New York City is made up of more than 400 neighborhoods. The concept of neighborhoods in cities has had many meanings and understandings over time. Equally complex is the concept of community used to describe the people attached to or defined by neighborhood. While neighborhood can be interpreted as a spatial, social, political, racial, ethnic, or even, economic unit; community often refers to the group of stakeholders (i.e. residents, workers, investors) whose interests directly align with the conditions of their environment. Community development is “a process where these community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems” that result from the changing contexts in their neighborhoods. Using a variety of theories and approaches, residents organize themselves or work with community development practitioners on the ground to obtain safe, affordable housing, improve the public realm, build wealth, get heard politically, develop human capital, and connect to metropolitan labor and housing markets. To address the ever-changing contexts of neighborhoods, community development organizations are taking on new roles and adapting (in various cases) to larger forces within the city, region and nation such as disinvestment, reinvestment, increased cultural diversity, an uncertain macroeconomic environment, and changes in federal policy. For more than a century, city-dwellers—and especially New Yorkers—have been tackling these challenges. This course will examine both historic and contemporary community building and development efforts, paying special attention to approaches which were shaped by New York City. This urban center, often described as a “city of neighborhoods,” has long been a seedbed for community-based problem-solving inventions. The course will focus on the theories (why?), tools (how?), and actors (who?) within the field of community development practice and is organized around important sectors (housing, econom
This seminar course will take a deep dive into the complete works of Christopher Marlowe, the short-lived but massively influential playwright and poet of the 1580s and 1590s. Marlowe is best known for his innovative plays, including
Tamburlaine
(in two parts),
The Jew of Malta
,
Doctor Faustus
, and
Edward II
. We will examine these alongside the lesser known
The Massacre at Paris
and
Dido Queen of Carthage,
his poetry (including the erotic “epyllion”
Hero and Leander
), his translations from Lucan and Ovid, and the archival traces of his controversial life.
Admission to the seminar will be by application; preference will be given to English majors in their senior and junior years, but all are welcome to apply.
This course examines the evolution of pacifist thought in literature from the interwar years to the dawn of the atomic age. It seeks to study the literature of twentieth-century pacifism as a response to expanding technologies of modern warfare. The course asks the following questions, among others: What shape does pacifist thought take in the atomic age, and how does it compare with interwar pacifism? What similarities or differences are discernible? What role do literary representations of modern warfare play in the evolution of pacifist thought? Does pacifism gain persuasive power through these representations, or do they lay bare its limits? How might one understand pacifism’s conceptual relation to nonviolence, anti-war resistance, and anti-militarism?
The course begins with works by pacifist writers in the interwar years: Bertrand Russell,
Why Men Fight
(1917); the correspondence between Einstein and Freud in 1932; Aldous Huxley, “What Are You Going to Do About It?” (1936) and
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936); Virginia Woolf,
Three Guineas
(1938) and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940); Vera Brittain, “Women and Peace” (1940). The course then considers the evolution of pacifism in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focusing on novels, memoirs, essays, short stories, and films, including the following works: Aldous Huxley,
Ape and Essence
(1948); M. K. Gandhi,
For Pacifists
(1949); Pearl Buck,
Command the Morning
(1959); Alfred Coppel,
Dark December
(1960); Masuji Ibuse,
Black Rain
(1965); Kenzaburo Oe
, Hiroshima Notes
(1965) and
Fire from the Ashes
, ed. (1985); Anand Patwardhan,
War and Peace
(2002, documentary); Howard Zinn (ed.),
The Power of Nonviolence
(2002).
The course encourages students to view selected films probing pacifist and anti-war themes alongside literary and philosophical texts, with a view to grasping the themes’ adaptability across various genres. Students must apply to enrol in the seminar, providing information about year, school, relevant prior coursework, and reasons for wanting to take the course. Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply; prior coursework in literature is strongly recommended.
Working memory is our ability to retain information in mind in the absence of sensory stimuli. In this course we will gain a more thorough understanding of what working memory is and how the brain supports it.
This seminar will provide a broad survey of how principles of cognition are represented
in music and the ways music has been used to study those principles in the psychology
and neuroscience literature.
PSYC BC1129/2129 (with or without lab) as well as permission of the instructor.
The Barnard Toddler Center provides the focus for this seminar and research in applied developmental psychology, an amalgam of developmental, educational, and clinical psychology. The seminar integrates theory and research and for AY 20-21 will use daily recordings of the toddler sessions as the centerpiece for understanding early development. The unique context of Covid19 will be used to understand risks in development, especially for vulnerable children and families. Second term students will also conduct research on parenting during the pandemic.
