A major challenge for governments across the Western Hemisphere is the complex relationship between illicit economies, violence, and politics. We can see this relationship operating at multiple levels, from everyday politics in gang-controlled neighborhoods where drugs are trafficked to the Amazon where illegal extraction of natural resources poses significant threats to the environment at the local and global levels. Today, the dynamics and consequences of the politics of illicit economies touch all our lives in different ways, including individual and family struggles with substance abuse, everyday encounters with militarized police, environmental degradation, state corruption, and the strains on democracy and citizenship, among many others. This course will examine some of these dynamics and consequences with a theoretical and empirical focus mainly on the Western Hemisphere. Throughout our time together we will connect these pressing issues to broader theories, concepts and empirical findings in political science.
Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.
This interdisciplinary course surveys literary, cinematic, historical and other archival text representations of time and change in and around waterways in the Global South—oceanic, riverine, at the littoral and in hinterlands. It is animated by questions of how people live with water as horizon, resource, life-giving source, as ancestral boundaries and threat. We do so now in a time when climate change refocuses our dependencies upon, and vulnerabilities to, water.
Our themes are shaped by water’s influence on the rhythms of lives, and how these rhythms have been changed and are changing—deliberately, as in dam building and its aftermaths in lives, and through climate change.
In this course, students will write original, independent papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia College and its colonial predecessor Kings College, with the institution of slavery.
Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle.
The title of this course suggests that there are literatures across the “globe” written in English, and that we will study them. But this statement rests on a series of assumptions: the
a priori
existence of a globe with latitudes, longitudes, and borders; a singular category of “literature” produced in different geographical locations across the globe; and finally, that these literatures are written in English. During the course of the semester, we will investigate and (occasionally overturn) all three of these assumptions.
In order to do so, we will read across different literary genres (short stories and novels, plays, poetry, and essays), while also reading texts that move between these genres or defy them altogether. We will read texts that were originally written in English, as well as texts that have been translated into English, and we will learn and discuss the term “global anglophone” along with the ways in which this term has been challenged. During our collective readings and discussions, we will map the locations that arise in each text
and
the locations out of which these texts arise. We will study the relationship between literature, translation, and mapping, and we will learn and discuss the concept of planetary thinking and writing as an alternative to border and global thinking.
Prerequisites: POLS W1201 or the equivalent. Not an introductory-level course. Not open to students who have taken the colloquium POLS BC3326. Enrollment limited to 25 students; L-course sign-up through eBear. Barnard syllabus. Explores seminal caselaw to inform contemporary civil rights and civil liberties jurisprudence and policy. Specifically, the readings examine historical and contemporary first amendment values, including freedom of speech and the press, economic liberties, takings law, discrimination based on race, gender, class and sexual preference, affirmative action, the right to privacy, reproductive freedom, the right to die, criminal procedure and adjudication, the rights of the criminally accused post-9/11 and the death penalty. (Cross-listed by the American Studies and Human Rights Programs.)
The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B+ or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors.
Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.
This course explores how New York City didn't just host the American comics industry—it shaped what comics looked like, how they were sold, and what stories they told. We'll trace how the city's newspapers, newsstands, subway cars, tenement buildings, and even its crime waves left their mark on the page. We'll move chronologically from the 1890s to today, looking at moments when the city and the comics it produced were tightly linked: early newspaper strips born in the era of “yellow journalism”; the Golden Age publishers clustered in Midtown offices; the censorship battles of the 1950s; underground cartoonists working out of East Village apartments in the ’60s and ’70s; and the rise of graphic novels in bookstores and museums. Along the way, we'll ask: Why did superhero comics look the way they did? How did economic pressures shape page layout? What happens when the same city produces both blockbuster superhero titles and experimental art magazines?
