Analysis and discussion of representative works from the Middle Ages to the present.
In this course, we will encounter ghosts and hauntings in literature from the Americas, primarily from Latin American and Caribbean writers. These ghosts expose something hidden in the past and pull dark secrets into the light. We will think about haunting not just as a supernatural experience, but as a mechanism that reveals layers of history and unearths long buried injustices. A few of the characters we will meet are: A Cuban exile living in Miami who is haunted by the life he left behind; a teenager in Argentina who explores her queer identity and confronts the ghosts of the state violence; a General accused of genocide who defends his innocence, though the ghosts in his home say otherwise. The ghosts in these stories force the characters to reckon with, or fall prey to, legacies of colonialism, war, and migration. Readings include literary works by Mariana Enriquez, Edwidge Danticat, Carlos Fuentes, Jean Rhys, Ana Menéndez, and others.
How do we think about the future? Why do we develop the hopes and fears that we do? How do present conditions and discourses inform, influence, or limit our senses of personal and political possibility? In this section of First-Year Writing, we will explore conceptions of the future in 19th through 21st-century literary fiction. We will begin by close reading 20th-century short stories that evoke hopes and fears for the future on individual, social, and global scales. We will then turn to H.G. Wells’ classic novella
The Time Machine
and place its portrayal of the future in the context of late Victorian science and socioeconomics. Finally, we will consider how contemporary literature reflects and responds to the accelerating climate crisis, and explore fiction’s role in helping us apprehend the potential for radical environmental disruption.
Clothing is a part of everyone’s daily life, and what one wears is often considered to be an expression of individuality. Yet, while a wardrobe may involve deeply personal choices, the textiles available to us and the styles we gravitate toward can also reflect our historical moment. Like other art forms, fashion is political, and its materials—textiles—have historically been at the heart of global trade. In this course, we will ask: what can literature show us about cultural and political histories of fashion trends and the textile industry? Just as importantly, how can understanding historical context for the textiles, needlecrafts, and garments that appear in the pages of a story offer insights into character, setting, and theme? As a class, we will consider some of the ways fashion and the global circulation of textile goods have been bound up in relationships between nations and empires as well as relationships between individuals, society, and the environment. Readings are subject to change but may include fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ntozake Shange, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Other readings will draw upon fashion theory and scholarship on textile history by scholars such as Lisa Lowe, Hilary Davidson, Monica Miller, Suchitra Choudhury, Amber Butchart, and others. We will also consider costuming as a part of worldbuilding and character development in film and television examples such as
Bridgerton
, and we will put our discussions of historical text(ile)s into conversation with recent work in fashion activism.
Recent works as diverse as The New York Times’s
Overlooked Project
and Netflix’s
Bridgerton
raise questions about what records we keep, how we narrate history, and the factors that determine what stories we can tell. In this class, we will probe these questions by reading literary works that turn to a speculative mode to make sense of history, past and present. As we enter the critical conversation about the historical record, we will explore how authority and value are assigned to different texts and accounts. In so doing, we will also develop our ability to read texts' and documents' own theorizations of truth and fact. Readings may include work by Virginia Woolf, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Carmen Maria Machado, Adrienne Rich, and N.K. Jemisin alongside critical texts by Saidiya Hartman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and others. Course costs will not exceed $15.
This class examines the ways that a historical event can be remembered and described differently by direct participants, and how personal biases, such as race, gender and class, affect the process of recollection and narration. Some of the texts that will be read and discussed include Sara Collins’
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
, Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
, and Alison Bechdel's
Fun Home
, among others. Our analysis of these texts will be augmented by theoretical works drawn from sociology and literary studies.
This course is designed for the absolute beginner or the student returning to ballet class after a lengthy hiatus and is intended to familiarize the student with the classical ballet terminology, to foster independence in this particular vocabulary, to introduce the historical context of the Western art form and conventions of a ballet class. Learning the physical practice of this centuries-old craft will give the student basic classical ballet terminology as well as gaining an anatomical understanding of the body.
