What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.
This course examines the history of science, technology and medicine in the modern Middle East. We will consider a number of themes from energy infrastructures and communication and transportation systems to modern medical, agricultural and environmental developments.
The Middle Ages have long been a source of inspiration for composers of opera. Since the midnineteenth century, mystery plays, troubadour lyrics, enigmatic tapestries, and Arthurian romances have all been showcased on the operatic stage; the last 30 years, in particular, have seen a spike in interest in reenergizing medieval culture for contemporary audiences. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in medieval literature and/or the history of lyric theater, this course excavates the medievalist turn in opera, from Wagner to the present day. We’ll ask questions about the nature of intermedial adaptation, the effect of staging in constructing or dispelling medieval allusion, the historically contingent politics of musical antiquarianism and revival, and the enduring appeal of the Middle Ages in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Along the way, we’ll read medieval texts from England, Germany, and Occitania, analyze recorded performances of musical works, visit medieval tapestries at the Cloisters, and take a trip to a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s
Tristan
und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera.
What does nationalism do to memory, and how do those memories get telegraphed, circulated and preserved? This research seminar brings together media history and memory studies towards an exploration of how Iran’s history has been written, remembered, and mediated inside and outside Iran over the course of the modern period. It investigates the kinds of knowledge production involved in maintaining or rejecting a national history, and the forms of visual media harnessed to deploy such historical narratives from both government and grassroots perspectives. This course will consider the different forms of media mobilized in public history, national and institutional histories, and personal histories, all of which speak to the preservation and suppression of the past. This course follows a general chronological timeline and examines how these different narratives often center Tehran while also looking towards alternate histories that offer regional or provincial perspectives, as well as texts speaking to global trends and theoretical interventions. By examining photography, archives, museums, architecture, and other forms of new media production alongside academic historical texts and personal memoirs, this course investigates at the various ways different historiographical trends have been broadcast and institutionalized with regards to Iran’s modern history.
Should we read important classical texts to use from the planetary perspective? We will read six texts to consider answering this question. We will read: Hegel, Phenomenology of the Mind, selections; Marx, 1844 Manuscripts and Primitive Accumulation; Du Bois, Black Flame Trilogy, selections; Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; Marguerite Duras, The Sea Wall; Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy.
Computational techniques for analyzing genomic data including DNA, RNA, protein and gene expression data. Basic concepts in molecular biology relevant to these analyses. Emphasis on techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning. String-matching algorithms, dynamic programming, hidden Markov models, expectation-maximization, neural networks, clustering algorithms, support vector machines. Students with life sciences backgrounds who satisfy the prerequisites are encouraged to enroll.
This seminar examines the history of modern China through its borderlands, exploring how Qing imperial conquests, subsequent colonial expansion, and state-building shaped the contemporary territory and population of China. Focusing on Tibet, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and Taiwan in the 20th century, the course critically examines the violent processes of colonial expansion that underpinned China’s transformation from a multiethnic empire into the nation-state of the People’s Republic of China.
Africa has long been construed in the Western mind as a place of disease – from the ‘White Man’s Grave’ of West Africa in the Atlantic Era through the colonial epidemics of sleeping sickness and syphilis and to the recent past the AIDS pandemic and most recently outbreaks of Ebola and the COVID-19 pandemic. Colonial medical officials presented themselves as introducing biomedicine to the continent as part of the “civilizing mission.” The post-colonial flourishing of humanitarian and medical non-governmental organizations has in large part continued this self-projection. As such, ‘traditional’ or non-biomedical healers have found themselves alternatively the target of campaigns to prevent them from working and of efforts to bring them into the medical system by rationalizing their work through efforts such as the scientific evaluation of herbal medicines.
This course seeks to chart the history of health and healing from a perspective interior to Africa. We explore changing practices and understandings of disease, etiology, healing and well-being from pre-colonial times into the post-colonial. A major theme running throughout the course is the relationship between medicine, the body, power and social groups. We will explore changing understanding of disease and practices of healing through specific themes and case studies.
Basic statistical principles and algorithmic paradigms of supervised machine learning.
