TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOP

TOPICS IN COG SCI & PHILO

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.

• Department: Cognitive Science @Barnard
• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Joshua J Kramer
  Info
• 3 points

PROBABILITY FOR ENGINEERS

Introductory course to probability theory and does not assume any prior knowledge of subject. Teaches foundations required to use probability in applications, but course itself is theoretical in nature. Basic definitions and axioms of probability and notions of independence and conditional probability introduced. Focus on random variables, both continuous and discrete, and covers topics of expectation, variance, conditional distributions, conditional expectation and variance, and moment generating functions. Also Central Limit Theorem for sums of random variables. Consists of lectures, recitations, weekly homework, and in-class exams.

• Department: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Daniel Lacker
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

MAFIA MOVIES

Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism. Limit 25

• Department: Italian @Barnard
• T 6:10 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Nelson Moe
  CULPA: 10 h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

Early American Horror

Buried alive. Driven mad with guilt. Dissolved into a vast, anonymous universe. These are some of the terrors that this undergraduate seminar will address as we explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical dimensions of early American horror. How did Puritan, Gothic, and other early American horror writers complicate cultural attitudes towards the unthinkable, the cruel, and the perverse in works of supernatural horror? What do Gothic fiction’s enduring tropes—such as haunted houses, doppelgängers, and sentient machines—reveal about the massive social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, including the expansion and intensification of slavery, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the economic transition to industrial capitalism? And what might early American horror fail to capture about these underlying political realities? Our historical attention to race, labor, and gender will enable us to reconsider canonical American horror literature and illuminate the reliance on early American literary tropes in contemporary horror films for representing the uniquely disturbing experiences of modern life.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ethan A Plaue
  Info
• 4 points

SOUTH ASIA

SOUTH ASIA: ANTHRO APPROACHES

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Elizabeth M Green
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

The Politics of Work

In this class we will examine the politics, organization, and experience of work. In the first three weeks we will get our bearings and consider some basic (but difficult!) questions about work, including: What counts as work and who counts as a worker? How important are our jobs to our survival in the world, and what makes for a good or bad job? In this section you will start thinking about and analyzing your own work experiences. In weeks four and five we will read what sociology’s founders had to say about work, and consider some of the important shifts to work that accompanied industrialization. Then we will turn to 20th century transformations, including the rise of the service economy and worker-customer relations, changes in forms of managerial control and worker responses to these changes, globalization, and the proliferation of precarious work. Finally, we will turn to examining gender, class and race in labor markets and on the job, paid and unpaid reproductive labor, the construction of selves at work, and the job of fashion modeling. Throughout the course we will examine how the sociology of work is bound up with other key institutions including gender, race, class, and the family.

• Department: Sociology
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Teresa Sharpe
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

The Ancient Table: Archaeology of Cookin

ANCT TBL: ARCH COOKING &

Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean.

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Camilla Sturm
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

The Politics of Care

THE POLITICS OF CARE

Semester:

What are the consequences of entrenched inequalities in the context of care? How might we (re)imagine associated practices as political projects? Wherein lie the origins of utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? How might we track associated promises and failures as they travel across social hierarchies, nationalities, and geographies of care? And what do we mean when we speak of “care”? These questions define the scaffolding for this course. Our primary goals throughout this semester are threefold.  First, we begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, including urban and rural America, an Amazonia borderland, South Africa, France, and Mexico. Third, we will address temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced in the here-and-now, historically, and in a futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, and most importantly, we will remain alert to the relevance of domains of difference relevant to care, most notably race, gender, class, and species.

Upper level seminar; 4 points

Summer:

What do we mean when we speak of “care”? How might we (re)imagine practices of care as political and moral projects? What promises, paradoxes, or failures surface amid entrenched inequalities? And what hopes, desires, and fears inform associated utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? These questions will serve as a scaffolding of sorts for this course, and our primary goals are fourfold. 
First,
 we will begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. 
Second,
 we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, communities, and geographies of care. 
Third
, we will remain alert to the temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced historically, in the here-and-now, and in the futuristic world of science fiction. 
Finally,
 we will consider the moral underpinnings of intra-human alongside interspecies care.

Enrollment limited to 10; 4 points

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Gina A Jae
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

Gender Trouble in French and Francophone

French and francophone literature from past centuries is replete with queer and feminist literary utopias. While some French-language authors have imagined fictional places where patriarchal structures have been weakened or reversed, others have imagined worlds in which the category of gender itself has been problematized or done away with. This course introduces students to the rich and long history of such texts from the middle ages to the present. Authors and filmmakers will include Christine de Pizan, George Sand, Alice Guy, Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, Léonora Miano, Mati Diop, Céline Sciamma and Paul Preciado. Class taught entirely in French.

• Department: French
• MW 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Anna P Langewiesche
  Info
• 3 points

Business & Politics in Globalized World

Business & Politics Globa

Companies (or, as we’ll mostly refer to them, firms) play a number of important roles in both domestic and international politics; among other activities, they create jobs, engage in trade and in-vestment, create social responsibility programs, lobby governments, and create much of the world’s pollution. How should we think about firms as political actors? Why, when, and how do firms attempt to influence policymaking? And when do they succeed? In this course, we will study strategic collaboration, competition, and collusion between firms and governments in a range of settings and policy areas. To do so, we will draw on insights from international relations, economics, and business scholars, and we will frequently engage with current real-world examples of business-government relations. Topics will include (among others) lobbying, corporate social responsibility, taxation and tax avoidance, public-private governance, and corporate influence in foreign policy.