This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the undisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice. The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was
the
threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world. Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts. We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography.
We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions,
Witness: Against Our Vanishing
(Artists Space, 1989) and
Exposé-es
(Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz + Cuchar, Bambanani Women’s Group, Felicano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, Matthew Wong, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition.
This course introduces students to the philosophy, ethics, and practice of oral history with specific emphasis on interview and transcription techniques and the use of oral history in interdisciplinary research and analysis. This course will also include instruction on the archival collection, preservation, description, and digitization of oral history interviews.
Course themes include:
Introduction to Oral History
Foundations of Oral History
Ethical and Legal Considerations (IRB, vulnerable populations, shared authority)
Oral History Best Practices
Oral History and Memory
Interviewing
Transcription and Metadata as Political Acts
Oral History as Primary Sources in Research and Writing
Community Oral History
Oral History as Public History
Oral History and Social Justice
Oral History Online
Oral History and Exhibitions/Programming
Since September 11, 2001, there has been an avalanche of immigration enforcement policies and initiatives proposed or implemented under the guise of national security. This course will analyze the domino effect of the Patriot Act, the Absconder Initiative, Special Registration, the Real I.D. Act, border security including the building of the 700-mile fence along the U.S./Mexico border, Secured Communities Act-that requires the cooperation of state and local authorities in immigration enforcement, the challenge to birthright citizenship, and now the congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization. Have these policies been effective in combating the war on terrorism and promoting national security? Who stands to benefit from these enforcement strategies? Do immigrant communities feel safer in the U.S.? How have states joined the federal bandwagon of immigration enforcement or created solutions to an inflexible, broken immigration system?
Each week, a historical period is studied in connection to a particular theme of ongoing cultural expression. While diverse elements of popular culture are included, fiction is privileged as a source of cultural commentary. Students are expected to assimilate the background information but are also encouraged to develop their own perspective and interest, whether in the social sciences, the humanities (including the fine arts), or other areas.
The aim of this course is to examine the biological bases of individual differences in behavior. We will start by examining how individual differences in behavior and health are shaped by gene-environment interactions. We will complement these studies with the endophenotype approach and discuss its role in our contemporary views of complex disorders. We will then introduce behavioral epigenetics studies that are suggested to mediate the effects of gene-environment interactions at different levels of analysis. We will continue by discussing how these topics shape and are shaped by developmental programming. We will end the semester by discussing the major debates around these topics as well as their implications in real life and public policies. By covering these topics, students are expected to gain a better understanding of how our behavior is i) formed and shaped by gene-environment interactions over time, ii) influenced by the underlying physiological and epigenetic mechanisms, and iii) changed by developmental processes. With this information, the students are expected to view individual differences in behavior in a perspective that is highly interdisciplinary and dynamic.
Prerequisites: Concurrent with registering for this course, a student must register with the department and provide a written invitation from a mentor; details of this procedure are available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/courses/w3500/index.htm. Students must register for recitations UN3510 or consult the instructor. Corequisites: BIOL UN3510 The course involves independent study, faculty-supervised laboratory projects in contemporary biology. Concurrent with registering for this course, a student must register with the department, provide a written invitation from a mentor and submit a research proposal; details of this procedure are available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/courses/w3500/index.htm. A paper summarizing results of the work is required by the last day of finals for a letter grade; no late papers will be accepted. See the course web site (above) for more details. Students can take anywhere from 2-4 points for this course.
Prerequisites: the written permission of the faculty member who agrees to act as supervisor, and the director of undergraduate studies permission. Readings in a selected field of physics under the supervision of a faculty member. Written reports and periodic conferences with the instructor.
Intro to Moving Image: Video, Film & Art is an introductory class on the production and editing of digital video. Designed as an intensive hands-on production/post-production workshop, the apprehension of technical and aesthetic skills in shooting, sound and editing will be emphasized. Assignments are developed to allow students to deepen their familiarity with the language of the moving image medium. Over the course of the term, the class will explore the language and syntax of the moving image, including fiction, documentary and experimental approaches. Importance will be placed on the decision making behind the production of a work; why it was conceived of, shot, and edited in a certain way. Class time will be divided between technical workshops, viewing and discussing films and videos by independent producers/artists and discussing and critiquing students projects. Readings will be assigned on technical, aesthetic and theoretical issues. Only one section offered per semester. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.
