This graduate level seminar is designed to introduce students to many of the main questions motivating research in comparative politics. The course is not designed as exercise in intellectual history, although some "classics" are included. It is also not designed to teach particular approaches or methods in the study of comparative politics, although many such approaches and methods are included in the readings. Instead, it is designed to give students a sense of what we "know" today about the answers to some major questions that animate the subfield and to encourage students to develop the analytical skills, substantive knowledge, and theoretical insights necessary to make their own contributions to comparative politics and political science. Comparative Politics Survey II builds on the topics developed in Comparative Politics Survey I, but can easily be taken before taking Comparative Politics Survey I. Topics to be covered in the surveys include among others, institutions, culture, parties, violence, collective action, economic development, bureaucracy, regimes and regime change, the welfare state, corruption and political behavior.
This seminar presents political economy perspectives on development focusing in particular on the role of the state in development, the impact of state intervention on social structure and economic change, as well as recent transformation of such relations under the pressure of globalization. This course is an advanced seminar that requires background knowledge of development theories and their evolution, as well as familiarity with basic social science theories and methods. The course emphasizes comparative methods and introduces students to a wide range of social science theories applied to different parts of the developing world.
Prerequisites:
ECON G6411
and
ECON G6412
.
The goal of the course is to equip students with basic econometric tools to analyze problems in macroeconomics and finance. This is not a theory course. The emphasis will be on implementation.
(coming soon)
Though the nineteenth century novel is widely credited as the model and inspiration for much of the most exciting global fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, readers looking in the novel for the global interconnectedness of people and events will often assume that it was only after 1900 that novelists were capable of making such connections outside the borders of their nations or, therefore, recognizing the way distant places are bound up in what is happening to their characters at home. After all, where are the realist novels that talked about the Irish Famine, a world-historical catastrophe that was happening a stone’s throw from Britain’s shore? And if even Ireland was too far, what about India or the Caribbean?
There is, however, a global dimension to the literature of the 19th century, and a non-negligible one. This seminar will explore the international side of 19thcentury classics like Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch while also bringing into the conversation outstanding but neglected masterpieces like Multatuli’s novel about Dutch colonialism in what is now Indonesia, Max Havelaar, and Tolstoy’s final work of fiction, the novella Hadji Murat, which deals with the Russian conquest of what is now Chechnya in the 1840s. It is coming to be recognized that the concept of “world literature,” which was born in the 19th century and discussed by Marx and Engels, demands attention to world history as well. But which history? What does 19th century literature look like when it’s considered in its global context? In its attention to the novels and secondary readings on its syllabus, the seminar will also ask what world history world literature needs.
In the seventeenth century, Shakespeare had already begun to serve as a vehicle of British colonial aspirations, bearing conjoined messages about nation, empire, and civilization, justifying cultural domination, and serving as the touchstone of literacy for new British subjects. At the same time, the multiple geographies of the plays themselves—moving across “The Globe” from Inverness to Libya, Syria to Navarre, the “seacoast of Bohemia” to the never-never-island of
The Tempest
—helped to destabilize their meaning, revealing “more things on heaven and earth” than British Shakespeare missionaries might ever have dreamt. In the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, rapidly changing media, the acceleration of global communication, norms of interpretive innovation, and the desire to turn imperial cultural tools against themselves combined not only to multiply the number of Shakespeare productions but to diversify still further their settings and implications. In this course, we will examine adaptations of Shakespeare (primarily on film) by directors working in a variety of media, languages, and places. Close reading of performance and cinematic detail will undergird broader discussions of how media, politics, economics, local, national, and cosmopolitan identities (and more) shape interpretation. (Note: This course fulfills the post-1700 requirement, and may be taken as either a 6000- or 4000-level course.)
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
Corequisites: APMA E4200
Analysis of stress and strain. Formulation of the problem of elastic equilibrium. Torsion and flexure of prismatic bars. Problems in stress concentration, rotating disks, shrink fits, and curved beams; pressure vessels, contact and impact of elastic bodies, thermal stresses, propagation of elastic waves.
Prerequisites: L6231
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
A survey course that explores aspects of day-to-day managerial communication, presentations and high-profile moments, as well as interpersonal communication. The course uses many teaching techniques: short lectures, individual and group exercises, videotaped presentations, role-plays, case discussions, video clips, and writing assignments.