• Department: Political Science
• MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Calvin N Thrall
  Info
• 3 points

Disability Narratives in Latin America

Disability Narratives Lat

This course surveys Latin American literary texts that have deeply engaged with disability in the
20 th and 21 st century. Against the tendency to treat disability merely as a useful metaphor or to
simply import Global Northern vocabulary and methodologies of disability studies to other
locations, this course turns to Latin American literary texts by authors that have been directly
“touched” by disability to foreground the concerns, vocabularies, and commitments that their
texts reveal. This includes authors who either through their personal experience with disability
or as caretakers—as parents, siblings, or close friends of people with disabilities—have closely
grappled with the experience of non-normative bodies and minds in the Latin American
context. In this course we ask how are subjects with disabilities represented in a variety of
genres (novel, essay, poem, graphic novel) and what constraints and possibilities circumscribe
these subjectivities and their lives. Ultimately, we will ask what vision of disability justice
emerges from these localized experiences and creative interventions beyond now globalized
disability discourses of inclusion/access and independence/autonomy.

• Department: Spanish and Latin American Culture
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Maja Horn
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 points

Mass-Mediated Politics in Modern Latin A

Mass-Med Politics Mod Lat

This undergraduate seminar offers an introduction to the study of mass media and politics in Latin America from the early 19th to the early 21st century. Throughout the course, the students will get acquainted with some of the key concepts, problems, and methods through which historians and communication scholars have probed the relationship between mass media and political power in the region. We will define and understand media broadly, but we will focus largely on printed media and, to a lesser extent, radio, cinema, and television. We will discuss both breaks and continuities between different media technologies, journalistic cultures, and political regimes. Knowledge of Spanish is welcome, but not mandatory.

• Department: History @Barnard
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Alfonso Salgado
  Info
• 4 points

Research Immersion in OR and Data Analyt

An overview of active research areas in Operations Research and Data Analytics, and an introduction to the essential components of research studies. This course helps students develop fundamental research skills, including paper reading, problem formulation, problem-solving, scientific writing, and research presentation. Classes are in seminar format, with students analyzing research papers, developing research projects, and presenting research findings.

• Department: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
• T 4:10 p.m.-6:40 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam N Elmachtoub
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

STRATEGY FORMULATION

This class is an introduction to strategic management and the decisions that firms make in their historical context. We look at the growth of the large multi-product firm in almost all countries in the world and the the process by which they internationalized their activities and, very often, were also forced to retreat from their international positions.  We treat strategies as relation to two broad goals of the class: to understand why some companies are financially much more successful than others; and to analyze how managers can devise a set of actions (the strategy) and design processes and structures that allow their company to obtain a competitive advantage. You will learn the analytical tools developed in universities, in consulting and industrial firms, and even in the military.   These tools include what companies do to outperform their rivals; to analyze the competitive moves of rival firms by game-theoretic concepts; and when it makes sense for companies to diversify and globalize their business. Applications will be to Walmart and Apple, European firms and to Asian firms, and developing country firms.

• Department: Mendelson Center
• R 10:25 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Len Sherman
  Info
• 3 points

Modern Library Resources for Scientific

Library Science Research

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.

• Department: Chemistry @Barnard
• Instructor: Michael Campbell
  Info
• 1 points

LATINX RACIAL IDENTITY & CULTURAL PRODUC

LATINX RACIAL CULTURAL PR

The course will investigate the impact of racial identity among Latinx in the U.S. on cultural production of Latinos in literature, media, politics and film. The seminar will consider the impact of bilingualism, shifting racial identification, and the viability of monolithic terms like Latinx. We will see how the construction of Latinx racial identity affects acculturation in the U.S., with particular attention to hybrid identities and the centering of black and indigenous cultures. Examples will be drawn from different Latinx ethnicities from the Caribbean, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

• Department: Ethnicity and Race, Center for
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Edward Morales
  Info
• 4 points

INTRO TO COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

A basic course in communication theory, stressing modern digital communication systems. Nyquist sampling, PAM and PCM/DPCM systems, time division multipliexing, high frequency digital (ASK, OOK, FSK, PSK) systems, and AM and FM systems. An introduction to noise processes, detecting signals in the presence of noise, Shannons theorem on channel capacity, and elements of coding theory.

• Department: Electrical Engineering
• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Irving Kalet
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 12 Info
• 3 points