Readings range from early Sunday pages (the Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay) through Will Eisner’s
A Contract with God
and Frank Miller’s
Daredevil
and
The Dark Knight Returns
, to Art Spiegelman’s
RAW
magazine, Ben Katchor’s urban wanderings, Roz Chast’s
New Yorker
cartoons, and contemporary mainstream works like
Hawkeye
’s “Pizza Dog” issue. Famously, Eisner drew on his Bronx childhood to create
A Contract with God
, while Miller’s work channels the gritty, anxious New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But we’ll look at the full range of what the city made possible, from newspaper syndicates to underground comix to today’s independent publishers.
You’ll learn to read comics closely by analyzing how panel grids, gutters, shadows, and perspectives work and by connecting those choices to the real-world conditions in which they were made. Optional Saturday field trips include Newspaper Row/City Hall Park (early press and Sunday pages), an East Village Underground walk (
East Village Other
/
Gothic Blimp Works
sites), and a visit to the Society of Illustrators/MoCCA (exhibition and archives orientation).
Course assignments combine analytical writing, archival engagement, and original digital scholarship. In addition to two short close-reading essays, there is a final project that takes the form of
Why do some countries develop well-functioning states capable of providing security and public services to their citizens while others do not? Why do some develop a strong sense of national identity and unity, while others are plagued by ethnic and communal divisions? How do the structure and strength of the state shape the development of national and other identities, and how do those identities in turn shape the state? This course examines these and related questions from historical and comparative perspectives, drawing on cases from different world regions in both the past and the present.
Prerequisites: Non-majors admitted by permission of instructor. Students must attend first class. Enrollment limited to 16 students per section. Introduction to the historical process and social consequences of urban growth, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present.
This course explores representations of queer Harlem in African American literature, sonic culture, and performance. We will consider the history and making of Harlem, key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and the aesthetic innovations of writers and artists who defied the racial, sexual, and gendered conventions of their time. We will be guided by an intersectional approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality and the methods of Black queer studies, African American and African diaspora literary studies, as well as sound and performance scholarship. We will ask when, where, and what was/is gay Harlem; how we might excavate its histories; map its borders; and speculate on its material and imagined futures.
This course explores the deep historical roots of climate-related migration. Before the categories of climate and environmental refugees emerged in recent decades, climate variability, environmental disasters, and ecological change have often shaped human mobility. Building on case studies from across the world and a timeline spanning from antiquity to the present, the class will examine the relationship between human migrations, environmental crises, economic transformations, and political conflicts. Since displacement disproportionately affects vulnerable communities that rely on less resilient environments, the class also sheds light on global inequality by looking at the politics of freedom of movement, nativism, and the connection between anti-immigration backlash.
Prerequisites: Must have taken a Dance Department Composition course, have some dance training. This experiential, hands-on course requires all students to choreograph, dance, and film. Focusing on single-shot film-making, the duet of the camera and the dance will create an understanding of the interaction between the two, enabling students to create a final short film.
A range of dance genres, from the traditional to the innovative, co-exist as representations of Indianness in India, and beyond. Identities onstage and in films, morph as colonial, national, and global contexts change. This course zooms from micro to macro views of twentieth century staged dances as culturally inflected discourse. We review how Indian classical dance aligns with the oldest of performance texts, and with lively discourses (rasa as a performance aesthetic, Orientalism, nationalism, global recirculations) through the ages, not only in India but also in Europe, Britain and America. Throughout the course, we ask:- How is culture embodied? How do historical texts configure dance today? How might they affect our thinking on mind-body, practice-theory, and traditional-contemporary divides? How does bodily patterning influence the ways that we experience our surroundings and vice versa? Can cultural imaginaries instigate action? How is gender is performed? What are dance discourses?
This course examines Afro-Indigeneity as an emerging critical field and as a decolonial framework for the historical, cultural, and political analysis of Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the study of literature, history, film, music, and critical theory, the course analyzes the relationships, conflicts, and interdependencies between Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples from the colonial period to the present.
This course offers intensive practice in writing on dance and explores a range of
approaches to dance criticism from the 1940s through today. Starting from the premise
that criticism can be an art form in itself, we ask: What are the roles and responsibilities
of a critic? How do our own identities and experiences inform how we see and write?