In our class we will discuss abolition as a name for a set of imaginings that call for complete and total eradication of systems ("Worlds") that perpetuate collective harms. We will think about how capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy limit our imaginations, and how we can think in ways that remake our world. Students will read essays by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pheng Cheah, Denise F. DaSilva, Edouard Glissant, and Christina Sharpe, and will trouble received readings of significant literary texts through abolitionist lenses to discern a range of liberatory strategies in the poetry, literary nonfiction, and fiction of writers including Audre Lorde, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, M Nourbese Philip, Robin Coste Lewis, Etheridge Knight, Randall Horton, dg nanouk okpik, and Jackie Wang. As a class, students will discuss and consider these writers’, as well as their own, interventions in the context of literature's world-making power. (*Readings subject to change).
Teenagers inhabit a strange land: in exile from childhood, still immigrating to adulthood. How have different writers mapped the liminal territory of the teenage experience? In this class, we will step away from the rich tradition of realistic Coming-of-Age narratives and explore how genre frameworks—including speculative, horror, fairy tale, gothic, and quest traditions—have been used to illuminate the Teenage Strange. How have writers used the strangeness of genre to render this slice of time? How does genre capture the teenage intersection between public and private inquiry—between larger questions about the world, and more private questions about the self? How does genre construct questions about fear, desire, rage, shame, power, culture, and love? How does it deconstruct reality so it can be seen, investigated, and felt? Readings may include work by Octavia Butler, A.S. King, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, Shirley Jackson, Joan He, Francesca Lia Block, Kelly Link, Viktor Shklovsky, Ursula K. LeGuin, Akwaeke Emezi, and others.
This course is designed for the student with prior beginning ballet study, knowledge of the basic ballet vocabulary and the ability to process a combination with relative proficiency. During this semester you will be introduced to an expanded vocabulary, with focused attention will increase your technical ability, work with dynamics and speed, may work with a partner to analyze a movement combination or may be asked to produce and present a combination in class.
Dear student: I write to you, who now read these words. Or, perhaps, I don’t: perhaps I never had you in mind at all; perhaps you are just someone passing by, who has taken these words as though meant for yourself. This course examines how writers have made use of the privacy of letters in their public writing. What happens when we address our written words to a particular other? How, on the other hand, do we read words meant for someone else? What intimacies does the letter form make possible, or violate? And what might the special case of the letter have to tell us about writing in general? Objects in the course may include: fiction by Goethe, DeWitt, Diderot, Poe, West; epistolary poems by Ovid, Dickinson, Rankine, Shockley; paintings of letter-reading by Vermeer and Greuze; letter-memoirs by Baldwin and Vuong; criticism and theory by Althusser, Barthes, Benveniste, Fried, Howe, Jackson, Reed.
In this class we will read and discuss feminist fairy tales: adaptations of classic tales and newly-imagined stories which—rather than promising a simple and tidy “happily ever after”—privilege female agency and offer up critiques of patriarchal structures. In dialog with texts that center women and other intersecting identities, we will talk about colorism, sexuality, desire, misogyny, motherhood, and more. Analyzing how these texts unmask and challenge various forms of oppression, we will explore how and why the magical and often didactic nature of the fairy tale genre lends itself to thinking critically about our current world and to envisioning more equitable futures. Readings include literary texts by Ovid, Julia Alvarez, Olga Broumas, Charles Perrault, Luisa Valenzuela, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeanette Winterson, Amal El-Mohtar, and Kelly Link. In dialog with these literary texts, we will also engage with various theoretical texts and perspectives; with film (Georges Méliès and Disney’s
Frozen
); with artwork; and with music (Taylor Swift).
The "Mad Woman" is an archetype with enduring appeal in storytelling. Inimical forces conspire to curb her agency or prohibit the pursuit of her desires; how does she survive or strike back from such a disadvantaged position? How is her “madness” represented as the effect of her oppression and a consequence of her femininity? How does she weaponize the very terms by which her existence is disqualified? Moreover, under what conditions does she subject others to the same suffering imposed on her, and to what cost? This course considers the ways women of all kinds negotiate life “on the verge,” in states of extreme precarity or with the threat of violence lurking around them. What do their complicities, rebellions, and fantasies reveal about sexual difference materialized within patriarchal societies? To be “on the verge” is to hover in a liminal space between “here” and “there,” perhaps to be even something not quite human. This unique vantage point offered by this eclectic collection of women will orient our critical approach to this seminar. Possible texts include Euripides’s
Medea
, Aeschylus’s
Oresteia
cycle, Valerie Solanas’s
SCUM Manifesto
, Andrea Dworkin’s
Right-wing Women
, Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
, Pedro Almodóvar’s
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
, and Coralie Fargeat’s
The Substance
.