Prerequisites:
Multivariable calculus (e.g. MATH1201 or MATH1205 or APMA2000), linear algebra (e.g. COMS3251 or MATH2010 or MATH2015), probability (e.g. STAT1201 or STAT4001 or IEOR3658 or MATH2015), discrete math (COMS3203), and general mathematical maturity. Programming and algorithm analysis (e.g. COMS 3134). COMS 3770 is recommended for students who wish to refresh their math background.
Course overview: The goal of this course is to engage upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students in an immersive intellectual experience at the intersection of rigorous scientific inquiry and the history of innovation in molecular biology. The central theme will be curiosity and critical thinking as the twin drivers of both technological innovation and scientific discovery. The course will be divided into a series of modules focused on analysis and presentation of original research papers related to one important breakthrough in molecular biology that occurred during the past century. A prominent theme of the course will be the persistently unpredictable trajectory linking technical research and methodological developments to breakthrough science. Approximately six-to-eight original research papers will be covered in each module, spanning topics from the development of the methods that made the breakthrough possible through practical application of the resulting knowledge.
Three or four of the following breakthroughs will likely be covered in 2023:
Discovery and clinical application of insulin by Banting & Best.
Development of the Trikafta triple drug treatment for cystic fibrosis.
Development of CRISPR for human genetic engineering.
Genetics and pharmacological treatment of human hyperlipidemia.
Development of the Gleevec tyrosine kinase inhibitor to cure Ph+ leukemias.
Development of “next-generation” nucleic acid sequencing methods.
This seminar
explores a tradition of historical writing (historiography) that constructs “Africa and France,” or “France and Africa,” or “FrançAfrique” as an historical object and as an object of knowledge. That body of writing accounts in various and sometimes contadictory ways for the peculiar, intense, and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France and the sub-Saharan nation-states that are its former African colonies.
Degree requirement for all MSFE first-year students. Topics in Financial Engineering. Past seminar topics include Evolving Financial Intermediation, Measuring and Using Trading Algorithms Effectively, Path-Dependent Volatility, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in modern financial decision making, Risk-Based Performance Attribution, and Financial Machine Learning. Meets select Monday evenings.
Tracing the discovery of the role of DNA tumor viruses in cancerous transformation. Oncogenes and tumor suppressors are analyzed with respect to their function in normal cell cycle, growth control, and human cancers. 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
How language structure and usage varies according to societal factors such as social history and socioeconomic factors, illustrated with study modules on language contact, language standardization and literacy, quantitative sociolinguistic theory, language allegiance, language, and power.
Care is central to the interpersonal claim that is made by the other. It is a response that recognizes and satisfies a need. Care can be motivated by pain and sorrow, but also by desire and the desire for recognition. But while care is a fundamental aspect of healing, it can also be a demand that extracts obligations and liabilities. Care is an ambiguous concept that always already contains or is determined by its oppositions; we will begin by analyzing the concept of care itself, drawing on resources from the history and philosophy of medicine as well as literary sources. Ideals of care that many of us have for our loved ones are difficult to render at scale, and are often in tension with the for-profit motivations behind the development of medications, the administration of healthcare services, and the distribution of goods. We will consider the sorts of compromises that are made every day through readings in literature, history, political science and philosophy and also through first-person experience in the form of a practicum that that will run parallel to the course.
Introduction to human spaceflight from a systems engineering perspective. Historical and current space programs and spacecraft. Motivation, cost, and rationale for human space exploration. Overview of space environment needed to sustain human life and health, including physiological and psychological concerns in space habitat. Astronaut selection and training processes, spacewalking, robotics, mission operations, and future program directions. Systems integration for successful operation of a spacecraft. Highlights from current events and space research, Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, and International Space Station (ISS). Includes team design project.
Introduction to human spaceflight from a systems engineering perspective. Historical and current space programs and spacecraft. Motivation, cost, and rationale for human space exploration. Overview of space environment needed to sustain human life and health, including physiological and psychological concerns in space habitat. Astronaut selection and training processes, spacewalking, robotics, mission operations, and future program directions. Systems integration for successful operation of a spacecraft. Highlights from current events and space research, Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, and International Space Station (ISS). Includes a design project to assist International Space Station astronauts.