Mass Extinctions are caused by catastrophic shifts in the earth's climate, solid earth, and life systems. These major inflection points in the history of life leave lasting impacts and require study across a variety of disciplines. In this course we will use these 'system breakdowns' to take a bird's eye view of the history of life. We'll study what happens when vast magmatic provinces spew gases into a darkened sky and try to pick up the pieces as asteroid impacts desecrate the world around them. Along the way, we'll consider how our own actions have the potential to shape the world around us, and the nature of our relationship with an ever-changing earth system. Over the course of the semester students will practice integrating paleontological data from a variety of sources to study both evolutionary hypotheses and the causes of climate change in deep time. We will incorporate foundational ideas from geochronology and stratigraphy as a group, to place fossils into a broader geologic context. Students from all backgrounds who have taken at least one of the three "Systems" courses or Dinosaurs and the History of Life are welcome.
Unlike any other medium, animation provides unmatched suspicion of disbelief. Moreover, one can exercise one's imagination in digital space beyond material and physical limitations. Combining the two provides the permissive space to manifest our wildest reveries: utopias, dystopias, thought experiments, psi-fic scenarios, or dollhouses for amphibians.
In this course, students will receive a general survey on a range of methods in animation production. From the most traditional hand-drawn animation and cel animation to digital animation employing Photoshop, After Effects, and Blender (3D animation). Although this class can be technically involved; software mastery the end goal of the course is using these techniques to produce animations as a means of expression. These are only tools to help students form and realize their creative visions. Designed for both the digitally inclined and those who hate computers, students can try and then choose the method most agreeable to their temperament and ideas. They can also combine and mix different methods, maximizing creative freedom.
The course will introduce projects from animation history (early experimental animation, Disney, Soviet experimental animation, etc.) and contemporary art examples (Pierre Huyghe, Ian Chang, Wong Ping. etc.). However, the aim is to go beyond the Western art canon and expose students to other facets of culture. We will also study examples from popular culture (music videos) and Japanese anime (Hideaki Anno, Satoshi Kon, Masaaki Yuasa, etc.). One of the most essential responsibilities the students will take on is expanding our collective references by bringing in and presenting works that genuinely inspire and interest them.
Animation is an exceptionally permissive medium; it facilitates all of your prior skills and interests. Whether it is drawing, painting, music, poetry, fiction, or using a yoyo, there is a way for it to exist in animation. Students will be asked to keep a sketchbook for the duration of the semester. It will serve a landing pad for ideas and an anchor point to manage the project. The course will cover the entire production process, from idea development, concept design, character design, writing, storyboarding, foley, voice, music, editing, and final publication. Much of the class time will be dedicated to working, punctured by presentations, technical workshops, and critiques. At the end of the semester, students will have completed three shorts (30 seconds-2 minutes) and one fully developed pr
This undergraduate seminar examines the social, political, and cultural transformations of the 1960s through the lens of local history. The course is centered on the student and community protests that took place at Columbia University and in Morningside Heights in 1968. Scholarly and popular histories have underscored the ways 1968 was a watershed moment in the history of the 20th century. Although the protest is one of the touchstone events from the year and the decade, reliable historical treatment is still lacking. This class encourages students to examine and craft histories of the university and the surrounding community in this period. Designed to work in tandem with the “Columbia and Slavery” course, this course is a public-facing seminar designed to empower students to open up a discussion of all the issues connected with the protests, its global, national, and local context, and its aftermath. The course aims to raise questions, elicit curiosity, and encourage students and those interested in Columbia and Morningside Heights history to investigate one of the most important events to take place in the university’s history. The recent 50th anniversary of those events, and the availability of new sources & publications on the protests, have presented opportunities to prompt fresh answers to old questions: What were the factors that led to the protests? How did student and community mobilization shape, and were shaped by, national and international forces? What are the local, national, and international legacies of Columbia 1968? The recent graduate student strike is a very tangible legacy of the protests. This seminar is part of an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with such questions 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 visualizationsof these projects.
Course Objectives:
1. To explore, document, and contextualize the Columbia/Morningside Heights protests of 1968.
2. To practice the “historian’s craft” by conducting research, analyzing primary material, and making coherent arguments based on an interrogation of evidence.
3. To analyze, engage in, and reflect on the relationship between archival research and the produ
Love and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex.
Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory.
Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.
This interdisciplinary course surveys literary, cinematic, historical and other archival text representations of time and change in and around waterways in the Global South—oceanic, riverine, at the littoral and in hinterlands. It is animated by questions of how people live with water as horizon, resource, life-giving source, as ancestral boundaries and threat. We do so now in a time when climate change refocuses our dependencies upon, and vulnerabilities to, water.
Our themes are shaped by water’s influence on the rhythms of lives, and how these rhythms have been changed and are changing—deliberately, as in dam building and its aftermaths in lives, and through climate change.
"This interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to make sense of the ‘sense of an ending’ that underlines all warnings about environmental crisis and climate change. Our interdisciplinary course has a doubled foundation out of which our readings and discussions will grow: communal understanding and knowledge about local environments, on one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and the data and information gathered by scientists."
"We therefore begin with a simple question: what is the relation between the Humanities and the work of scientists? Scientists undertake painstaking, necessary research to provide communities and their governments with vital, necessary information. Individuals and communities interpret and translate this information, often affectively. An organization of scientists studying carbon levels across Africa can list the progressive increase in temperatures across Africa over a period of years and calculate anticipated increases. An image based on this data may visualize the projected rise:"
"A glance reveals something dire based on the way we associate red with danger. Our course is oriented towards who lives beneath the surfaces of data and images that ‘draw a picture’ for us. We read for how communities and individuals explain and communicate their relation to the historical and changing environments. In other words, we attend to narration, in different forms—fiction, poetry, song, travelogue—to grasp how experiences are rendered comprehensible. There is a broad ‘where’ as well, and a fluid ‘when.’ ‘Where’ takes us into the portmanteau category of ‘The Global South.’ We bracket the scope of this category to focus upon specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa and diasporic African communities. ‘When’ permits us to think of time, the time of the world, the times of change and the times of aftermaths. Go into an archive, open a history book, a sacred text and you will encounter ‘endings.’ We enter British colonial archives to see how signs of ‘When’ also allows us to face an underlying dread that might be called a ‘sense of an ending’ and to see just how many such ‘endings’ have come to pass. This is how we enter the diasporic histories of environmental change related to colonialism and the enslavement and transportation of whose descendants live in the
This course will explore the politics of ethnicity and ethnic identity using the frameworks, methodologies, and approaches of the political science subfield of comparative politics. Ethnicity—and identity politics more broadly—is enormously important in understanding domestic politics in most countries around the world. While most people would acknowledge that they themselves have an ethnic identity, few would say that they purposefully chose that identity. Compared to other identity categories, ethnicity is assigned at birth without consent or consultation, and is generally thought to be beyond any one individual’s capacity to change it. Yet almost no one would say that this somewhat random assignment procedure makes ethnicity irrelevant. Not only are many people very eager to organize the political world around ethnic identities, but people also derive a sense of meaning and attachment to others as a result of their ethnicity. With the global rise in ethnonationalist populism in many places, this influence is becoming even more pronounced.
This class will explore how and why this specific type of identity has come to hold such enormous importance for the lives of so many people. At an individual level, we will ask where ethnic identities come from, and why ethnic identities at some times take on primary importance for an individual’s sense of self, while at others become less important than other identities such as religion, interest, class, social values, etc. At the group level, we will examine when ethnic identities become politicized, when ethnic communities organize politically into political parties or interest groups, and which groups get representation in the seats of political power and which do not. At the broadest societal level, we will examine how those ethnic identities influence regime type (whether democratic or authoritarian), political party systems, economic development, inequality, and stability.
While it will be helpful to have completed Introduction to Comparative Politics (POLS UN2501), it is not absolutely required to take this class. Please also note that this class is not the same as Ethnic Conflict (POLS UN 3622). While there will inevitably be some overlap between this class and that, this course focuses much more on domestic politics, ethnicity and non-violent democratic processes, and ethnicity in the politics of regime change.