With the proliferation of dance in digital spaces, what new possibilities arise for dance
criticism? Class meetings include discussion, writing exercises, and peer workshops.
Assignments involve viewing performances outside of class.
This course investigates “Asian American” literature as a nexus of two larger social forces: (1) migration, as a lens to investigate xenophobia, nationalism, settler violence, and working class struggle; and (2) imperialism, often a driving force that unleashes the travelers and refugees that comprise the former category. Adopting a heavily historical emphasis that will use Asian American identity as a lens to examine migration and imperialism, this course seeks to destabilize all three terms in its title: Asian, American, and literature. Students will (1) conduct an oral history with an Asian American or immigrant subject, (2) research Asian American little magazines and create a response on their own; and (3) write a final term paper. We will read many texts that are primary sources such as movement journals and little magazines and oral histories as well as other non-literary sources (e.g., Supreme Court decisions, pamphlets and op-eds for and against Chinese exclusion, letters from the Ghadar party of Sikh and Punjabi anti-colonialists, an audio recording of a South Asian woman who traveled on the Komagata Maru, demands from the Third World Liberation Front).
We will read documents from the Chinese exclusion period alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s
China Men
and the poems written by migrants detained at Angel Island—a theme of incarceration that we will pick up in reading about Japanese American incarceration. Other texts will explore proletarian power, such as Carlos Bulosan’s
America Is In The Heart
and Sujatha Gidla’s
An Ant Among Elephants
, or the American wars in Asia, such as Richard E. Kim’s
The Martyred
. Some writers will come from the boundaries of a Pan-Asian American identity, such as Arab modernist Ameen Rihani, or not be written by “Asian Americans” at all, such as the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man detained at Guantánamo Bay.
This course examines the struggle against South African apartheid with a particular focus on the global solidarity movement in the 20th century. The class will examine key turning points in the movement, its connection with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, gendered constructs of apartheid and feminist leadership in the movement, and the circulation of theories of racial capitalism. Students will understand how and why apartheid became a global concern. Students will work on a project using the primary source material available on the African Activist Archive Digital Project at Michigan State University.
Required for all majors who do not select the year-long Senior Thesis Research & Seminar (BIOL BC3593 & BC3594) to fulfill their senior capstone requirement. These seminars allow students to explore the primary literature in the Biological Sciences in greater depth than can be achieved in a lecture course. Attention will be focused on both theoretical and empirical work. Seminar periods are devoted to oral reports and discussion of assigned readings and student reports. Students will write one extensive literature review of a topic related to the central theme of the seminar section.
Topics vary per semester and include, but are not limited to:
Plant Development
,
Animal Development & Evolution,
Molecular Evolution, Microbiology & Global Change, Genomics, Comparative & Reproductive Endocrinology, and Data Intensive Approaches in Biology.
This year-long course is open to junior and senior Biology majors and minors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give a poster presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills two upper-level laboratory requirements for the Biology major or minor. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3591 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3592 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3593-BIOL BC3594.
This year-long course is open to junior and senior Biology majors and minors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give a poster presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills two upper-level laboratory requirements for the Biology major or minor. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3591 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3592 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3593-BIOL BC3594.
Research and scholarly writing in chosen topics relating to dance. Methods of investigation are drawn from prominent archival collections and personal interviews, as well as other resources. Papers are formally presented to the Dance Department upon completion.
This lab-based course introduces students to advanced methods in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on the application of electroencephalography (EEG) for real-time recording of brain activity. Unlike traditional approaches that study how the brain responds to different external stimuli or task demands, this course centers on spontaneous brain activity that occurs during rest or just before experimental events. Whether or not spontaneous brain activity is just meaningless noise remains an active area of research in cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers believe that spontaneous brain activity may be an important factor shaping our subjective experience of the world. However, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive in part due to the challenges in objectively defining and measuring subjective experience.
