Explores the historical development of anarchism as a working-class, youth, and artistic movement in Europe, North and Latin America, the Middle East, India, Japan, and China from the 1850s to the present. Examines anarchism both as an ideology and as a set of cultural and political practices.
Politics of Violence
offers an analysis of the role of the state, its mechanisms, and its structures in perpetuating, legitimizing, and facilitating political, racial and gender based violence worldwide. We will explore the connections and effects of nationalism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy (as structural and ideological elements of the state) as well as neoliberal assaults and practices in the normalization of violence against dissidents, incarcerated populations, refugees, workers, and indigenous communities. We will engage in a theoretical discussion on the salience of particular ideational and material experiences of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and queer identities, political affiliation, in rendering state sponsored, political violence, and torture thinkable. The course aims to shed light on the power structures within militaristic and hypermasculinized state frameworks, and on biopolitical practices that legitimize structural violence against particular communities based on their political, class, gender, ethnic identities or precarious immigration status. In this seminar, we will examine violence, persecution, and dispossession as inherent phenomena of the sovereign nation state, in their continuities and ruptures, during war and conflict, but also in migratory, democratic, and transitional contexts. Students will examine historical and contemporary cases of state sponsored and political violence, systematic violations of human rights in the context of genocide, gendercide, racist violence, colonial terrorism, carceral regimes, and the securitization of forced migration. Lectures and readings provide a comparative, transnational perspective but focus on regional case studies, through a transdisciplinary lens, drawing on international relations, anthropology, gender studies, political theory, and history.
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.
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.
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.
Prerequisites: one course in philosophy. Corequisites: PHIL V3711 Required Discussion Section (0 points). This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.
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.
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, Liliana Cavani, Barbara Kopple, Larisa Shepitko, 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 Smiling Madame Beudet" (Germaine Dulac, 1922)—, 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 –"Together" (Mazzetti, 1956), "Cléo from 5 to 7" (Varda, 1962), "Daisies" (Chytilová, 1966)–, auteur cinema of the 1970s – "Jeanne Dielman" (Akerman, 1975), "The Ascent" (Shepitko, 1977)–, and documentary films –"Harlan County, USA" (Kopple, 1976), "Paris Is Burning" (J
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. (Seminar). Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) with the subject heading The Beat Generation. 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. 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.
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.
Many of us are drawn to sociology because we care about making the world more just. One important promise of the discipline is that social research can help direct efforts toward progressive social change. And yet, people and organizations on the front lines of grassroots action are often not privy to social-science research and vice versa. This course will create an opportunity for active engagement between students doing sociology and a local organization working for social change. Before the semester begins, the instructor(s) will have secured a commitment to a partnership with a community organization and planned a research or action project for the students to complete over the course of a semester. During the class, students will be expected to actively study and/or participate in the project designed by the instructor and organization leaders. The action/research may take the form of participant observation (taking part in the activities of the organization/campaign and analyzing your experiences); interviews (conducting interviews with members and leaders from an organization or campaign); historical analysis (studying the origins and development of the organization(s) or campaign(s)); or something else entirely. Students will also read, discuss, and write about literature on scholarly-community partnerships, collective-action models, and relevant social issues. We will study a combination of scholarly work, practical organizing advice, and case studies. This course is intended to be one semester of a two-semester course. Students may take either Part I or II or both. The opportunity to take two semesters (and engage with two different projects) should allow students to engage more deeply and broadly with the material and relationship with the organization.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
Philanthropy and Social Difference will introduce students to the history of Anglo-American philanthropy, as described in both historical and literary texts by writers including Jane Addams, James Agee, Andrew Carnegie, and George Orwell. Through reading these texts, students will receive an experiential perspective on the social problems that philanthropy seeks to address. The course will also focus on best practices in contemporary philanthropy, teaching students how to make informed decisions in making grants to nonprofit organizations. In addition, students will have the opportunity to practice philanthropy directly by making grants from course funds to nonprofit organizations selected by the class.