MAJOR WOMEN FILMMAKERS

Traditional film history has consigned a multitude of cinema practices to an inferior position. By accepting Hollywood’s narrative model as central, film scholars have often relegated non-male, non-white, non-Western films to a secondary role. Often described as “marginal” or “peripheral” cinemas, the outcomes of these film practices have been systematically excluded from the canon. Yet… are these motion pictures really “secondary”? In relation to what? And according to whom? This course looks at major films by women filmmakers of the 20th Century within a tradition of political cinema that 1) directly confronts the hegemonic masculinity of the Hollywood film industry, and 2) relocates the so-called “alternative women’s cinema” at the core of film history. Unlike conventional feminist film courses, which tend to be contemporary and anglocentric, this class adopts a historical and worldwide perspective; rather than focusing on female directors working in America today, we trace the origins of women’s cinema in different cities of the world (Berlin, Paris, New York) during the silent period, and, from there, we move forward to study major works by international radical directors such as Lorenza Mazzetti, Agnès Varda, Forough Farrokhzad, Věra Chytilová, Chantal Akerman, Lina Wertmüller, Barbara Loden, Julie Dash, and Mira Nair. We analyse how these filmmakers have explored womanhood not only as a source of oppresion (critique of patriarchal phallocentrism, challenge to heteronormativity, etc) but, most importantly, as a source of empowerment (defense of matriarchy, equal rights, lesbian love, inter- and transexuality...). Required readings include seminal texts of feminist film theory by Claire Johnston, Laura Mulvey, Ann Kaplan, bell hooks, and Judith Butler. Among the films screened in the classroom are silent movies –
Suspense
(Lois Weber, 1913),
The Seashell and the Clergyman
(Germaine Dulac, 1928)—, early independent and experimental cinema –
Girls in Uniform
(Leontine Sagan, 1931),
Ritual in Transfigured Time
(Maya Deren, 1946)—, “new wave” films of the 1950s and 1960s –
Cléo from 5 to 7
(Varda, 1962),
Daisies
(Chytilová, 1966)–,
auteur
cinema of the 1970s –
Seven Beauties
(Wertmüller, 1974),
Jeanne Dielman
(Akerman, 1975)–, and documentary films –

• Department: Film @Barnard
• M 4:10 p.m.-7:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Sophia de Baun
  Info
• 3 points

SENIOR RESEARCH ESSAY SEMINAR

• Department: American Studies @Barnard
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dani Joslyn
  Info
• Instructor: Manu Karuka
  Info
• 4 points

RESEARCH DESIGN: DATA ANALYSIS

This course examines the basic methods data analysis and statistics that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. The same methods apply to other kinds of problems about cause and effect relationships more generally. The course will provide students with extensive experience in analyzing data and in writing (and thus reading) research papers about testable theories and hypotheses. It will cover basic data analysis and statistical methods, from univariate and bivariate descriptive and inferential statistics through multivariate regression analysis. Computer applications will be emphasized. The course will focus largely on observational data used in cross-sectional statistical analysis, but it will consider issues of research design more broadly as well. It will assume that students have no mathematical background beyond high school algebra and no experience using computers for data analysis.

• Department: Political Science
• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Abdullah Aydogan
  h-index: 4 Info
• 3 points

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS: FOUNDATIONS AND E

LLM FOUNDATIONS AND ETHIC

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, ChatGPT, LLaMA are models that are trained on large amounts of data and are adaptable to a wide range of tasks. They are the basis of most state-of-the-art systems in Natural Language Processing. While the potential of these technologies for social good is large, the risks are also comparable. In this course, the students will learn the fundamentals about the modeling, theory and ethical aspects of LLMs and their applications, while gaining experience working with them. The course will be structured as a seminar, where one class is dedicated to instructor-led lecture and one to studentled discussion of papers around topics covered in the lecture. Each paper discussion will be structured as a panel of 3-4 students, each with an assigned role. Each panel role covers one aspect of critically assessing an academic/industry paper. Everyone in the class should participate by commenting and asking questions from the panel. The class is project-based, meaning there will be a semester-long project focused on evaluating LLMs and/or building LLMs around a topic/problem/task you care about, with an end of semester final paper. The projects will be done by groups of 3-4 students.

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 NLP, AI or machine learning is beneficial, but not required.

• Department: Computer Science @Barnard
• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Smaranda Muresan
  h-index: 22 Info
• 3 points

Persuasion at scale: causal inference, m

Persuasion at Scale

By employing statistical and computational methods, including randomized controlled trials, natural experiments, and machine learning techniques, students will engage directly with real-world data to uncover the intricacies of persuasion across different sectors, including but not limited to quantifying the effects of partisan media, social media, and political campaigns. The course will also delve into the historical evolution of these persuasive techniques, providing students with a rich contextual background to better understand current trends and anticipate future developments.

This course fulfills the quantitative methods requirement for the Political Science major.

• Department: Political Science
• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• 3 points

RESEARCH DESIGN: SCOPE AND METHODS

RESEARCH DESIGN: SCOPE&ME

This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.

• Department: Political Science
• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Caterina Chiopris
  Info
• 4 points

SCOPE AND METHODS - DISC

This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.

• Department: Political Science
• 0 points

Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well

Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s
Phaedo
to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them.

Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kathy H Eden
  CULPA: 19 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

VIRGINIA WOOLF

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Queer Science & Tech Studies

Queer Science & Technolog

Technology has long shaped our understanding of sex and gender, from stone tools to artificial intelligence. Likewise, scientific knowledge systems and practices have profoundly impacted processes of categorization and defined what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’ Yet, simultaneously, sociocultural conceptions of sex and gender bear upon science and technology. How might we think about this nexus in a time of fraught contestations over sex, gender, and visions of what the world ought to be like, vis-à-vis science and technology? Leveraging intersections of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist and queer studies, this seminar queries the mutually constitutive relationships between science, technology, gender, and sex across time and space.

