HIST 321D restricted to 3rd Year History honours students

History of the Future:

This course explores changing conceptions, understandings and imaginings of the future from early writings on the apocalypse, to millenarian movements, to Enlightenment beliefs in progress, to modernist understandings of the future, to the prospects of a future without us under the impact of global warming and climate change. Exploring how some of those in the past, and up to the present, have imagined and engaged with the future, through such things as writings on utopias, the mounting of exhibitions at world fairs, the construction of model capital cities, science fiction and the writing of futurists, movies, and changes in computer and digital technology, among other kinds of texts, provides the means for those taking the course to begin to write their own history of the future.