1
A Serious Man, the 2009 movie by the Coen Brothers opens with a Yiddish folk tale featuring a dybbuk. Dybbuks, golems, magicians, and monsters haunt not only Yiddish literature but also the contemporary cinema, as illustrated by such recent films as The Unborn and The Possession. Why are we so attracted to dybbuks, spirit possession, magic, and monsters in the twenty-first century? This course will focus on magic, monsters, dybbuks, demons, and golems in Yiddish literature and beyond, including film and popular culture. We will approach the supernatural motif from the perspective of gender, body, and performance studies, and will explore the questions of memory, trauma, and identity. The aim of the course is to encourage students to discuss and critically engage with the various texts and film adaptations listed on the syllabus in an attempt to answer the following questions: In what ways do these works explore, interrogate with, and reflect on human experience? What do they tell us about the powers of good and evil? How relevant are they in the twenty-first century? The course puts emphasis on developing the skills of critical, analytical, and abstract thinking in relation to the discussed works, as well as the ability to express that critical thinking in writing. No knowledge of Yiddish required.
Prerequisites: POLS W1201 or the equivalent. Not an introductory-level course. Not open to students who have taken the colloquium POLS BC3326. Enrollment limited to 25 students; L-course sign-up through eBear. Barnard syllabus. Explores seminal caselaw to inform contemporary civil rights and civil liberties jurisprudence and policy. Specifically, the readings examine historical and contemporary first amendment values, including freedom of speech and the press, economic liberties, takings law, discrimination based on race, gender, class and sexual preference, affirmative action, the right to privacy, reproductive freedom, the right to die, criminal procedure and adjudication, the rights of the criminally accused post-9/11 and the death penalty. (Cross-listed by the American Studies and Human Rights Programs.)
The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B+ or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors.
Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to senior majors. Individual research in Womens Studies conducted in consulation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings. For further info visit:
https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors
Prerequisites: Non-majors admitted by permission of instructor. Students must attend first class. Enrollment limited to 16 students per section. Introduction to the historical process and social consequences of urban growth, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present.
This course explores representations of queer Harlem in African American literature, sonic culture, and performance. We will consider the history and making of Harlem, key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and the aesthetic innovations of writers and artists who defied the racial, sexual, and gendered conventions of their time. We will be guided by an intersectional approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality and the methods of Black queer studies, African American and African diaspora literary studies, as well as sound and performance scholarship. We will ask when, where, and what was/is gay Harlem; how we might excavate its histories; map its borders; and speculate on its material and imagined futures.
This seminar will center on the close reading of some of the most formally complex and intellectually dense lyric poetry written in English - more specifically, the work of the seventeenth-century poets generally deemed exemplary of the English “metaphysical” tradition. We will divide our time more or less equally among three figures: John Donne, the libertine-turned-priest whose poetry spans erotic and devotional extremes; George Herbert, the humble parson whose daring experiments in poetic form can seem uncannily postmodern; and finally Andrew Marvell, whose nickname—“the Chameleon”—gestures both toward the shiftiness of his political affiliations and the radical ambiguity of his poetry. Each week we will undertake the careful analysis of exhilaratingly, exhaustingly difficult poems. Our reading will also include a set of critical or historical supplements, meant to enrich and enliven our understanding of the primary texts under consideration.
Prerequisites: Must have taken a Dance Department Composition course, have some dance training. This experiential, hands-on course requires all students to choreograph, dance, and film. Focusing on single-shot film-making, the duet of the camera and the dance will create an understanding of the interaction between the two, enabling students to create a final short film.
A major challenge for governments across the Western Hemisphere is the complex relationship between illicit drugs, violence, and politics. We can see this relationship operating at multiple levels, from everyday politics in gang-controlled neighborhoods to the global arenas where governments debate and craft international drug policy. These links also reach back in history to global wars of empire and colonial rule, race relations during and following the collapse of the institution of slavery, and contemporary drug wars being waged across the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. Today, the dynamics and consequences of the politics of illicit drugs touch all our lives in different ways, including individual and family struggles with substance abuse, everyday encounters with militarized police, and the strains on democracy and citizenship, among many others. This course will examine some of these dynamics and consequences with a theoretical and empirical focus mainly on Latin America and the United States. Throughout our time together we will connect these pressing issues to broader theories, concepts and empirical findings in political science. The course is divided into several individual modules (denoted below with the headings A – G) under three overarching themes for this semester:
1. Politics of Drugs in a Historical Perspective:
The first theme is a broad historical overview of the political origins of illicit drugs and the global drug regime. Some of the main questions we will tackle are: When and why did states label drugs as illicit? How did domestic and global politics come together to shape the global drug regime and the “war on drugs?” What role did race and gender play in the early social construction of illicit drugs?