• Department: Anthropology
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Madisson Whitman
  Info
• 4 points

GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE AMERICAN STAGE

PERFORMING THE BODY POLIT

This seminar investigates how American theatre/performance, as read through the lens of gender and sexuality, operates as a cultural force.  Simply put, the U.S. is obsessed with sex; theatre/performance has proven a fertile medium for America’s expression of this obsession. Exploring texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider how performance intersects with the nation state’s desire to regulate how we “practice” gender both publicly and behind closed doors and how that intersects, overlaps and influences the politics of American Identity. How is performance, which always includes gendered/raced/classed/sexualized bodies, situated in relationship to ideas of a national body politic?  How does the American nation state hinge on how gender and sexuality are performed both on-stage and off?

• Department: English @Barnard
• R 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
• Instructor: Pamela Cobrin
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Six major concepts of political philosophy including authority, rights, equality, justice, liberty and democracy are examined in three different ways. First the conceptual issues are analyzed through contemporary essays on these topics by authors like Peters, Hart, Williams, Berlin, Rawls and Schumpeter. Second the classical sources on these topics are discussed through readings from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Plato, Mill and Rousseau. Third some attention is paid to relevant contexts of application of these concepts in political society, including such political movements as anarchism, international human rights, conservative, liberal, and Marxist economic policies as well as competing models of democracy.

• Department: Philosophy @Barnard
• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Ding Ding
  Info
• 3 points

LITERATURE ON DRUGS

Whether as sources of artistic creativity, symbols of moral decay, avenues of escape, or
foundations for alternative forms of sociality, drugs are an inexhaustible source of inspiration
for all manner of storytellers. Why is that? This course surveys the narrative history of
“literature on drugs” from three angles: first, we examine poetry and fiction composed under
the influence of mind-altering intoxicants; second, we study literature about drug-induced
experiences and the counter-cultures they have fueled; and we ask why literary criticism is
essential to articulate the danger and allure of drugs, past, present, and future. We will read
from literary psychonauts including William Blake, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Allen
Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Anaïs Nin, and Hunter S. Thompson; historians of the highly weird like
Michel Foucault and Erik Davis; and an array of primary sources on the legal, therapeutic, and
psychological complexities of drug use, such as Billy Holiday, Sigmund Freud, William James,
and Margaret Mead. We also will consider the cinematic history of literature on drugs with
films like Altered States, Trainspotting, and Apocalypse Now. The course incorporates hands-on
archival work and includes a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

• Department: English @Barnard
• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Nathan Gorelick
  Info
• 3 points

Experimental Research

Randomized experimentation is an important methodology in political science. In this course, we will discuss the logic of experimentation, its strengths and weaknesses compared to other methodologies, and the ways in which experimentation has been -- and could be -- used to investigate political phenomena. Students will learn how to interpret, design, and execute experiments.

• Department: Political Science
• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Yamil R Velez
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 8 Info
• 4 points

LIVING, DYING, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Bringing together scholars from the fields of Philosophy, Medicine, Ethics, and Religion, this course
exposes students to modes of inquiry that can help to answer central questions that are often elusive and/or
unconsidered: What constitutes a good human life? What do I need to be truly happy? How does the fact
that I will one day die impact how I should live today? This interdisciplinary course provides a rare
opportunity to consider how a wide variety of thinkers and writers have approached these questions, while
also engaging with them in a personal way within our contemporary context. Lectures will be combined
with group discussion and a weekend retreat, creating possibilities for interpersonal engagement and deep
learning.

• Department: Philosophy
• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• 3 points

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH-DISC

This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3768.

• Department: Political Science
• 0 points

Indigenous Enlightenment

What is the source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been the restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why.

• Department: Religion @Barnard
• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Timothy Vasko
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATN,CLTR,VAL

BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATNCLTRVAL

An intensive seminar analyzing questions of migration, identity, (self-) representation, and values with regard to the Turkish minority living in Germany today. Starting with a historical description of the „guest worker“ program that brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish nationals to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the course will focus on the experiences and cultural production of the second and third generations of Turkish Germans, whose presence has profoundly transformed German society and culture. Primary materials include diaries, autobiographies, legal and historical documents, but the course will also analyze poetry, novels, theater plays and films. In German.

• Department: Germanic Languages
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Mark M Anderson
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative

Lab Lit, Weird Sci, & Spe

This course will focus on literary fiction and film about science, scientists, and scientific culture.  We’ll ask how and why writers have wanted to represent the sciences and how their work is inspired, in turn, by innovations in scientific knowledge of their time.  This is not a class on genre fiction.  Unlike a science fiction class, we will cover narratives in a variety of genres—some highly speculative, and some in a more realist vein—thinking about how literary form is related to content.  We start with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, often considered the first work of science fiction, before moving to works from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including H.G. Welles’s
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
George Schulyer’s
Black No More
, Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith
, Carl Sagan’s
Contact
, Richard Powers’s
Overstory
, and the short stories of Ted Chiang.  We will also watch such films as James Whale’s
Frankenstein
, Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
, Andrew Niccol’s
Gattaca
, and Yorgos Lanthemos’s
Poor Things
. 