This course seeks to entice you into readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. While now often relegated to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost lands inspired a form of “occult ethnography.” Novels such as
The Coming Race
(1871) drew on the popular fascination with buried land-masses in order to re-imagine alternative narratives in which the “imperial English” would be colonized by a new race of people rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. At one level, the use of ethnographic details in such novels provided an ironic commentary on the European ethnographies of colonized peoples. But at another level it also offered a visionary description of a world as yet unseen and unknown, so that the idea of the past itself becomes less stable in the cultural imagination. In animating the details of a rediscovered people, occult ethnography both drew on and subverted evolutionary models of development by showing these “lost” people, in some instances, to have reached the highest perfection possible, both in technological capability and human potential. The unsettling of established and familiar conceptions of nation, history, and cultural identity through the exploration of lost or drifting lands reaches an apex in José Saramago’s
The Stone Raft
(1986). In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, and technology, as well as understanding the writing of history itself: i.e., what is included in mainstream accounts and what is left out.
Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (
gv6@columbia.edu
) with the subject heading Literature of Lost Lands 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. Please note that you will not be able to enroll in the class without Prof. Viswanathan's approval.
This course offers a critical introduction to the development and history of American musical theatre. We will examine the musical theatre canon, beginning with
Shuffle Along
in 1921 and finishing with
Hamilton
in 2015, to understand how the musical developed as an American theatrical form. We will also consider how the musical responds to the cultural and historical moment surrounding it. As David Savran has written even for “many devotees of the so-called straight theatre, musical theatre remains (at best) a guilty pleasure – a little too gay, too popular, too Jewish, and too much damned fun.” This course will analyze the theatrical form of that “guilty pleasure.” We will pay particular attention to what these musicals tell us about race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in America. Our class discussions will focus on contextualizing the various affordances of the musical and closely analyzing the specifically musical attributes of a show. This course will invite students to develop in-depth readings of musicals by analyzing the genre’s formal components: music, lyrics, book, orchestrations, and choreography.
Throughout the course we will pay particular attention to a set of key questions: how do these musicals represent what it means to be an American? Who is marginalized in musicals and who is centered, and how do musicals change when they are revived? How do musicals represent and engage with changing conceptions of race and gender? What does the experience of watching a musical do to an audience, and how does the experience create a plurality of possible meanings at different historical moments? While we will listen to music in this course, the ability to read music is not required.
This course is about “creative” or “literary nonfiction”: writing that deploys techniques usually associated with literature to tell stories about actual events, people, or things. Over the course of the seminar, we will investigate the nature of the genre, looking closely at the work of some of its greatest practitioners to analyze how they convey their meaning and achieve their effects. We will ask why writers might choose to use literary techniques to write nonfiction, and discuss the ethical issues the genre raises. At the same time, the seminar is a place for you to develop your work in a supportive and thoughtful community of readers and writers. Application instructions: to apply, please email Professor Peters (peters@columbia.edu) the following: name, year, school, major, a few sentences on why you want to take the course, and a short piece representing your writing at its best. (It may be fiction or nonfiction, and there is no minimum or maximum length, but choose a piece whose first few sentences show the quality of your writing!)
This course is a philosophical examination of the meaning and significance of the concept of race. The course will chiefly aim to answer: What do we mean by the term “race”? And why is it often tied to the existence of racism? From where does the concept come? And what role did “race” play in the philosophical thought and the culture of Western modernity? Among the questions that can be asked are, How do concepts of race contribute to the formation and justification of various economic, political, and social institutions and practices, such as slavery, colonialism, and segregation? However, we will also inquire at the end of the course whether “race” is always a destructive concept, or whether it can be re-defined as part of a liberation project centered on racial identity: the appreciation and celebration of racial difference and solidarity.
Prerequisites: None formally; instructor may recommend introductory or advanced course in their subfield For joint Faculty-Student research on a deisgnated topic of the instructor's choice. Students will critically engage with scholarly debates, formulate research designs, analyze or interpret data, and learn to summarize and present findings. Apply directly to the instructor. Can be taken once for elective credit toward the major.
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.