In this course, students will address this challenge by developing methods to study the relationship between spontaneous brain activity and subjective experience, with a particular focus on mind-wandering and the sensory phenomena elicited by Ganzflicker and Ganzfeld stimulation. The course culminates in independent research projects where students test their hypotheses by collecting and analyzing behavioral and EEG data. Key questions to address include: can spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity account for why people sometimes zone out while performing a task? Can the same fluctuations explain why people sometimes have different sensory experiences despite constant external stimuli? Do individual variations in spontaneous brain activity help explain why some people are more likely to report such experiences?
Note: The course involves weekly in person meetings as well as asynchronous work on data acquisition, analysis, and primary article readings for approximately 6 additional hours per week (on average).
This year-long course is open to senior Biology majors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give an oral presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills the senior capstone requirement for the Biology major. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3593 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3594 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592.
This year-long course is open to senior Biology majors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give an oral presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills the senior capstone requirement for the Biology major. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3593 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3594 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592.
Prerequisites: Open to senior Neuroscience and Behavior majors. Permission of the instructor. This is a year-long course. By the end of the spring semester program planning period during junior year, majors should identify the lab they will be working in during their senior year. Discussion and conferences on a research project culminate in a written and oral senior thesis. Each project must be supervised by a scientist working at Barnard or at another local institution. Successful completion of the seminar substitutes for the major examination.
Similar to BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592, this is a one-semester course that provides students with degree credit for unpaid research
without
a seminar component. You may enroll in BIOL BC3597 for between 1-4 credits per semester. As a rule of thumb, you should be spending approximately 3 hours per week per credit on your research project.
A
Project Approval Form
must be submitted to the department each semester that you enroll in this course. Your Barnard research mentor (if your lab is at Barnard) or internal adviser in the Biology Department (if your lab is elsewhere) must approve your planned research
before
you enroll in BIOL BC3597. You should sign up for your mentor's section.
This course does not fulfill any Biology major requirements. It is open to students beginning in their first year.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
From the finishing school to the convent to the women’s college, spaces of female education have long fascinated writers. More than just academic spaces, these are also unique worlds of friendship and exclusion, desire and alienation, community and social fracture, conformity and transgression. In this course, we will explore how women’s education has been imagined in novels, poetry, and film from the early modern period to the present. Beginning with competing visions of women’s education in early feminist and anti-feminist thought, we’ll go on to explore how imaginative writers from the nineteenth century to the present have envisioned the girls’ school as both a literary and a social space. What kinds of cultural fantasies attach to these spaces, and what narratives and social relationships do they enable? How are differences of class, race, sexuality, and religion negotiated within them? Do girls’ schools offer a world apart from society, or do they recreate and intensify outside social dynamics within their walls? Our exploration will take us across genres and media, including the Bildungsroman, the detective novel, the narrative poem, and the horror film. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Fleur Jaeggy, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Sayers, Muriel Spark, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.
Introduction to continuous systems with the treatment of classical and state-space formulations. Mathematical concepts, complex variables, integral transforms and their inverses, differential equations, and relevant linear algebra. Classical feedback control, time/frequency domain design, stability analysis, Laplace transform formulation and solutions, block diagram simplification and manipulation, signal flow graphs, modeling physical systems and linearization. state-space formulation and modeling, in parallel with classical single-input single-output formulation, connections between the two formulations. Transient and steady state analysis, methods of stability analysis, such as root locus methods, Nyquist stability criterion, Routh Hurwitz criterion, pole/zero placement, Bode plot analysis, Nichols chart analysis, phase lead and lag compensators, controllability, observability, realization of canonical forms, state estimation in multivariable systems, time-variant systems. Introduction to advanced stability analysis such as Lyapunov stability and simple optimal control formulation. May not take for credit if already received credit for EEME E4600.
The course can be taken for 1-3 credits. Students are graded and take part in the full production of a dance as performers, choreographers, designers, or stage technicians.
The course can be taken for 1-3 credits. Students are graded and take part in the full production of a dance as performers, choreographers, designers, or stage technicians.