In addition to asking how science and scientists are represented in these narratives, we’ll also discuss the cultural impact of such scientific innovations as the discovery of electricity, cell theory, eugenics and racial science, vaccines and immunology, space travel, new reproductive technologies, gene editing and more.  A STEM background is not required, but students will be expected to have curiosity and motivation to learn about science, as well as its narrative representation.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 4 points

Prints in 17th-Century Holland: A Curato

Holland in the seventeenth century was home to some of the most innovative and influential printmakers in the history of art, most important among them, Rembrandt van Rijn. In addition, known for producing the most professional engravers, it became the main center for the issuing and distribution of prints in Europe. Held primarily in The Met’s Drawings and Prints Study Room, this class examines printmaking from this period in its many forms – from masterworks of Dutch landscape to political broadsheets. Reproductive printmakers and peintres-graveur, professional printmakers and amateurs will be considered. How prints were made, published, and sold will be explored. Students will learn how to identify techniques as well as quality of impression by examining original works in the collection of The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints. We will also look at the subject from the point of view of the museum curator – how works are collected and exhibitions created.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nadine M Orenstein
  Info
• 4 points

Material Culture and Africa's Neglected

Mat'l Cult.&AF Neglected

For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear.

• Department: History
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Elya R Assayag
  Info
• 4 points

History of African Muslims: Timbuktu and

HIST AFRICA MUSLIMS TIMBU

This seminar uses the celebrated city of Timbuktu as a starting point from which to explore the history of West African Muslims and their scholarship from the age of the Sudanic empires (10th-17th centuries) through the troubled present in the Republic of Mali. Key questions include the relationship between scholars and rulers, the boundaries of the Muslim community, the entanglements of race, slavery, and religious practice, and the impact of secular governance on the Muslim scholarly tradition.

• Department: History
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gregory Mann
  CULPA: 15 h-index: 13 Info
• 4 points

Lagos: From the Pepperfarm to the Megaci

Lagos: Pepperfarm to Mega

Lagos: The City Is…


the unofficial capital of Nigeria

the go-slow capital of the world

Rem Koolhaas’ planning mystery

George Packer’s mega-city nightmare


 

Above all, as social scientist Margaret Peil once said, Lagos: The city is the people. At last count, over 15 million people to be (in)exact which makes Lagos the second most densely populated city in Africa. How does a city like Lagos come into being? What are its origins?  What is its history in regional, continental, and global context?  How does it ‘work’ and what work does it do for our understandings of cities, urbanization, urbanism, colonialism, globalization, trans-nationalism, and the spatial factor in Africanist historical analyses?  This course examines the many Lagoses that have existed over time, in space, and in the imagination from the city’s origins to the 21st century.  This is a reading, writing, viewing, and listening intensive course.  We will be reading scholarly, policy-oriented, and popular sources on Lagos as well as screening films and audio recordings that feature Lagos in order to learn about the social, cultural, and intellectual history of this West African mega-city.

• Department: History @Barnard
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Abosede A George
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Department: Education @Barnard
• Instructor: Maria S Rivera Maulucci
  h-index: 10 Info
• Instructor: Lisa Edstrom
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 1-4 points

EARTH & ENVIR ENGIN LAB

Experiments on fundamental aspects of Earth and environmental engineering with emphasis on the applications of chemistry, biology and thermodynamics to environmental processes: energy generation, analysis and purification of water, environmental biology, and biochemical treatment of wastes. Students will learn the laboratory procedures and use analytical equipment firsthand, hence demonstrating experimentally the theoretical concepts learned in class.

• Department: Earth and Environmental Engineering
• TR 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• 4 points

SEM IN CONTEMP ART PRACTICE

(Formerly R4601) New York City is the most abundant visual arts resource in the world. Visits to museums, galleries, and studios on a weekly basis. Students encounter a broad cross-section of art and are encouraged to develop ideas about what is seen. The seminar is led by a practicing artist and utilizes this perspective. Columbia College and General Studies Visual Arts Majors must take this class during their junior year. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.

• Department: Visual Arts
• T 4 p.m.-7 p.m.
• Instructor: Keli Safia Maksud
  Info
• 3 points

ENVIR SCIENCE SENIOR SEM II

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. Prerequisite to EESC W3901.

• Department: Environmental Sciences @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

COLL:POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT

Prerequisites: V 1501 or equivalent Description: The semester-long course aims to study political and social factors behind economic development and exam empirical cases of the success and failure in economic growth in order to understand the key features of the development processes. In the last two centuries, some countries successfully achieved economic growth and development, while other failed to do so. Even in the post-WWII period, the world has witnessed the rise and decline of economies around the world. Why do nations succeed or fail in economic development? How do political institutions affect economic outcomes? What are the ways in which state and market interact and influence each other? Can democracy be considered a cause of development, an outgrowth of development, or neither and to which extent? How do external factors such as foreign aid encourage or discourage development? We will try to examine these questions by taking a historical-institutional and comparative approach and take a critical look at the role of political and other institutions by applying theoretical guidelines and empirical cases. We will explore competing explanations for the successes and failures of economic development in the world. Objective:1. Understand some important concepts and theories within the fields of comparative politics and political economy. To explore the interconnections between politics, economy, and society in the context of development policy and practice.2. Develop basic analytic skills to explore various factors that shape political, economic, and social development and underdevelopment in the world;3. Understand some country specific political economy processes and how these processes prove or disprove certain theories and policies.

• Department: Political Science @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Xiaobo Lu
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

CHEM ENG & APPLIED CHEM LAB

Emphasizes active, experiment-based resolution of open-ended problems involving use, design, and optimization of equipment, products, or materials. Under faculty guidance students formulate, carry out, validate, and refine experimental procedures, and present results in oral and written form. Develops analytical, communications, and cooperative problem-solving skills in the context of problems that span from traditional, large scale separations and processing operations to molecular level design of materials or products. Sample projects include: scale up of apparatus, process control, chemical separations, microfluidics, surface engineering, molecular sensing, and alternative energy sources. Safety awareness is integrated.