Prerequisites: A4404: or the instructor's permission
Discussion of major issues in transportation at several levels, from national to local, and covering the economic, political, and social implications of decision-making in transportation. Current topics and case studies are investigated.\n
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This course examines, in 16th and 17th century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represented national and imperial clashes, and how the concepts of being "Spanish", "English", or "Turk" often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, the Ottoman Empire, and the Barbary States.
The successful execution and evaluation of programs within a sector of government, or a private company, depend heavily on the ability of an organization to continually improve performance. It follows that effective (in both the private and public sectors) hinges on an understanding of best practices within organizations. Benchmarking is the process of continually comparing and measuring against other organizations anywhere in the world to gain information on philosophies, practices and measures which will help an organization take action to improve its performance. This course provides an introduction to the structural basis of benchmarking, which consists of 5 primary phases - 1) Plan, 2) Baseline, 3) Collect Information, 4) Analyze Information, 5) Make Recommendations. Using a public sector-based case study with "hands-on" group activities, as well as other real-world examples offered by the instructors, this course will also teach students how to use various tools and techniques when conducting activities within each benchmarking phase to help them implement successfully.
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
Insecurity and violence are on the rise in Latin America and the Caribbean with countries in the region having some of the highest rates of violence in the world. These challenges are not unique to Latin America and the Caribbean and lessons learned can be applied to different regions facing similar challenges. The course will review approaches to strengthening rule of law institutions and promoting social inclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean as a means of address rising citizen insecurity. Violence, crime and insecurity threaten the life and liberty of individuals and their fundamental human rights, obstruct the fight against poverty and hinder the process of democratic governance. Insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean also has direct implications for the United States, and its policies and laws involving organized crime, trafficking, drugs and immigration.
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
The course will be competent in the critical questioning of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL) system. Participants will gain an understanding of the historical development and system of international humanitarian law in the context of its political and technological environment. They will study the methods for interpretation of IHL treaties and the identification of customary IHL-law and they will learn to apply IHL to actual conflicts such as the conflicts in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine. Students will develop and understanding of the preconditions for the punishment of war crimes under ICL. They analyze judgements in fundamental crimes cases. Students will be able to determine which treaty and customary rules need to be applied to actual wars. They will be able select and use the appropriate IHL-rules to determine whether violations have taken place and how perpetrators could be punished.
Prerequisites: Completion of 1st year graduate program in Economics, or the instructor's permission.
The standard model of economic behavior describes a perfectly rational, self interested utility maximizer with unlimited cognitive resources. In many cases, this provides a good approximation to the types of behavior that economists are interested in. However, over the past 30 years, experimental and behavioral economists have documented ways in which the standard model is not just wrong, but is wrong in ways that are important for economic outcomes. Understanding these behaviors, and their implications, is one of the most exciting areas of current economic inquiry. This course will study three important topics within behavioral economics: Bounded rationality, temptation and self control and reference dependent preferences. It will draw on research from behavioral economics, experimental economics, decision theory, psychology and neuroscience in order to describe the models that have been developed to explain failures of the standard approach, the evidence in support of these models, and their economic implications.
Prerequisites: permission of instructor.
Hands-on experiments in molecular and cellular techniques, including fabrication of living engineered tissues. Covers sterile technique, culture of mammalian cells, microscopy, basic subcloning and gel electrophoresis, creation of cell-seeded scaffolds, and the effects of mechanical loading on the metabolism of living cells or tissues. Theory, background, and practical demonstration for each technique will be presented.
Prerequisites: permission of the faculty member who will direct the teaching.
Participation in ongoing teaching.
This survey course introduces students to the fundamentals of statistical analysis. We will examine the principles and basic methods for analyzing quantitative data, with a focus on applications to problems in public policy, management, and the social sciences. We will begin with simple statistical techniques for describing and summarizing data and build toward the use of more sophisticated techniques for drawing inferences from data and making predictions about the social world. The course will assume that students have little mathematical background beyond high school algebra. Students will be trained on STATA. This powerful statistical package is frequently used to manage and analyze quantitative data in many organizational/institutional contexts. Because each faculty member takes a somewhat different approach to teaching this course, students should examine each professor's syllabus to understand the differences.