Prerequisites: PSYC UN1010, PSYC UN2280, PSYC UN2620, or PSYC UN2680, and the instructors permission. Considers contemporary risk factors in childrens lives. The immediate and enduring biological and behavioral impact of risk factors.
Discussions of the student's Independent Research project during the fall and spring terms that culminate in a written and oral senior thesis. Each project must be supervised by a scientist working at Barnard or at another local institution.
Prerequisites: (PSYC UN1001) Instructor permission required. A seminar for advanced undergraduate students exploring different areas of clinical psychology. This course will provide you with a broad overview of the endeavors of clinical psychology, as well as discussion of its current social context, goals, and limitations.
Presently, suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are on the rise, particularly among racially and
ethnically minoritized youth. The seminar is designed to enhance understanding of: (a)
prevalence, (b) etiology, (c) risk factors (d) mechanisms (e.g., phenotypes and biological
markers), (e) prevention and treatment approaches, and (f) ethical considerations
This is an undergraduate seminar in social inequality and mobility. Social inequality is broadly defined as the unequal distribution of scarce resources and of the processes by which these resources are allocated to individuals, groups, and populations. The study of inequality en-compasses income and wealth inequality, socioeconomic hierarchies and privileges, poverty and unemployment, social mobility over the life course and across generations, inequality in the educational system, race-ethnic and gender inequality, globalization and the future of work, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of inequality and opportunity, neighborhood segregation, and the consequences of inequality and policy interventions. Over this semester, we will investigate such questions as: How likely are individuals to end up in the same social stratum as their par-ents? Will globalization and automation exacerbate or reduce inequality in workplace? Is there growing inequality in the U.S. and around the globe and, if so, why? In this class, we cover the concepts, theories, facts, and methods of analysis used by sociologists to understand social inequality and mobility. This course takes most of its examples from the contemporary U.S., but we will place U.S. in historical and comparative perspectives as well.
From its origins, and to the present, marriage has been transactional, arranged, and rarely concerned with the desires or interests of the wife. In the eighteenth-century, and especially through the genre of the novel, women began to insist on right to choose their spouse, and the possibility of marrying for love. Perversely, it is at this point that the descriptions of some of the most disastrous and repressive marriages enter literature, and in the twentieth century film. If “the course of true love never did run smooth” this seminar follows its path, investigating the shifts and transformations of marriage. While the focus of the seminar will be on women, we will also consider men, same-sex marriage, questions of marriage and race in the United States, and marriage in China.
A seminar on the historical, political, and cultural developments in the Jewish communities of early-modern Western Europe (1492-1789) with particular emphasis on the transition from medieval to modern patterns. We will study the resettlement of Jews in Western Europe, Jews in the Reformation-era German lands, Italian Jews during the late Renaissance, the rise of Kabbalah, and the beginnings of the quest for civil Emancipation. Field(s): JWS/EME
This course will focus on one topic at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, modularity, mental representation, probabilistic inference, the language of thought, and the computational theory of mind.
