An introduction to issues and cases in the study of cinema century technologies. This class takes up the definition of the historiographic problem and the differences between theoretical empirical solutions. Specific units on the history of film style, genre as opposed to authorship, silent and sound cinemas, the American avant-garde, national cinemas (Russia and China), the political economy of world cinema, and archival poetics. The question of artificial intelligence approached as a question of the “intelligence of the machine.” A unit on research methods is taught in conjunction with Butler and C.V. Starr East Asian Libraries. Writing exercises on a weekly basis culminate in a digital historiography research map which becomes the basis of final written “paper” posted in Courseworks in video essay format. Students present this work at a final conference. Topics in the past include:
Cultural Transactions: Across Media and Continents, Genre: Repetition and Difference, and Bang, Bang, Crash, Crash: Canon-Busting and Paradigm-Smashing
This course gives students the opportunity to design their own curriculum: To attend lectures, conferences and workshops on historical topics related to their individual interests throughout Columbia University. Students may attend events of their choice, and are especially encouraged to attend those sponsored by the History Department (www.history.columbia.edu). (The Center for International History - cih.columbia.edu - and the Heyman Center for the Humanities - heymancenter.org/events/ - also have impressive calendars of events, often featuring historians.) The goal of this mini-course is to encourage students to take advantage of the many intellectual opportunities throughout the University, to gain exposure to a variety of approaches to history, and at the same time assist them in focusing on a particular area for their thesis topic.
This course offers students an opportunity to expand their curriculum beyond the established course offerings. Interested parties must consult with the QMSS Program Director before adding the class. This course may be taken for 2-4 points.
This course fulfills the Masters Thesis requirement of the QMSS MA Program. It is designed to help you make consistent progress on your master’s thesis throughout the semester, as well as to provide structure during the writing process. The master’s thesis, upon completion, should answer a fundamental research question in the subject matter of your choice. It should be an academic paper based on data that you can acquire, clean, and analyze within a single semester, with an emphasis on clarity and policy relevance.
Current topics in biomedical engineering. Subject matter will vary by year.
Current topics in biomedical engineering. Subject matter will vary by year.
Current topics in biomedical engineering. Subject matter will vary by year.
Basic techniques for analyzing quantitative social science data. Emphasis on conceptual understanding as well as practical mastery of probability and probability distributions, inference, hypotheses testing, analysis of variance, simple regression, and multiple regression.
Second semester of project-based design experience for graduate students. Elements of design process, with focus on skills development, prototype development and testing, and business planning. Real-world training in biomedical design, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
This course provides a structured setting for stand-alone M.A. students in their final year and Ph.D. students in their second and third years to develop their research trajectories in a way that complements normal coursework. The seminar meets approximately biweekly and focuses on topics such as research methodology; project design; literature review, including bibliographies and citation practices; grant writing. Required for MESAAS graduate students in their second and third year.
This course provides a wide-ranging survey of conceptual foundations and issues in contemporary human rights. The course examines the philosophical origins of human rights, their explication in the evolving series of international documents, questions of enforcement, and current debates. It also explores topics such as womens rights, development and human rights, the use of torture, humanitarian intervention, and the horrors of genocide. The broad range of subjects covered in the course is intended to assist students in honing their interests and making future course selections in the human rights field.
Medieval and Renaissance Philology for MA students.
This course introduces students to historical approaches in sociology and political science (and some economics). In the first part, the course surveys the major theoretical approaches and methodological traditions. Examples of the former are classic comparativist work (e.g. Skocpol’s study of revolutions), historist approaches (such as Sewell’s), or the historical institutionalist tradition (Mahoney, Thelen, Wimmer, etc.). In terms of methodological approaches, we will discuss classical Millean small-N comparisons, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, process tracing, actor-centered modeling, quantitative, large-N works, and causal inference type of research designs. In the second part, major topics in macro-comparative social sciences are examined, from world systems and empire to the origins of democracy.
The Proseminar in Religion is designed to support PhD students within the department as they work on various aspects of professional development. Meeting three times per semester, the sessions will focus on both academic and non-academic career paths, coordinated by a member of the faculty and with guest speakers from both within and beyond the department. The emphasis will be on concrete outputs and skills training. The proseminar will require preparation and active participation from enrolled students, including background reading and writing assignments connected to the monthly topic. After each session focused on a piece of writing (fellowship applications; CVs and cover letters; publishing), students should come away from the proseminar with strong drafts of the relevant texts.
The proseminar is required for all ABD students in year 5 or 6 and can be taken sequentially or not. ABD students are encouraged to speak about the timing of enrollment with the DGS and their dissertation sponsor.