2. Illicit Drugs, Politics and Governance:
The second theme focuses on contemporary linkages between illicit drugs, violence, and politics. Here we will examine the conditions under which illicit drug markets are either violent or (relatively) peaceful. We will tackle questions like: Do states always seek to dismantle drug markets? What is the relationship between illicit drugs and electoral politics? What role do illicit drugs play in governance by armed non-state actors? Are states and criminal actors involved in the drug trade always at “war” with each other?
3. Democracy, Citizenship, and the War on Drugs:
The th
Discussion Section for POLS-UN3565 Drugs and Politics in the Americas
A range of dance genres, from the traditional to the innovative, co-exist as representations of Indianness in India, and beyond. Identities onstage and in films, morph as colonial, national, and global contexts change. This course zooms from micro to macro views of twentieth century staged dances as culturally inflected discourse. We review how Indian classical dance aligns with the oldest of performance texts, and with lively discourses (rasa as a performance aesthetic, Orientalism, nationalism, global recirculations) through the ages, not only in India but also in Europe, Britain and America. Throughout the course, we ask:- How is culture embodied? How do historical texts configure dance today? How might they affect our thinking on mind-body, practice-theory, and traditional-contemporary divides? How does bodily patterning influence the ways that we experience our surroundings and vice versa? Can cultural imaginaries instigate action? How is gender is performed? What are dance discourses?
This course offers intensive practice in writing on dance and explores a range of
approaches to dance criticism from the 1940s through today. Starting from the premise
that criticism can be an art form in itself, we ask: What are the roles and responsibilities
of a critic? How do our own identities and experiences inform how we see and write?
With the proliferation of dance in digital spaces, what new possibilities arise for dance
criticism? Class meetings include discussion, writing exercises, and peer workshops.
Assignments involve viewing performances outside of class.
Philosophical problems at the foundations of quantum theory, especially those having to do with the uncertainty of relations and nature of quantum mechanical indeterminacy. Exploration of a variety of interpretation and hidden variable theory.
Required for all majors who do not select the year-long Senior Thesis Research & Seminar (BIOL BC3593 & BC3594) to fulfill their senior capstone requirement. These seminars allow students to explore the primary literature in the Biological Sciences in greater depth than can be achieved in a lecture course. Attention will be focused on both theoretical and empirical work. Seminar periods are devoted to oral reports and discussion of assigned readings and student reports. Students will write one extensive literature review of a topic related to the central theme of the seminar section.
Topics vary per semester and include, but are not limited to:
Plant Development
,
Animal Development & Evolution,
Molecular Evolution, Microbiology & Global Change, Genomics, Comparative & Reproductive Endocrinology, and Data Intensive Approaches in Biology.
This year-long course is open to junior and senior Biology majors and minors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give a poster presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills two upper-level laboratory requirements for the Biology major or minor. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3591 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3592 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3593-BIOL BC3594.
This year-long course is open to junior and senior Biology majors and minors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give a poster presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills two upper-level laboratory requirements for the Biology major or minor. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3591 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3592 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3593-BIOL BC3594.
Research and scholarly writing in chosen topics relating to dance. Methods of investigation are drawn from prominent archival collections and personal interviews, as well as other resources. Papers are formally presented to the Dance Department upon completion.
This lab-based course introduces students to advanced methods in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on the application of electroencephalography (EEG) for real-time recording of brain activity. Unlike traditional approaches that study how the brain responds to different external stimuli or task demands, this course centers on spontaneous brain activity that occurs during rest or just before experimental events. Whether or not spontaneous brain activity is just meaningless noise remains an active area of research in cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers believe that spontaneous brain activity may be an important factor shaping our subjective experience of the world. However, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive in part due to the challenges in objectively defining and measuring subjective experience.
In this course, students will address this challenge by developing methods to study the relationship between spontaneous brain activity and subjective experience, with a particular focus on mind-wandering and the sensory phenomena elicited by Ganzflicker and Ganzfeld stimulation. The course culminates in independent research projects where students test their hypotheses by collecting and analyzing behavioral and EEG data. Key questions to address include: can spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity account for why people sometimes zone out while performing a task? Can the same fluctuations explain why people sometimes have different sensory experiences despite constant external stimuli? Do individual variations in spontaneous brain activity help explain why some people are more likely to report such experiences?
Note: The course involves weekly in person meetings as well as asynchronous work on data acquisition, analysis, and primary article readings for approximately 6 additional hours per week (on average).
This year-long course is open to senior Biology majors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give an oral presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills the senior capstone requirement for the Biology major. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3593 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3594 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592.