• Department: Chemical Engineering
• MW 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
• 3 points

LITERARY APPROACHES TO BIBLE

Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature.

• Department: English @Barnard
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Margaret R Ellsberg
  CULPA: 54 Info
• 4 points

TOXIC

It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own.

• Department: Anthropology
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Knowledge, Practice, Power

COLLOQUIUM ON FEMINIST INQUIRY

Knowledge, Practice, Power is a practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for. Open to non-majors, but sophomore and junior majors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are encouraged to enroll in this course as preparation for Senior Seminar I. This course is required for students pursuing the concentration or minor in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies. Prerequisite: 
Either
 one introductory WGSS course 
or
 Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory 
or
 Permission of the Instructor.

• Department: Women's, Gender, Sexuality Studies @Barnard
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza
  Info
• 4 points

Black Shakespeare

This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring  representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s
Othello
will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor

• Department: Africana Studies (AFSB)
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Kim F Hall
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING LAB II

Biomedical experimental design and hypothesis testing. Statistical analysis of experimental measurements. Analysis of experimental measurements. Analysis of variance, post hoc testing. Fluid shear and cell adhesion, neuro-electrophysiology, soft tissue biomechanics, biomecial imaging and ultrasound, characterization of excitable tissues, microfluidics.

• Department: Biomedical Engineering
• W 1:10 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
• R 1:10 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
• 3 points

Workshop in Sustainable Development: Eco

WORKSHOP IN SDEV SOUTH AF

This course is a client-based workshop in which students apply their experience and knowledge to address critical, real-world sustainability challenges. The primaryclient is Wild Tomorrow, a non-profit conservation organization focused on ecosystem restoration and community development in a biodiversity hotspot in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Students will contribute to the sustainable protection, rewilding, and expansion of a 4,600-acre wildlife corridor adjacent to the UNESCO World Heritage iSimangaliso Wetland Park. Over spring break, students will travel to the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve to learn from local experts while gaining practical experience in restoring habitat for threatened species, addressing human-wildlife conflict, and exploring the intersection of conservation and community development. Post-trip class sessions will consist of focused teamwork on the final report and presentations.

• Department: Earth Institute
• M 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenna M Lawrence
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

Archives of Possibility

In part due to the rise of social and political movements challenging and reshaping colonial narratives about the past, the emergence of digital technologies, and unprecedented access to information, attention to archives has increased over the last decades. This course aims to familiarize students with theories, histories, and practices of archival-building as a mode of knowledge production and to explore questions regarding the relationship between archives and power. The course also examines how and under what conditions archives open up new possibilities by producing and circulating marginalized knowledge, narratives, and perspectives; promotes archival research, and familiarizes students with the basics of preservation in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As part of the course, students will research Columbia's archives and build their own as part of this process.

• Department: Ethnicity and Race, Center for
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner
  CULPA: 18 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

RACE, CASTE, AND THE UNIVERSITY: B. R. A

RACE, CASTE, AND UNIVERSI

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey.

 

This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, Rare Books and Manuscript Library Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more.

This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and stuents will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research.  This seminar inaugurates an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with globalizing the reach and relevance of B. R. Ambedkar and to share our findings with the Columbia community and beyond.  Working independently, students will define and pursue individual research projects.  Working together, the class will create digital visualizations of these projects.

• Department: History @Barnard
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Anupama Rao
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 4 points

FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER SYSTS

Fundamentals of computer organization and digital logic. Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, basic gates and components, flipflops and latches, counters and state machines, basics of combinational and sequential digital design. Assembly language, instruction sets, ALU’s, single-cycle and multi-cycle processor design, introduction to pipelined processors, caches, and virtual memory.

• Department: Computer Science
• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Daniel S Rubenstein
  CULPA: 29 Info
• 3 points

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR

In this class, we will think about the various ways in which philosophers, social theorists, historians and anthropologists have thought about war, violence, and responsibility. The course focuses on a set of themes and questions: for example, the nature of violence and the question of responsibility or accountability, shifting technologies of warfare, and the phenomenology and aftermath of warfare, for civilians and for combatants. The reading list incorporates different approaches to such questions—from historical to philosophical to ethnographic accounts.

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nadia Abu El-Haj
  CULPA: 13 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Citizenship: Regional and Global Histori

Citizenship in South Asia

This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities.

• Department: History
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kalyani Ramnath
  Info
• 4 points

New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, H

The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine
Partisan Review
on Astor Place.  Although usually regarded as male dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time.  Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary;  Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection
The Company She Keeps
; Susan Sontag’s debut
Against Interpretation
(1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book
On Photography
(1977) she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL

• Department: History
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Marwa Elshakry
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Tunc Sen
  Info
• Instructor: Hannah Farber
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

Seminar on Law and Psychology

Psychology and Law Semina

This seminar explores how psychological theory and research—particularly from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology—can illuminate, inform, and challenge legal institutions, practices, norms, and debates. The course examines how people think about, interact with, and are affected by the legal system in roles such as defendants, jurors, judges, lawyers, and citizens. Topics include legal decision-making, responsibility and intent, bias and discrimination, forensic assessment, mental illness and legal capacity, eyewitness testimony, interrogations and false confessions, punishment, and stigma.