Prerequisites: three terms of biology (genetics and cell biology recommended). Cancer is one of the most dreaded common diseases. Yet it is also one of the great intellectual challenges in biology today. How does a cell become cancerous? What are the agents that cause this to occur? How do current findings about genes, cells, and organisms ranging from yeast cells to humans inform us about cancer? How do findings about cancer teach us new biological concepts? Over the past few years there have been great inroads into answering these questions which have led to new ways to diagnose and treat cancer. This course will discuss cancer from the point of view of basic biological research. We will cover topics in genetics, molecular and cell biology that are relevant to understanding the differences between normal and cancer cells. These will include tumor viruses, oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, cell cycle regulation, programmed cell death and cell senescence. We will also study some current physiological concepts related to cancer including angiogenesis, tumor immunology, cancer stem cells, metastasis and new approaches to treatment that are built on recent discoveries in cancer biology. The text book for this course is The Biology of Cancer Second Edition by Robert A Weinberg (Garland Science). Additional and complementary readings will be assigned. SCE and TC students may register for this course, but they must first obtain the written permission of the instructor, by filling out a paper Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form). The form can be downloaded at the URL below, but must be signed by the instructor and returned to the office of the registrar. http://registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
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.
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.
In his
Theses on Feuerbach
, Karl Marx writes, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change
it.” The questions to ask in response to Marx’s exhortation include: how do we recognize the need for change and appropriately effect it? What are the relations between our goals and the means to them? How can we better understand our goals to make the means more suitable? When we organize to produce results, what are we
doing
? Do we know exactly who and what we want to change? What are the “ethics of process”? What exactly do we do when we organize? A tentative definition: to organize is to bring together individuals who have common interests in a way that will enhance their power. What kind of power is this? What other forms of power are there? What is the best form of coordinating among individuals? If we better understand the dynamics of organizing, should we reconceive our goals accordingly? How do we better tap into shared values and concerns? What temptations and distractions get in the way of our goals? What problems prevent us from achieving them? Do we have goals that can be achieved? If not, how can we revise them?
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Womens Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Ntozake Shanges stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in Feminist history. In a unique collaboration between Barnard, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and the International Center for Photography, and with support by the Mellon funded Barnard Teaches grant, this year long seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shanges work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. You can find more information and apply for the course at http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. On Twitter @ShangeWorlds.
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.
Prerequisites: an introductory programming course. 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.
Migrant management, breakthrough of Eurosceptic parties, criticism on all sides of European governance: the European Union has been undergoing for some years now a deep internal crisis, at the very moment when its leaders have chosen to strengthen the political construction of the Union. The main objective of the course will be to question the current situation of the EU by cross-examining the institutional and political functioning of the Union with forms of transnationalization of the political life of European countries. In the first part, we will discuss the historical construction of the EU, its institutional structure, and the structuring effects that the EU has on the political systems of European countries. This section will also address the central issues facing the EU today (Brexit, project of a European Constitution, distribution of political forces in the European Parliament, etc.). The second part of the course will adopt the standpoint of European countries from which the central themes that shape political debate in Europe are being formed. This part will contain a strong focus on transnational and political issues dominating regional areas of the EU. The themes of integration, borders, political violence, the rise of extreme rights, etc., will be discussed throughout all these sessions. The course will also benefit from outside interventions by EU specialists and scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (history, sociology, political science). In addition, the course will take place soon after the 2019 European elections, and will focus both on the issues that dominated the campaign in the different member countries, and on how the new European Parliament will take up the stakes, which will prevail in the EU.
This course focuses on conceptualizing air across cultures, time and space. If western episteme has long relied on earthbound vocabularies in order to edify its modernizing project, what happens when we set to rethink its basic premises through aerial logics? Can we even suggest adopting an air
perspective
or
point of view
without falling back into those very earthbound terms on which knowledge has long been made to be
grounded
? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this course proposes to analyze plural histories of the air that have not been sufficiently acknowledged. Drawing on a variety of cultural and historical examples, each week will entail ungrounding air through a particular subject-matter: medical, legal, war, race, gender, religion, media and technology, pollution and climate change, design, art and architecture, cities and countryside, the future of masks, or exoplanet atmospheres
.