This year-long course is open to senior Biology majors. Students will complete an independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty mentor at Barnard or another local institution. Attendance at the weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students will write a scientific paper about their project and give an oral presentation about their research at the Barnard Biology Research Symposium.
Completion of this year-long course fulfills the senior capstone requirement for the Biology major. This course must be taken in sequence, beginning with BIOL BC3593 in the Fall and continuing with BIOL BC3594 in the Spring. Acceptance into this course requires confirmation of the research project by the course instructors. A Barnard internal mentor is required if the research project is not supervised by a Barnard faculty member. This course cannot be taken at the same time as BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592.
Prerequisites: Open to senior Neuroscience and Behavior majors. Permission of the instructor. This is a year-long course. By the end of the spring semester program planning period during junior year, majors should identify the lab they will be working in during their senior year. Discussion and conferences on a research project culminate in a written and oral senior thesis. Each project must be supervised by a scientist working at Barnard or at another local institution. Successful completion of the seminar substitutes for the major examination.
A research and writing workshop designed to help students plan and execute a major research project, and communicate their ideas in a common scholarly language that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Content is determined by students thesis topics, and includes general sessions on how to formulate a proposal and how to generate a bibliography. Students present the fruits of their research in class discussions, culminating in a full-length seminar presentation and the submission of the written thesis.
Similar to BIOL BC3591-BIOL BC3592, this is a one-semester course that provides students with degree credit for unpaid research
without
a seminar component. You may enroll in BIOL BC3597 for between 1-4 credits per semester. As a rule of thumb, you should be spending approximately 3 hours per week per credit on your research project.
A
Project Approval Form
must be submitted to the department each semester that you enroll in this course. Your Barnard research mentor (if your lab is at Barnard) or internal adviser in the Biology Department (if your lab is elsewhere) must approve your planned research
before
you enroll in BIOL BC3597. You should sign up for your mentor's section.
This course does not fulfill any Biology major requirements. It is open to students beginning in their first year.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
have enchanted, and sometimes troubled, readers since they first appeared in the year 8 CE. This course is designed first, to read, closely, the
Metamorphoses
in its entirety. We will look at Hellenistic sources – Hesiod’s
Theogony
, Boios’s
Orthinogonia
, as well as the
Heteroioumena
by Alexander of Colophon. We will also investigate moments in their complex literary afterlife: in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, in Shakespeare’s
Tempest
, in Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
as well as Boccaccio and Dante. Finally we will look at some translations of the
Metamorphoses
, by Caxton and Gower, Dryden and Pope, as well as contemporary translations.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3328 and permission of instructor. Individual research projects at Barnard or Columbia, culminating in a comprehensive written report.
Introduction to continuous systems with the treatment of classical and state-space formulations. Mathematical concepts, complex variables, integral transforms and their inverses, differential equations, and relevant linear algebra. Classical feedback control, time/frequency domain design, stability analysis, Laplace transform formulation and solutions, block diagram simplification and manipulation, signal flow graphs, modeling physical systems and linearization. state-space formulation and modeling, in parallel with classical single-input single-output formulation, connections between the two formulations. Transient and steady state analysis, methods of stability analysis, such as root locus methods, Nyquist stability criterion, Routh Hurwitz criterion, pole/zero placement, Bode plot analysis, Nichols chart analysis, phase lead and lag compensators, controllability, observability, realization of canonical forms, state estimation in multivariable systems, time-variant systems. Introduction to advanced stability analysis such as Lyapunov stability and simple optimal control formulation. May not take for credit if already received credit for EEME E4600.
Corequisites: PHIL V3611 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Systematic treatment of some major topics in metaphysics (e.g. modality, causation, identity through time, particulars and universals). Readings from contemporary authors.
Corequisites: PHIL V3611 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Systematic treatment of some major topics in metaphysics (e.g. modality, causation, identity through time, particulars and universals). Readings from contemporary authors.
Prerequisites: one year of calculus-based general physics. The standard hot big bang cosmological model and modern observational results that test it. Topics include the Friedmann equations and the expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, inflation, primordial nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, the formation of large-scale cosmic structures, and modern cosmological observations.
Prerequisites: one year of calculus-based general physics. The standard hot big bang cosmological model and modern observational results that test it. Topics include the Friedmann equations and the expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, inflation, primordial nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, the formation of large-scale cosmic structures, and modern cosmological observations.