We will consider how psychological insights help explain how the law operates in practice and critically assess how legal policies align with—or diverge from—psychological evidence. While grounded in psychological science, the course also draws on interdisciplinary work from law and legal scholarship, sociology, public health, and neuroscience. We will read empirical studies and legal analyses that address psychological issues relevant to the law. The principal goal is to understand the legal system not only as a body of rules, but as a human institution shaped by cognitive, emotional, and social dynamics.

 

Over the course of the semester we will (1) analyze how core concepts in psychology apply to legal contexts; (2) assess psychological studies by examining the strength of their research design and considering their implications for legal concepts and practices; (3) examine how developmental, cognitive, and affective processes affect legal decision-making; (4) identify and critique the use of psychological evidence in courts and policy debates; and (5) explore how neuroscience is reshaping legal understandings of responsibility, culpability, and sentencing, while critically examining its ethical and evidentiary limitations.

• Department: Psychology
• T 8:10 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael J Naft
  Info
• 4 points

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). As the great imperial powers of Britain, France, and Belgium, among others, ceded self-rule to the colonies they once controlled, formerly colonized subjects engaged in passionate discussion about the shape of their new nations not only in essays and pamphlets but also in fiction, poetry, and theatre. Despite the common goal of independence, the heated debates showed that the postcolonial future was still up for grabs, as the boundary lines between and within nations were once again redrawn. Even such cherished notions as nationalism were disputed, and thinkers like the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore sounded the alarm about the pitfalls of narrow ethnocentric thinking. Their call for a philosophy of internationalism went against the grain of ethnic and racial particularism, which had begun to take on the character of national myth. The conflict of perspectives showed how deep were the divisions among the various groups vying to define the goals of the postcolonial nation, even as they all sought common cause in liberation from colonial rule. Nowhere was this truer than in India. The land that the British rulers viewed as a test case for the implementation of new social philosophies took it upon itself to probe their implications for the future citizenry of a free, democratic republic. We will read works by Indian writers responding to decolonization and, later, globalization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Beginning as a movement against imperial control, anti-colonialism also generated new discussions about gender relations, secularism and religious difference, the place of minorities in the nation, the effects of partition on national identity, among other issues. With the help of literary works and historical accounts, this course will explore the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society in a globalized era without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. Writers on the syllabus include Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Mahasweta Devi, Bapsi Sidwa, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu ) with the subject heading Indian Writing in English seminar. In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gauri Viswanathan
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

THE HISTORY OF KOREA TO 1900

This course traces Korean history from the earliest recorded kingdoms to 1900, situating the development of Korean civilization within both East Asian and global contexts. Students will explore major political, social, intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic issues of premodern Korea through diverse interpretive approaches and a wide range of primary sources that illuminate both everyday life and broader historical transformations. No prior knowledge of Korean history is required, and all readings are in English.

• Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jungwon Kim
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performa

This visual arts seminar explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP.  This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Janina P Marshall
  Info
• 4 points

OUT OF PLACE

Literature has always attracted the outsider, and literature itself seems to demand from its writers to momentarily step out of the fray in order to hope to observe it. The modern age has offered different examples of this. When Bernard Levin described V.S. Naipaul as an ‘inquiline’ author — meaning, a guest or a lodger, an animal that lives in another's nest — Naipaul responded:

‘When I see the sun set here at Stonehenge, there is a way that it is somebody else’s sun, somebody else’s landscape, it has somebody’s else's history connected with it. I can't avoid that: that's the way I think.’

When Virginia Woolf received news of the death of Joseph Conrad, she sat down and penned an admiring obituary that opens with what might be read as a presumptuously arrogant statement:

‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’

Despite Woolf’s English snobbishness, her words reveal something true about Conrad’s situation, and about the place of many other writers who were, for one reason or another, obliged to operate in foreign lands, inside other languages or states of being, authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Ovid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Waguih Ghali and David Malouf.

Through the close analysis of a narrow selection of works, this class will chart the ways in which such works reveal the nature and imaginative location of the artist out of place. We will be interested in the question of to what extent is writing a process of mapping an intellectual, aesthetic, psychic or geographical territory. We will be motivated by close reading, interpretation, and the adventure of comparing different portraits of being an outsider-insider.

We may refer to fragments by travellers and explorers such as Leo Africanus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Ibn Battuta, or look at the work of artists who crossed boundaries, such as the 15th century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and the impact of his visit to Mehmed II’s court in 1479, or the influence of the Arabesque on the music of Claude Debussy.

We will explore what it is about literature and, in particular, the novel that has made it so well-suited for por

• Department: English @Barnard
• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Hisham Matar
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Introduction to Fashion Studies

Intro to Fashion Studies

This seminar examines the many meanings of fashion, design, and style; how values underlying fashion are selected, preserved, denied, reinvented or rethought; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production and consumption of fashion goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand fashion through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how fashion can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary society, and in relation to a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course. In English.