In the 21st century, we are accustomed to seeing historical violence represented in pop cultural forms, like graphic novels, manga, animated film, or even Tik Tok memes… But when Art Spiegelman first published the graphic novel
Maus,
he worried about the dissonance between its form and content: “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream. And trying to do it as a comic strip!” Spiegelman alluded to several historical precedents for the novel’s unusual—or even problematic—form. Artists have long experimented with the relationship between image and text: from cartoons to caricatures, from woodcuts to wordless comics, or from
calligrammes
to
ciné-poésie
. When are these dual modes of representation complementary or in conflict? How has the language and subject matter of image-texts developed over time? In this course, we will analyze the French-language graphic novel as an important contemporary medium for the representation of history, politics, and violence.In the first half of the class, we will consider various historical modes of image-text forms, in the French context and beyond, including (but not limited to): Scève’s
emblèmes,
Hokusai’s
manga
, Goya’s woodcuts, and Töppfer’s proto-graphic novels; Daumier, Nadar, and Doré’s political cartoons; children’s comics (notably
Tintin, Corto Maltese
); and adult comics (
Hari-Kiri, Charlie Hebdo, Métal Hurlant).
In the latter half of the course, we will focus our attention on iconic and lesser-known French- and Francophone- graphic novels, attending to the particularity of this
neuvième art
. How does one study a popular medium that has not been canonized or is in the process of canonization? Why have
bandes dessinées
become an important site for representing and remembering historical trauma, from the Iranian Revolution and October 17th, 1961? Course is taught in French, with texts in French.
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
In 1789, a French revolution shook the government foundation of Europe, and with it, all the arts. The principles of monarchy were rejected, women gained unprecedented freedoms, and French slavery was abolished. How did the arts express those upheavals? By 1805, areaction against the Revolution. An emperor crowned himself, women’s rights were revoked slavery was reinstated. How did the arts deal with this backlash?
The way an environment is made remains deeply embedded within it. Our environments shape us like our families, they nourish and educate us, they prejudice us. What if they were not a given? If our relationship to them was something we choose and shape, less of a blood relation, more of a lifelong friendship? A friend is an equal with their own agency and act as, a partner in play and life. Friendship is a place where we interact, welcome each-other and make the world together. The common task of this class is to devise a studio for making living environments to study how we could make, exhibit and live with art. Through a variety of individual and group readings and assignments, in-class case-studies and interviews we will test our preconceptions of space and time so that we may experience and inspire the state of being present. We will study and practice presence to form intimate bonds with interior, exterior, bodily and narrative environments already in existence and of our own making.
As we face the triple threats of inequalities, climate change, and a pandemic, the dignity and well-being of many people are under attack or at imminent risk. Exploring several specific issues through the lens of human rights principles and public health standards will provide students with a strong analytic framework for understanding the challenges of and potential for systemic change to address these threats. Specifically, we will be looking at disparate health impacts and how to understand what drives the disparities; intellectual property laws and how they apply during a global crisis; the double-edged sword of digital technology particularly as it applies to health surveillance; the strengths and weaknesses of a biomedical model dominating the public health discourse; and, the politization of health policy. Specifically, we will explore systems of oppression that drive inequalities and lead to disparate health outcomes; the lack of a transnational accountability framework to address both climate change and the rights of those most impacted by it; and how a corporate-driven intellectual property regime has put access to essential medicines, including vaccines, beyond the reach of people living in poverty. Finally, looking at reports ripped from the headlines, we will look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown open the door to widespread digital surveillance with few safeguards to protect privacy rights or to address the biases in many of the algorithms driving this technology.
In this seminar, students will create a digital exhibition of ten stone sculptures produced by Inuit artists working within an important artistic tradition interconnected with Indigenous-Settler interaction during the second half of the twentieth century. Initially cultivated to bring Inuit people into the cash economy as part of a broader colonial process of disrupting seasonal migrations and subsistence lifeways, modern Inuit sculpture has developed in ways that increasingly center community leadership and assertions of artistic and cultural sovereignty in the face of environmental, economic, political and aesthetic change. The assignments for this class foreground writings, films, and artworks by Inuit scholars, artists, and community leaders. In preparation of the exhibition, we will and also work closely with the Brooklyn Museum staff to gain an understanding of their collection of Inuit sculpture and the staff roles in caring for it.
