geopolitical, institutional, and ethical imaginaries that shape the idea of “world cinemas” and how do they intersect with the senses of worlds within what may be called worlds within cinemas or “cinematic worlds”? The first session of the seminar series published as The Beasts and the Sovereign, Volume II, begins with “I am alone. Says he or she. I am alone.” From here, Jacques Derrida experiments with variations of this phrase, including “I am alone with you in this world” and considers questions of islands, alterity, power, solitude, and finitude. Thinking of the “part of those who have no part,” in conversation with Hannah Arendt’s critique of human rights, Jacques Rancière defines a dissensus as “putting two worlds in one and the same world.” Judith Butler’s What World is This? continues Butler’s pursuit of the question of shared vulnerability, interdependency, and the philosophical and political arguments underpinning the sense of a common world while the “world keeps dividing into unequally exposed zones.” Following Naoki Sakai’s critique of nationalist insularity and the binaries of “the West and the rest,” within the post-World War II modern international world, we will also consider empire, decolonization, and Pax Americana in the constitution of the “world” of “world cinemas.” Through critical and creative juxtapositions of films and political and philosophical texts, this class is an invitation to investigate the possibilities of thinking world-formation, worldhood and, as Roland Barthes once considered, How to Live Together.
CIN3107HF - Topics in Politics of the Moving Image
FALL | Mondays 5-7, Tuesdays 1-3 | æryka hollis-o'neil
This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital, and also autonomy.
On Adaptation: Genre, Transition, and the Politics of Form: What does adaptation demand, and from whom? This graduate seminar treats adaptation not as a question of fidelity or influence, but as a political technology and an ethical problem. To adapt is to translate across regimes of power. It is to render forms, bodies, and histories legible within systems that regulate what counts as coherent, credible, or human. Central to this process is genre: the classificatory logic through which legibility is organized in the first place. At the same time, adaptation names the pressure exerted on those systems by what does not fully translate, what lingers between categories, what reconfigures the terms of capture itself. Rather than treating genre as a neutral scheme of aesthetic taxonomy, the seminar approaches it as an adaptive infrastructure: a historically sedimented system that organizes expectation, coherence, and intelligibility. Genres do not simply shape stories; they discipline perception. They establish the conditions under which realism, authenticity, confession, documentary truth, or narrative closure become thinkable. Adaptation, in this sense, is inseparable from genre’s ongoing revision, enforcement, and breakdown. Drawing from cinema studies, Black studies, trans and queer theory, and political philosophy, the course examines how moving image media adapt not only texts but social categories, aesthetic conventions, and political antagonisms. Remakes, biopics, archival re-stagings, documentary truth claims, and algorithmic circulation operate as sites where identities are revised and incorporated into governance. Genre functions within these processes as a mechanism of stabilization, but also as a site of fracture. When a figure appears between fiction and nonfiction, between realism and experiment, between social categories, genre itself becomes unstable. These moments of instability are not merely failures of classification. They are intervals where aesthetic form mediates the relation between antagonism and collectivity. We will ask: How does adaptation consolidate governing logics and institutional power, and how might it also reconfigure the terms of relation? When does translation reinforce genre’s normative authority, and when does it expose its limits? What forms cannot be cleanly translated? How do Black and trans aesthetic practices inhabit the space between categories in ways that unsettle regimes of legibility while opening alternative scenes of address and configurations of proximity? Throughout the seminar, adaptation is understood as both constraint and improvisation: a recursive process through which images and subjects adjust to the pressures of recognition and misrecognition. In this adaptive interval, form becomes relational—not by resolving antagonism, but by staging new conditions of encounter within and against dominant orders of sense. Positioning adaptation as inseparable from racial capitalism, colonial administration, and gender regulation, the seminar foregrounds the political life of form. Through rigorous theoretical engagement and close analysis of moving image works, students will investigate how cinema and media participate in the ongoing production, management, and transformation of social worlds—and how, in moments of breakdown and opacity, genre and adaptation alike become sites of ethical encounter as well as political struggle.