This graduate seminar is offered to students interested in the anthropological analysis of extractive economies and the social and political forms associated with them, including the forms of overt and clandestine political radicalism that have often arisen in contexts of mining. Considering the social life, as well as the technical and epistemic conditions of natural resource extraction and especially underground mining, the course is concerned with the symbolic function that various minerals have played in different, often conflicted imaginations of historicity, interest and value.
This course is the second semester in the SIPA statistics sequence. Students conduct a major research project, which will serve as an important vehicle for learning about the process and challenges of doing applied empirical research, over the course of the semester. The project requires formulating a research question, developing testable hypotheses, gathering quantitative data, exploring and analyzing data using appropriate quantitative techniques, writing an empirical research paper, proposing policy recommendations, and presenting findings and analyses.
This is a Public Health Course. Public Health classes are offered on the Health Services Campus at 168th Street. For more detailed course information, please go to Mailman School of Public Health Courses website at http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/academics/courses
Prerequisites: equivalent.
Corequisites: BMEN E4001,BMEN E4002
Advanced biomaterial selection and biomimetic scaffold design for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Formulation of bio-inspired design criteria, scaffold characterization and testing, and applications on forming complex tissues or organogenesis. Laboratory component includes basic scaffold fabrication, characterization and
in vitro
evaluation of biocompatibility. Group projects target the design of scaffolds for select tissue engineering applications.
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
SIPA: Management. SIPA: Electives.
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the
Law School Curriculum Guide
at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
This is a seven-week course that introduces students to design principles and techniques for effective data visualization. Visualizations graphically depict data to foster communication, improve comprehension and enhance decision-making. This course aims to help students: understand how visual representations can improve data comprehension, master techniques to facilitate the creation of visualizations as well as begin using widely available software and web-based, open-source frameworks.
This seminar will bring together professors and select students from three schools to discuss how different disciplines solve cybersecurity issues. Classes will cover the technical underpinnings of the Internet and computer security; the novel legal aspects from technology, crime and national security; and the various policy problems and solutions involved in this new field.
Over the last ten years, the dramatic increase in cheap, easily accessible technology to share and analyze data means that government agencies can draw on ever more information when designing policies. Future policy makers who educate themselves and their colleagues on modern tech and approaches will have a distinct advantage: understanding what good data is, and how to acquire it. While this course won’t make students data scientists, it will show how to both maximize potential for existing information and teach how to ask the right questions to get to required answers. The course will teach and use techniques in MS Excel, R, Python, and Tableau that are both effective and easily replicable outside the classroom.
(Seminar). Recent scholarship on modernism speaks of “bad modernisms” and “ugly modernisms” and, of course, we have regularly taught and thought about “good modernisms.” Modernism has also been cast as “reactionary” and as a site of “political inversions.” But what might be queer about modernism and how do queer modernisms interact with the good, the bad and the ugly? At stake here are questions about aesthetic experimentation and politics and unpredictable links between beauty and power, alternative subjects and domination and bodies and language. Reading modernist texts as part of a grand attempt in the early 20
th
century to rescale relations between morality, sexuality, this course investigates odd relations between homosexuality and totalitarian masculinity on the one hand and lesbianism and fascism on the other. We will read Adorno’s
Minima Moralia
and consider his claim, in a section subtitled “Tough Baby” that “totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together”? Is this sentiment homophobic? Accurate? Irresponsible? How and when and where does Fascism make an appearance in queer modernism?
This is a Public Health Course. Public Health classes are offered on the Health Services Campus at 168th Street. For more detailed course information, please go to Mailman School of Public Health Courses website at http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/academics/courses
This is a graduate level seminar on the contemporary foreign policy and international relations of Western Balkans states which are undergoing post-conflict and post-socialist/communist political, economic, social, and legal transition. The course will present and examine in detail the respective foreign policies and international relations of each of the following states: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
(Seminar). This seminar will examine European and American avant-garde aesthetics through the poetry, poetics, theory, and politics of "movements" like Surrealism, Objectivism, Oulipo, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. Texts include works from C. S. Peirce, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Andre Breton, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Robert Smithson, Clark Coolidge, Fredric Jameson, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Craig Dworkin, Tan Lin, Caroline Bergvall, and others.