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises—or threatens—to transform every area of our lives and societies. It has already begun to upend our understanding of human nature, radically alter our social institutions, and revolutionize scientific practice. And in some circles, there is increasing concern that AI is developing intelligence to rival our own. This course will explore these issues through the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and ethics. We will ask whether AI systems could have minds like ours, whether they could be conscious, whether they might eventually deserve moral consideration, and how we can use them fairly in our current societies.
If a student wishes to pursue a research project or a course of study not offered by the department, he or she may apply for an Independent Study. Application: 1. cover sheet with signatures of the professor who will serve as the project sponsor and departmental administrator or director of undergraduate studies; 2. project description in 750 words, including any preliminary work in the field, such as a lecture course(s) or seminar(s); 3. bibliography of primary and secondary works to be read or consulted. Please visit the English and Comparative Literature Department website at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/forms for the cover sheet form or see the administrator in 602 Philosophy Hall for the cover sheet form and to answer any other questions you may have.
If a student wishes to pursue a research project or a course of study not offered by the department, he or she may apply for an Independent Study. Application: 1. cover sheet with signatures of the professor who will serve as the project sponsor and departmental administrator or director of undergraduate studies; 2. project description in 750 words, including any preliminary work in the field, such as a lecture course(s) or seminar(s); 3. bibliography of primary and secondary works to be read or consulted. Please visit the English and Comparative Literature Department website at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/forms for the cover sheet form or see the administrator in 602 Philosophy Hall for the cover sheet form and to answer any other questions you may have.
If a student wishes to pursue a research project or a course of study not offered by the department, he or she may apply for an Independent Study. Application: 1. cover sheet with signatures of the professor who will serve as the project sponsor and departmental administrator or director of undergraduate studies; 2. project description in 750 words, including any preliminary work in the field, such as a lecture course(s) or seminar(s); 3. bibliography of primary and secondary works to be read or consulted. Please visit the English and Comparative Literature Department website at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/forms for the cover sheet form or see the administrator in 602 Philosophy Hall for the cover sheet form and to answer any other questions you may have.
This course relies primarily on visual materials to familiarize students with the history of Japan from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the present. It follows a chronological order, introducing students to various realms of Japanese visual culture—from woodblock prints to film, anime, and manga—along with the historical contexts that they were shaped by, and in turn helped shape. Special attention will paid to the visual technologies of nation-building, war, and empire; to historical interactions between Japanese and Euro-American visual culture; to the operations of still versus moving images; and to the mass production of visual commodities for the global marketplace. Students who take the course will emerge not only with a better understanding of Japan’s modern historical experience, but also with a more discerning eye for the ways that images convey meaning and offer access to the past.
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.
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?
This course investigates the social history of nuclear arms in the context of World War II and the Cold War, exploring their ramifications for subjects and societies. We consider historical, ethnographic, medical and psychiatric accounts of the bomb’s invention and fallout, including the unknowable bodily injuries caused by radiation and the ecological contamination inflicted on indigenous communities where atomic weapons were tested. Throughout the course, we investigate government propaganda designed to produce political subjects who both endorse and fear nuclear imperatives; who support expanding militarization and funding for weapons development; and who abide escalating political rhetorics of nuclear aggression.
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.
This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied mathematics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied physics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation of some problem in chemical engineering or applied chemistry or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report. No more than 6 points in this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements.
Prerequisites: The written permission of the faculty member is required. Points: 1-4 The opportunity to conduct an independent research project in nuclear nonproliferation studies is open to all majors. A product and detailed report is presented by the student when the project is completed. Section 1: Emlyn Hughes Section 2: Ivana N. Hughes Section 3: Monica Rouco-Molina
Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students who have applied for and declared a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medical Humanities.