This course offers an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance: such as the making and subjugation of colonized peoples and natural and disease landscapes under British colonial rule; modernizing states and their interest in development and knowledge and technology building, the movement and migration of populations, and changing place of public health and healing in south Asia. The key aim of the course will be to introduce students to reading and analyzing a range of historical scholarship, and interdisciplinary research on environment, health, medicine and populations in South Asia and to introduce them to an exploration of primary sources for research; and also to probe the challenges posed by archives and sources in these fields. Some of the overarching questions that shape this course are as follows: How have environmental pasts and medical histories been interpreted, debated and what is their contemporary resonance? What have been the encounters (political, intellectual, legal, social and cultural) between the environment, its changing landscapes and state? How have citizens, indigenous communities, and vernacular healers mediated and shaped these encounters and inserted their claims for sustainability, subsistence or survival? How have these changing landscapes shaped norms about bodies, care and beliefs? The course focuses on South Asia but also urges students to think and make linkages beyond regional geographies in examining interconnected ideas and practices in histories of the environment, medicine and health. Topics will therefore include (and students are invited to add to these perspectives and suggest additional discussion themes): colonial and globalized circuits of medical knowledge, with comparative case studies from Africa and East Asia; and the travel and translation of environmental ideas and of medical practices through growing global networks.
Characterization of stochastic processes as models of signals and noise; stationarity, ergodicity, correlation functions, and power spectra. Gaussian processes as models of noise in linear and nonlinear systems; linear and nonlinear transformations of random processes; orthogonal series representations. Applications to circuits and devices, to communication, control, filtering, and prediction.
Introduction to the mathematical tools and algorithmic implementation for representation and processing of digital pictures, videos, and visual sensory data. Image representation, filtering, transform, quality enhancement, restoration, feature extraction, object segmentation, motion analysis, classification, and coding for data compression. A series of programming assignments reinforces material from the lectures.
Embedded system design and implementation combining hardware and software. I/O, interfacing, and peripherals. Weekly laboratory sessions and term project on design of a microprocessor-based embedded system including at least one custom peripheral. Knowledge of C programming and digital logic required.
How to write the city? What is an archive for writing the city? What liminal and marginal perspectives are available for thinking about writing the city? What is the place of the city in the global south in our historical imagination? Our attempt in this seminar is to look at the global south city from the historical and analytical perspectives of those dispossessed and marginal. Instead of ‘grand’ summations about “the Islamic City” or “Global City,” we will work meticulously to observe annotations on power that constructs cities, archives and their afterlives. The emphasis is on the city in South Asia as a particular referent though we will learn to see Cairo, New York, and Istanbul.
This course is an intensive study of Aldous Huxley’s influential novel,
Brave New World
(1932). It aims to introduce students both to the context of Huxley’s world and the extensive reflections it spawned on the reimagining of what Anthony Burgess called “the perfectibility of man” conducted as a “scientific programme.” If
Brave New World
has entered the lexicon as a moniker for totalitarian overreach and mind conditioning, the novel merits closer examination for the unique means by which it achieves its effects, ranging from radical social engineering to the management of desire. Among the many questions the course addresses are the following: What are readers to make of the inversion of norms that identifies the World State with the acme of modernity and the “savage reservation” with a discredited past that includes concepts like the family? Does this inversion obscure the standpoints from which a critique of the World State can be made? How does Huxley unsettle the terms of analysis of the novel’s politics?
These questions, among others, are posed as learning tools for approaching the novel, the context in which it was written, and the broader influences it exerted. The syllabus assigns several weeks of reading
Brave New World
alongside relevant secondary criticism, with a view to encouraging students to probe different critical perspectives and identify evolving paradigms that amplify the novel’s cross-disciplinary engagements. Examples of the questions that students are encouraged to address are: Can the World State’s project of control through pleasure effectively eliminate feeling while requiring sensation? Is the technocratic manipulation of time (through the organization of workers’ bodies and labor) undone by a necessary recourse to the eternity-promising drug
soma
?