• Department: Italian
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Barbara Faedda
  Info
• 3 points

Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Inter

Photo as Material:A Studi

Images today can feel increasingly unstable, untethered to physical and interpersonal experience, and also unstoppable, generating and proliferating at accelerating speeds. What do we do with all this material? What are the global consequences of the mass circulation of images? And how do artists specifically make sense of the contemporary state of photography? This course invites students into a non-conventional, interdisciplinary approach to making, reading, critiquing, and relating to images. We begin with the fundamentally physical elements of photography—space, light, and lens—and end with the embedded histories, social relations, and personal narratives that photographs can trace or carry. We discuss case studies and readings by and about artists and theorists who research and make work across international contexts, exploring, for example, how early colonial histories of photography prefigure its contemporary conditions, and how images can echo or challenge patterns of displacement and resistance. We create artworks informed by this research, exploring how to physically manipulate, present, and disseminate images in hands-on thematic projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• R 10:10 a.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Mira Dayal
  Info
• 3 points

Tokyo

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan Reynolds
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS

This course will review and analyze the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. It will examine Beijing's relations with the Soviet Union, the United States, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Third World during the Cold War, and will discuss Chinese foreign policy in light of the end of the Cold War, changes in the Chinese economy in the reform era, the post-Tiananmen legitimacy crisis in Beijing, and the continuing rise of Chinese power and influence in Asia and beyond.

This lecture course will analyze the causes and consequences of Beijing’s foreign policies from 1949 to the present.

Students must register for a mandatory discussion section.

• Department: Political Science
• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Thomas J Christensen
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 4 points

CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS-DISC

This is the required discussion section for 
POLS UN3871.

• Department: Political Science
• 0 points

LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions.  From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects.  How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

• Department: Anthropology
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

The Book Review: History, Theory, Practi

What is criticism? And what (or who) is a critic? How does a critic write
now
? This seminar is an approach to these questions through an investigation of the common currency of literary-intellectual life: the book review. It is intended for young writers interested in the world of reviewing— and criticism, literary journalism, the magazine— and is three things at once: a history of 20th and 21st century criticism (exploring the work of major critics past and present); a theoretical exploration of how the literary field has been, and is now, structured; and a practicum in review-writing. Our focus will primarily be the quickly mutating life of public literary criticism in American magazines from WWII to the present. We will read figures such as Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and others, but most of our time will be spent reading significant critics of the past 5-10 years; we will also read three novelistic treatments of the lives of critics and writers; and some time will be devoted to in-person discussions with current editors and writers in NYC about the conditions of their work.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

The Afro-Feminist Novel

What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms? 

The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision.   

The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937); Ann Petry’s
The Narrows
(1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s
The Salt Eaters
(1980); Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
(1987); and Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
(2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
(1899) and Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
(1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Zoe L Henry
  Info
• 4 points

BEOWULF

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem
Beowulf
.  We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship.  As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: David M Yerkes
  CULPA: 41 Info
• 4 points

THE MONGOLS IN HISTORY

Study of the role of the Mongols in Eurasian history, focusing on the era of the Great Mongol Empire. The roles of Chinggis and Khubilai Khan and the modern fate of the Mongols to be considered.

• Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Morris Rossabi
  CULPA: 12 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Arabs and the West: The Andalusian Symbi

The Andalusian Symbiosis

This interdisciplinary seminar deals with the rich culture of Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal) during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory—from the eighth to the fifteenth century. This theme course is significant in its approach to the study of Andalusia for a number of reasons: it grounds the study of Muslim Spain in the larger context of the history of Islam and of Arabic culture outside of Spain; it embraces many aspects of the hybrid Andalusian legacy:  history, language, literature, philosophy, music, art, architecture, and sciences, among others; and, while the course includes materials from Christian writers, the textual materials focus more on Arabic writings and the viewpoint of Muslim Spaniards. The course closely examines the cultural symbiosis between Arab Muslims and Christian Europeans during the eight centuries of their coexistence in Andalusia. Through a critical reading of an appropriately chosen set of texts translated into English from Arabic, Latin, Spanish and other Iberian dialects, students will study the historical, literary, linguistic, religious, artistic, architectural, and technological products that were created by the remarkable symbiosis that took place in Andalusia. With its multiethnic and multilingual forms the Andalusian legacy bears direct resemblance to our contemporary multicultural world and provides students with a rare opportunity to integrate knowledge of different sources and viewpoints. In the third and final weeks, we compare how two contemporary historical novels, by Tariq Ali (of Pakistani extraction) and Arab writer Radwa Ashour, treat the fall of Granada in 1492. Class discussion and readings in English. Counts towards Global Core requirement.

• Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures
• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 4 points

Research Training

Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.

• Department: Biomedical Engineering
• Instructor: Milan N Stojanovic
  Info
• Instructor: John T Vaughan
  Info
• Instructor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
  Wikipedia h-index: 132 Info
• Instructor: Qi Wang
  h-index: 24 Info
• Instructor: Nandan L Nerurkar
  Info
• Instructor: Stephen H Tsang
  Wikipedia h-index: 58 Info
• Instructor: Elham Azizi
  h-index: 10 Info
• Instructor: Jose McFaline-Figueroa
  Info
• Instructor: Treena L Arinzeh
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Kaveri A Thakoor
  Info
• Instructor: Yvon Woappi
  Info
• Instructor: Yasmine El-Shamayleh
  Info
• Instructor: Kaveri A Thakoor
  Info
• 0 points

Research Training

Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.

• Department: Chemical Engineering
• Instructor: Scott Banta
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 36 Info
• Instructor: Kyle Bishop
  h-index: 42 Info
• Instructor: Christopher M Boyce
  h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Juliana Silva Alves Carneiro
  Info
• 0 points