Prerequisites: 20th Century Art recommended. The artistic phenomenon that came to be called Modernism is generally considered one of the most pivotal in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth century art. This course studies the emergence and development of Modernism in all of its complexity. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Modern artists responded to the dramatically changing notions of space, time and dimension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What impact did these dramatic changes have on existing concepts of representation? What challenges did they pose for artists? To what extent did Modernism contribute to an understanding of the full consequences of these new ideas of time and space? These concerns will lead us to examine some of the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts as they were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The course will focus specifically on the interrelationships between modernism and the expanding mass cultural formations of the industrial societies in Europe to address a wide range of historical and methodological questions. These include the emergence of modernism in the arts, the collapse of previous modes of representation, the development of new technologies of cultural production, the elaboration of the utopian projects of the avant-gardes, the unfolding of abstract art, the materialization of the readymade, as well as the transformation of concepts of artistic autonomy and cultural institutions. We will first investigate key modernist concepts developed in the late nineteenth century, as well as the crucial work of some of the artists of that moment. This will lead to an examination of the unfolding and consolidation of Cubism in the first decade of the twentieth century, followed by the development of Synthetic Cubism early in the 1910s. The third part of the course will study the impact of Cubism on artistic production in the following decade, focusing primarily on the Italian artists of Futurism, the German avant-garde in the context of Weimar culture, Dadaism, and the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes in the 1910s and 1920’s
Race has served as an enduring organizing principle of American politics. This course will
survey how race shapes politics and how politics shapes race in the United States. In the first of
the semester, we focus on the political processes and institutions that “make” race and
interrogate what we mean exactly when we say race is socially constructed. In the second half of
the semester, we turn to looking at how racialized groups engage in politics on multiple fronts,
paying particular attention to electoral politics and social movements. Throughout the course,
we grapple with both the challenges to and possibilities of diversity and racial justice in the
contemporary America. Topics include but are not limited to political representation, voting,
intersectionality, citizenship, immigration, community activisms, and solidarity.
Welcome to "Global Authoritarianism." Over the past two decades, scholars and policymakers have grown increasingly alarmed about the state of democracy worldwide. Freedom House, V-Dem, and other monitoring organizations have documented what many call a "democratic recession" in which authoritarian governance is expanding globally while the number of democracies shrinks and democratic institutions within liberal democracies weaken. This purely domestic framing, however, misses how authoritarian states now cooperate with and learn from one another, project power across borders into democracies, exploit the openness of democratic societies, and actively reshape international institutions and norms to serve their interests. Authoritarianism has gone global.
In this course, we will analyze the mechanisms, tools, and strategies that authoritarian states use to extend their reach beyond their borders and push back against the liberal international order. We also confront an uncomfortable reality: many of the networks, institutions, and professional services that enable authoritarian power are actually embedded within democracies themselves, including law firms, lobbyists, financial centers, think tanks, global media outlets and sports leagues based in New York, London and other democratic locations.
Guided exploration of chemistry research using modern library resources. Topics include: organization and evaluation of information, information ethics, the history of citation, and use of databases. Culminates in the creation of an online research guide on a specific chemistry topic, using a variety of carefully considered and annotated sources.
What is the relationship of the production of scientific knowledge to Black life in the Americas? What can thinking that arises out of the intellectual traditions of Black Studies contribute to our understandings of the many genres of science (social, physical, earth, life) and their relationship to justice? Building from these essential questions, this course offers a framework for considering the ways that canonical sciences have constrained, categorized, and delimited Black lives, exploring such themes as: technoscientific constructions of race difference, epigenetic theories about the heritability of trauma, histories of biomedical experimentation, the long durée of eugenicist thinking, and the relationship of racialized (and gendered) bodies to their environments. We will also explore scientific scripts emergent from “below,” like: folk healing, speculative fictions, and Black nationalist origin stories, that have and continue to be sources of imaginative and emancipatory promise. In addition to developing the capacity to read widely across genres of science and critical studies thereof, students will develop skills in the deconstruction and speculative refiguring of scientific discourse.
This class explores the relationships among memory, monuments, place, and political power in
the United States West. The course begins with an introduction to the theory of collective
memory and then delves into case studies in New Mexico, California, and Texas. We will
expand our perspective at the end of the course to compare what we have learned with the
recent debates over monuments to the Confederacy. We will consider both physical
manifestations of collective memory such as monuments and architecture as well as intangible
expressions like performance, oral history and folklore.