How is
Brave New World
both a futuristic view of a dominant world order, which is carefully produced by social engineering and conditioning, and a depiction of a subversive counterculture, uprooting the norms transmitted across generations?
The syllabus includes adjacent works, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We
(1924), viewed as a direct predecessor to
Brave New World
, George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), and Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
(1962). Students will read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
to determine whether its
The goal of synthetic organogenesis is to use stem cells to reconstitute aspects of embryo development and organ formation in vitro. Examines the molecular basis of human embryogenesis. Introduces synthetic organogenesis as an interdisciplinary field. Students learn to recognize generic molecular mechanisms behind signaling and cell lineage specification. Covers recent advances in applying engineering and contemporary biology to creating organoids and organs on chips using human stem cells.
North Korea is widely regarded as a country without a history; as enigmatic as it is isolated. Dispensing with this cliché, this course invites students to engage with North Korean history using a variety of primary and secondary sources. We begin in the medieval period to trace the distinct features of the northern region that made it uniquely receptive to outside ideas. Understanding the north as a frontier zone of experimentation and adaption allows us to examine the attractive power of modernity in the north during the early twentieth century via the influence of Christianity, capitalism and communism. Utilizing texts and materials made in North Korea and internationally, including feature and documentary films, women’s magazines, graphic novels, literary fiction and testimony, the course investigates the conditions within which knowledge about North Korea has been produced, circulated and repressed. Key topics to be explored include the history of Christianity and capitalism in Pyongyang and the northern provinces, communist cadres in the 1930s, the allure of the North in the 1940s, the Korean War and the purges that followed, North Korea’s relations with neighbors and the world, and the high cost its citizens pay for the country’s brutal sanction economy.
Many materials properties and chemical processes are governed by atomic-scale phenomena such as phase transformations, atomic/ionic transport, and chemical reactions. Thanks to progress in computer technology and methodological development, now there exist atomistic simulation approaches for the realistic modeling and quantitative prediction of such properties. Atomistic simulations are therefore becoming increasingly important as a complement for experimental characterization, to provide parameters for meso- and macroscale models, and for the in-silico discovery of entirely new materials. This course aims at providing a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge atomistic modeling techniques that are frequently used both in academic and industrial research and engineering. Participants will develop the ability to interpret results from atomistic simulations and to judge whether a problem can be reliably addressed with simulations. The students will also obtain basic working knowledge in standard simulation software.
Many materials properties and chemical processes are governed by atomic-scale phenomena such as phase transformations, atomic/ionic transport, and chemical reactions. Thanks to progress in computer technology and methodological development, now there exist atomistic simulation approaches for the realistic modeling and quantitative prediction of such properties. Atomistic simulations are therefore becoming increasingly important as a complement for experimental characterization, to provide parameters for meso- and macroscale models, and for the in-silico discovery of entirely new materials. This course aims at providing a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge atomistic modeling techniques that are frequently used both in academic and industrial research and engineering. Participants will develop the ability to interpret results from atomistic simulations and to judge whether a problem can be reliably addressed with simulations. The students will also obtain basic working knowledge in standard simulation software.
China's search for a new order in the long twentieth century with a focus on political, social and cultural change.
Prerequisites: Recommended preparation: a solid background in basic chemistry. Introduction to geochemical cycles involving the atmosphere, land, and biosphere; chemistry of precipitation, weathering reactions, rivers, lakes, estuaries, and groundwaters; students are introduced to the use of major and minor ions as tracers of chemical reactions and biological processes that regulate the chemical composition of continental waters.
:
Philanthropy & Just Societies
will enable Columbia undergraduate students to learn about the history of philanthropy, to understand best practices and ethical underpinnings, to debate its potential in making more just societies, and to consider what it means to give and receive aid at different scales. Students will have the opportunity to participate directly in philanthropic work.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Prerequisite(s): Approval by a faculty member who agrees to supervise the work. Independent work involving experiments, computer programming, analytical investigation, or engineering design.