Prerequisites: this course is intended for sociology Ph.D. and SMS students. No others without the instructors written permission. Foundational sources and issues in sociological theory: Adam Smith, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Mead, Mauss, others; division of labor, individualism, exchange, class and its vicissitudes, social control, ideas and interests, contending criteria of explanation and interpretation.
This course provides an introduction to the most widely used methods for measuring and analyzing human brain activity and their application in cognitive neuroscience, complemented by weekly hands-on interactive labs to deepen understanding, experience measurements, and explore analyses.
This course begins with two central and related epistemological problems in conducting ethnographic research: first, the notion that objects of scientific research are ‘made’ through adopting a particular relational stance and asking certain kinds of questions. From framing a research problem and choosing a ‘research context’ story to tell, to the kinds of methods one selects to probe such a problem, the ‘how’ and ‘what’ – or means and content – are inextricably intertwined. A second epistemological problem concerns the artifice of reality, and the nebulous distinction between truth and fiction, no less than the question of where or with whom one locates such truth.
With these issues framing the course, we will work through some key themes and debates in anthropology from the perspective of methodology, ranging from subject/object liminality to incommensurability and radical alterity to the politics of representation. Students will design an ethnographic project of their choosing and conduct research throughout the term, applying different methodological approaches popular in anthropology and the social sciences more generally, such as participant observation, semi-structured interview, diary-keeping and note-taking.
Anthropology GR6079x READING WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY. Reading, Writing, Ethnography” asks students to imagine learning to read and then to write anew. It explores a series of exemplary texts in order to explore the histories, genre conventions and experimental forms for writing ethnography. The course is especially concerned with the ways in which empirical observation is made the ground of theoretical abstraction and generalizing claims. Additionally, it examines the relationship between different theoretical and aesthetic movements as these have influenced the writings of anthropologists and those whose work can be considered to have an anthropological ambition—even when they have not been formally trained in anthropology.
Anthropology GR6085x THING THEORY. The ‘material turn’ is a shorthand for the vast and messy literature on things/objects/materials/ stuff/matter that crosses between and interweaves anthropology, archaeology, art history, science & technology studies (STS), political science, philosophy, and literary studies. Material cultural studies, of varying sorts, ask how things make us. This course explores the turn towards things across the humanities and social sciences over the past few decades. Engaging with the material of worlds, scholars have generated new questions, new modes of analysis, and new accounts of subjectivity, agency, and being. We will read a variety of texts from anthropology, STS, and other disciplines, in order to trace some of the ways in which material objects have become important to scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
Generations of anthropologists have seized upon waste as an object to think through issues as wide-ranging as labor divisions, religious devotion, and processes of social classification and value production. In recent years the discipline has renewed attention to this object by way of puzzling through how apparently intensifying global processes of industrialization, consumption, and extraction shape contemporary politics and ecological sensibilities. This seminar charts some of these moves within and beyond our discipline by inviting students to consider how and to what ends societies work through wasted things but also other kinds of durable leftovers (i.e. “ruins,” “byproducts,” “rubble,” “remainders” etc). Of particular concern for us will be the production and (re)appropriation of things that defy strict classification as “waste,” that is, as things imagined to be readily and permanently ejected from a social group or order. Students will read seminal texts on waste, excess, abjection, and reappropriation alongside ethnographic and historical monographs that take up these themes.
Required of all incoming sociology doctoral students. Prepares students who have already completed an undergraduate major or its equivalent in some social science to evaluate and undertake both systematic descriptions and sound explanations of social structures and processes.
Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions of motion. Stress and strain rate tensors, vorticity, integral and differential equations of mass, momentum, and energy conservation. Potential flow.
This course introduces graduate students to the major 20th-century literary theories that emerged in Russia and Eastern Europe. The course's main purpose is to familiarize students with these approaches and teach them how to use theoretical models as tools for analyzing literary texts.
By the end of the course, students will be required to write a paper investigating the theoretical aspects of one or more literary texts discussed in class. This paper will test not only students' mastery of literary analysis through the prism of multiple theoretical models, but also their ability to challenge a literary text through theory and vice versa.
Writing the paper will include a workshop-style class in which students design their thesis and outline. The course will also introduce students to the Bahmeteff Archive and Columbia's library holdings.
This course counts as Proseminar for Slavic graduate students but is also open to students in other disciplines, which is why all readings are in English.