This course provides an introduction to the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at an undergraduate level. We will discuss properties of human language at different levels of representation (morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics), and will learn how to create systems that can analyze, understand, and generate natural language. We will study machine learning methods used in NLP such as various forms of Neural networks and will focus particularly on conceptual and technical advances of frontier Large Language Models based NLP technologies (think ChatGPT) that are revolutionizing classical computational linguistics and NLP fields. We will also discuss applications such as question answering, summarization, language generation and as well as data, benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. We will discuss ethical aspects of NLP research and applications. Homework assignments will consist of programming projects in Python as well as written interpretation and analysis of the results. Class will also have a midterm and a mini final project instead of a final exam. Prerequisite(s): COMS W3134 or W3136 or W3137 (or equivalent). Background in probability/statistics and linear algebra is also required and experience with Python programming is strongly encouraged. Some previous or concurrent exposure to AI and machine learning is beneficial, but not required.
Please note: Due to significant overlap in content, only one of COMS BC3705 or COMS W4705 may be taken for credit.
This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts. Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation.
This course explores techniques to harness the power of “big data” to answer questions related to political science and/or American politics. We will teach students how to use R—a popular open-source programming language—to obtain, clean, analyze, and visualize data. We will focus on applied problems using real data wherever possible, with a particular focus on R’s “Tidyverse.” In total, in this course we will cover concepts such as reading data in various formats (including “cracking” atypical government data sources and pdf documents); web scraping; data joins; data manipulation and cleaning (including string variables and regular expressions); data mining; making effective data visualizations; using data to make informed prediction, and basic text analysis. We will also cover programming basics including writing functions and loops in R. Finally, we will discuss how to use R Markdown to communicate our results effectively to outside audiences. No previous knowledge of R is required.
Students who wish to do an independent study project (I.S.P.), should speak with a Political Science faculty member willing to serve as sponsor, then fill out a Request for Approval of Credit for Independent Study (see Registrars link below) and obtain signatures from the sponsor and from our Department Chair. File this form with the Committee on Programs and Academic Standing, which must approve all requests. (It must be filed with the C.P.A.S. well before the Registrars program-filing deadline for the semester of the I.S.P.) Note that no credit is given for an internship or job experience in or by itself, but credit is given for an academic research paper written in conjunction with an internship, subject to the procedures outlined above. The internship and the I.S.P. can be in the same semester, or you may do the I.S.P. in the semester following the internship. A project approved for three or four points counts as an elective course for the purpose of the ten-course major or five-course minor requirement. No more than two such three- or four-point projects may be used for the major, and no more than one for the minor. An independent study project may not be used to satisfy either the colloquium or senior seminar requirement. Each instructor is limited to sponsoring one independent study project per semester. The Registrar will assign a POLS BC 3799 section and call number unique to the faculty sponsor. The Registrars ISP form: http://www.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/indstudy.pdf. The Political Science faculty: http://polisci.barnard.edu/faculty-directory.
Students who wish to do an independent study project (I.S.P.), should speak with a Political Science faculty member willing to serve as sponsor, then fill out a Request for Approval of Credit for Independent Study (see Registrars link below) and obtain signatures from the sponsor and from our Department Chair. File this form with the Committee on Programs and Academic Standing, which must approve all requests. (It must be filed with the C.P.A.S. well before the Registrars program-filing deadline for the semester of the I.S.P.) Note that no credit is given for an internship or job experience in or by itself, but credit is given for an academic research paper written in conjunction with an internship, subject to the procedures outlined above. The internship and the I.S.P. can be in the same semester, or you may do the I.S.P. in the semester following the internship. A project approved for three or four points counts as an elective course for the purpose of the ten-course major or five-course minor requirement. No more than two such three- or four-point projects may be used for the major, and no more than one for the minor. An independent study project may not be used to satisfy either the colloquium or senior seminar requirement. Each instructor is limited to sponsoring one independent study project per semester. The Registrar will assign a POLS BC 3799 section and call number unique to the faculty sponsor. The Registrars ISP form: http://www.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/indstudy.pdf. The Political Science faculty: http://polisci.barnard.edu/faculty-directory.
Guided, independent, in-depth research culminating in the senior thesis in the spring. Includes discussion about scientific presentations and posters, data analysis, library research methods and scientific writing. Students review work in progress and share results through oral reports. Weekly seminar to review work in progress and share results through oral and written reports.