CIN3006HS - Media and Philosophy
WINTER | Wednesdays 9-11, Thursdays 11-1 | Meghan Sutherland
An in-depth examination of aspects of media and philosophy. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Technologies of Governance: Media, Reality, Liberalism: This course will explore the entanglement of two different but related stories of technology: on the one hand, the technologies of broadcast and digital communication that structure the contemporary cultural phenomenon of reality-TV, and on the other, the “technologies” of social, economic and political representation that structure the political philosophy of modern liberalism and the theories of governance it advances. Part of this undertaking will involve an engagement with existing scholarship on the history and theory of reality television; part of it will involve a genealogical inquiry into the aesthetic, economic, institutional, and yes, technological conditions that have shaped the phenomenon; and part of it will involve an intensive introduction to the thought of Michel Foucault—whose writings on the genealogy of modern liberalism and neoliberalism, and on the genealogical method of discourse analysis, occupy a pivotal place in the scholarship on reality television—as well as the theories of modern liberalism and governance they discuss and inspire. However, the chief concerns and questions of the course will go beyond any one of these three basic strands of its construction to ask: What can this examination of the relation between reality TV, liberalism and neoliberalism teach us about the relation between modern media culture, modern techniques of liberal and neoliberal governance and power, and modern conceptions of political economy and representation more broadly? And how might answers to this question reframe the way we think about the aesthetic, institutional, economic and political underpinnings of the “technologies” they share in common? Accordingly, students can expect to spend as much of the course looking at major texts from the history of reality TV as they do looking at the theatrical, televisual and cinematic genealogies that inform them, and as much time reading television studies scholarship as they do the works of philosophy, political economy and critical theory that take up the history and theory of liberalism and neoliberalism.
CIN3107HS - Topics in Politics of the Moving Image
WINTER | Tuesdays 9-12 | Grant Wiedenfeld
This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital, and also autonomy.
Affirmation & Negation: Cinema in the Civil Sphere: This course will consider the sociopolitical significance of cinematic media through a dialectical approach. On the one hand, Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the culture industry and Adorno's later writings emphasize negation as the mode of critique and of social change and have informed engaged filmmakers and publics. On the other hand, affirmation is key to cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's concept of the civil sphere and to the meaning of public recognition, especially for minorities, that Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, and Axel Honneth theorize. The objective of the course is to clarify different views of cinema's relationship to democracy while considering their stakes and contexts. Excerpts of global film and media practices ranging from avant-garde to mainstream will solicit discussion.
CIN3010HS - Topics in Film and Media Theory
WINTER | Tuesdays 1-3, Wednesdays 3-5 | Alice Maurice
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media theory not covered by the core curriculum, such as theories of the viewing subject, film and phenomenology, or reviewing spectator studies. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Making Faces: Identity, Performance, and the Face on Film: In this course, we will explore the shifting meaning of the face on screen. Much has been said about the face in cinema, with most of that discourse focusing on the close-up. This course will explore that work while also considering other approaches, examining the historical context and material specificity of the face on screen. Beginning in the early silent era, when the close-up was becoming an accepted part of cinematic language, we will examine the numerous ways the face has created meaning on screen, as well as the numerous ways the screen image has shaped our understanding of the face. How do we read faces? Do we put too much pressure on the face as a site of profound meaning? How are coded assumptions about race and class retained in the way the face is “typed” on screen? How do makeup practices express assumptions about the face, beauty, and character? What have the digital faces of contemporary screen culture inherited from physiognomy, emotion studies, and other face reading practices? How can we think about transformation and mutability via the face on screen? We will study films and performers that have been central to theories of the face in cinema, and we will also think about popular and critical reactions to the face on screen. Throughout, we will read criticism and theory that takes up the aesthetic, political, and ethical meaning of the face.
Elective Courses from other Departments (taught by Cinema Studies Institute Faculty)
GER1771HS - Topics in German Cinema Studies
WINTER | Mondays 5-7, Thursdays 9-11 | Angelica Fenner
Phenomenology in the Visual Field: As a philosophical approach, phenomenology locates meaning and value in the ebb and flow of lived (human) experience. Perception and embodiment become crucial vehicles for exploring the mind-body connection and the relationship between subjective experience and objective world. Film phenomenology, by extension, approaches the experiential component of film viewing, the apparatus, and even the institution of cinema, as perceptual worldmaking; this entails exploring how film form and narrative content allow us to feel and sense, both physically and emotionally, that which transpires on screen, and further, how film as textual object focalized through the camera, engages in sense-making and can be understood as itself a form of phenomenology. To come to terms with the changing stakes across a century of phenomenological thought, we'll familiarize ourselves with the genealogy of concepts and formulations in German and French philosophy, including that of Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Pontys as well as contemporary theorists Marx, Sobchak, and Solomon on vectors of difference. Weekly screenings of moving image produced across disparate historical eras and in diverse genres and modes will help us visualize the issues under investigation.