“Theories and Methods” courses in any field are commonly unwieldy beasts. They cannot but be a compromise-formation between contemporary questions and texts, ideas, and definitions (alongside a whole lot of problems) that we have inherited as “canonical” in a field. In the best case, such a course is a passageway into deeper engagement with a field, its histories, its complexities, and its possibilities from which we might wrest and build viable futures. Disciplinary fields are structures where power and knowledge are produced and reproduced. The study of religion is no exception. The questions of “how is ‘religion’ constructed as a category here?” and “what work does the designation of something or someone as ‘religious’ do?” will, therefore, accompany us throughout our work over the course of this semester. We will also examine how different methodological commitments shape what objects of study and which questions come to the fore for the study of religion. This course will explore how the study of religion is not reducible to the study of traditions and communities that are readily recognized as “religious.” However, the vexed histories of the construction of “religion” as a category of knowledge production does also not negate that there are large, varied, and flourishing communities of practice beyond the university for whom whether or not “religion” exists is not at all a question. Holding these layers of complexity in play, this course seeks to introduce students exemplarily to key texts and concepts that have shaped the study of religion as we encounter it today as an academic discipline.
This course is a seminar on research design in anthropological archaeology. It examines the links among theory, method, and data analysis in project design and interpretation.
This seminar is PART 2 for second and third year students who are writing their MPhil thesis. It will assume the form of a yearlong seminar during which students design, research, and write up their MPhil projects. These projects can be based on any kind of sociological method, quantitative or qualitative. The thesis will assume the form of an article that can be submitted to a social science journal. The seminar will help you to find an interesting question, a way to answer it, and a mode of communicating this to fellow sociologists in a way that they might find worth paying attention to. The summer break between the two semesters will allow students who don’t come to the first semester with ready-to-analyze data to gather such data (through ethnographic work, archival research, scraping the internet, combining existing survey data, etc.).
Twenty-first century literary studies has seen a steadily growing interest in formalist literary theory. This trend has manifested in new movements, such as New Formalism, Historical Poetics, and Quantitative Formalism. This interest in formalism has been accompanied by a widely expressed desire for a better understanding of literary form, and to find ways to connect its study with cultural and political history. The archive of Russian Formalism, a protean movement which was active in the 1910s and 1920s, is a rich source for those interested in rethinking the concept of form today. Beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s, Russian Formalism was interpreted as the precursor to French Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. In this class we seek to recontextualize Russian Formalism—not in terms of the ideas of the Cold War period—but rather in light of the cultural and political milieu of revolutionary and Civil War era Russia. By connecting theories of form with the cultural and political contexts from which they emerged, our goal is to develop an understanding of form as a concept defined not only in aesthetic or linguistic terms, but also as a construct with sociopolitical import.
This course will seek to raise and think through the following questions: What does it mean to talk today about a black radical tradition? What has it meant in the past to speak in these (or cognate) terms? And if we take the debate in part at least to inhabit a normative discursive space, an argumentative space in which to make claims on the moral-political present, what ought it to mean to talk about a black radical tradition?
The seminar will explore the Israeli-Palestinian (and Israeli-Arab) conflict from the beginning of the 20th century until today. The first part of the seminar will focus on the historical background informing the conflict and leading to the Palestinian refugee problem and the establishment of a Jewish, but not Palestinian, state in 1948. The second part of the seminar focuses on Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlement project, and possible political solutions, as well as the USA's role and its impact on the conflict, the occupation, and the current Gaza war.
This seminar examines the history of archaeological thought from its antiquarian beginnings in the 19th century, through archaeology’s professionalization and redefinition as an anthropological science during the mid-20th century, to the emergence of archaeology as a critically self-reflexive discipline during the late-20th century, defined by complicated intellectual ties across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Our driving questions are epistemological. How have archaeologists understood the project of interpretation? How have they articulated their relationship to data? What has come to count as evidence and what has not? How have archaeologists organized material remains in the present to make claims about the past? What questions have been posed about past cultures, and how were these “cultures” constructed as objects of study in the first place? Is archaeology best understood as a generalizing science, a historically oriented humanity, or both—and how and why has the discipline’s answer to this question evolved over time? How do the situated positions of archaeologists within contemporary society impact the claims they make about the past?
Practical and theoretical issues relating to the teaching of psychology and the psychology of teaching.
Panel data or longitudinal data consist of multiple measures over time on a sample of individuals. These types of data occur extensively in both observational and experimental studies in social, behavioral, and health sciences. This course will provide an introduction to the principles and methods for the analysis of panel data. Whereas some supporting statistical theory will be given, emphasis will be on data analysis and interpretation of models for longitudinal data. Problems will be motivated by applications primarily in social sciences.
This course provides an opportunity for students in the Music Department’s Composition DMA program to engage in off-campus practicum or internships in music composition for academic credit that will count towards the requirements for the degree.