Menu
Overview
Current & upcoming courses
You can find a selection of my previous syllabi here.
Overview
At UBC, I teach History (HIST) and Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) courses, focused on Canadian and global imperial/comparative colonial history. I am honoured to have won the Killam Teaching Prize in 2018.
- What to expect of me as an instructor
Learn more about me in this 2021 “Know Your Profs” feature from UBC History!
Broadly, I am committed to teaching that is clear, transparent, flexible, and accessible; rooted in genuine care and inflected with enthusiasm; attentive to the importance of representation; and focused not only what we are learning but also why it matters. My courses are always designed with the intention of equipping you to succeed in the course itself, and to build meaningful take-away lessons – knowledge, understanding, skills, and questions – that can continue to grow and resonate after term is over.
There are no required textbook costs in my courses.
- If you are a UBC student hoping to register in a fully enrolled course:
If it is an ACAM course, please join the waitlist (or, if there is not room in the waitlist, please monitor it for space).
If it is a HIST course, please contact me by email. The History department does not have course waitlists, but I am sometimes able to over-enrol my HIST courses depending on room capacity, workload, and other considerations.
Current & upcoming courses
In the 2023-24 academic year, I am teaching two undergraduate courses and one graduate course.
- ACAM 300 – Dis/Orienting Asian Canada (term 1)
What do Asian Canadian histories have to do with the present? What good can historical knowledge, understanding, and thinking do now? Driven by these questions, ACAM 300 is an Asian Canadian history course for our times. We will explore how Asian Canadian histories are portrayed and used in a range of contexts today – from scholarship and textbooks to political apologies and media coverage, from films and museum exhibits to community festivals and family stories. We will consider what role these diverse historical representations play in the present. And we will develop our own ideas about what other histories need to be told about people of Asian descent in northern North America, and explore how and why we might do so.
Overall, you can expect to learn about some important topics in Asian Canadian history; understand why these histories – and how they are told – matter today; build skills related to ethical community-engaged and community-centered historical work; and, in the process, contribute to histories that can make a difference in our times.
This course is officially designated as multi-access. It is possible to complete the course in person, online (asynchronous), or through a combination of the two.
Find ACAM 300 in the 2023W course schedule.
- HIST 420D – Drugs in Canadian History (listed as “Topics in Canadian History” in SSC, term 2).
How can studying the past help us to understand drugs and their place in Canada today, from the legalization of cannabis to the ongoing public health crisis of opioid poisoning? This question drives this offering of HIST 420, which examines the history of drugs in Canada since 1867. Over the past century and a half, Canada has played an important role in the continental and global history of drugs, while the study of drugs – from alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis to opium, amphetamines, LSD, and more – offers a remarkably revealing lens onto Canada, both past and present.
Through lectures, readings, historical films, discussions, and assignments, HIST 420D examines the social, cultural, political, and legal histories of drugs; the people who have used them; and the changing meanings, regulation, and (de)criminalization of different drugs over time in northern North America. Major themes will include the relationship between ideas about drugs, gender, race, class, and national identity; debates about regulation, policing, legalization, and decriminalization; changing understandings of use, treatment, and addiction; and tensions between personal experiences, social meanings, popular culture, and medical, legal, and political approaches to different drugs.
This course is officially designated as multi-access. It is possible to complete the course in person, online (asynchronous), or through a combination of the two.
- HIST 575 – Readings in International and Global History
Title: Colonialism & its archives
This course is an introduction to the large and diverse body of scholarship on histories of colonialism, with an emphasis on recent and innovative approaches to the colonial archive. How have historians problematized and interrogated the colonial archive, traced its logics and limits, and pushed its bounds? What research methods, analytical approaches, conceptual lenses, historical questions, and innovations in genre have they developed and employed in order to do so? How has this work challenged and changed understandings of colonial pasts? What are the stakes and implications for our own work in the field and, indeed, for historical practice more broadly? We will take up these questions with a focus on scholarship that examines and exceeds archival silence, works from fragmented or trace evidence, and centres people about whom colonial records say little.
Assigned readings will have some emphasis on the British imperial world from the eighteenth century to the present, but the course is intended as an introduction to key theoretical, historiographical, and methodological issues in the study of colonial pasts more broadly. By the end of the course, you should be familiar with some recent work and fundamental questions in the field, and equipped to think critically about future directions and the possibilities of your own practice, whatever your particular geographic, temporal, and thematic focus.
This course is officially designated as in-person.