How can the arts, particularly the literary arts, serve as tools for liberation and social change? How can writing be an act of defiance against forces of oppression? In this class, we will engage with texts that challenge dominant ideologies, resist oppressive structures, and envision new communities. We will attend to subtle and overt subversion in both the form and content of the works we discuss. The literary and theoretical works we read will provide models for creative intervention in public conversations around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Literary works may include works by Layli Long Soldier, Hala Alyan, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Octavia Butler, Isabel Allende, and others. Theory may include writings by Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and others.
Poetry-ish is a class examining how poetry speaks to, merges with, or embeds itself in other
genres in order to make a multimedia social statement. We will look at the intersections between
craft and criticism, audience and experimentation, history and self-expression. Readings will
move from early examples of hybridity to postmodern experimentation to creative examinations
into such contemporary issues as climate change, A.I., and the structural racism that inspired
Black Lives Matter. Genres include legal treaties, programming code, comics, cinema, opera,
jazz, and of course, poetry. Students will be asked to write three short essays, take turns leading
class discussion, submit one longer research-based project, and engage in various creative and
critical writing exercises throughout the semester. Planned authors include Layli Long Soldier,
William Blake, Franny Choi, JP Howard, Vanessa Anglica Villarreal, Douglas Kearney, Daveed
Diggs, and Langston Hughes.
Required Discussion section for ECON UN1105 Principles of Economics
In this course we will engage with various forms of artistic production (literary, cinematic, pictorial, musical) that have been banned or censored by religious authority, governmental institutions, or by public opinion. While discussing these primary texts we will investigate who gets to censor art, to what ends, and according to which criteria. Who is protected from tasteless, subversive, or obscene art? How do these categories change with time, and from culture to culture?
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.
Basic concepts of electrical engineering. Exploration of selected topics and their application. Electrical variables, circuit laws, nonlinear and linear elements, ideal and real sources, transducers, operational amplifiers in simple circuits, external behavior of diodes and transistors, first order RC and RL circuits. Digital representation of a signal, digital logic gates, flipflops. A lab is an integral part of the course. Required of electrical engineering and computer engineering majors.
Prerequisites: MATH UN1101 or the equivalent Vectors in dimensions 2 and 3, complex numbers and the complex exponential function with applications to differential equations, Cramers rule, vector-valued functions of one variable, scalar-valued functions of several variables, partial derivatives, gradients, surfaces, optimization, the method of Lagrange multipliers. (SC)
Prerequisites: some basic background in calculus or be concurrently taking MATH UN1101 Calculus I. The accompanying laboratory is PHYS UN1291-UN1292 The course will use elementary concepts from calculus. The accompanying laboratory is PHYS UN1291 - UN1292. Basic introduction to the study of mechanics, fluids, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, optics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, and nuclear physics.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the principles of American politics and governance. Upon completing the class, students should be more informed about the American political process and better able to explain contemporary American political phenomena, as well as being more likely to engage with politics and elections.
Prerequisites: one semester of calculus. Designed for students who desire a strong grounding in statistical concepts with a greater degree of mathematical rigor than in STAT W1111. Random variables, probability distributions, pdf, cdf, mean, variance, correlation, conditional distribution, conditional mean and conditional variance, law of iterated expectations, normal, chi-square, F and t distributions, law of large numbers, central limit theorem, parameter estimation, unbiasedness, consistency, efficiency, hypothesis testing, p-value, confidence intervals, maximum likelihood estimation. Serves as the pre-requisite for ECON W3412.
Prerequisites: MATH UN1102 and MATH UN1201 or the equivalent Multiple integrals, Taylor's formula in several variables, line and surface integrals, calculus of vector fields, Fourier series. (SC)
Prerequisites: This course will use elementary concepts from calculus. Students should therefore have had some high school calculus, or be concurrently enrolled in MATH UN1101. Taken with accompanying lab PHYS UN1291- PHYS UN1292, the sequence PHYS UN1201- PHYS UN1202 satisfies requirements for medical school. Electricity, magnetism, optics, and modern physics.
Prerequisites: FREN BC1001, BC1002, BC1102, C1101 and C1102, or an appropriate score on the placement test. Further development of oral and written communication skills. Readings in French literature.
Advanced work in language skills. Readings in French literature. Prerequisites: FREN BC1203 or an appropriate score on the placement test.
NOTE: This course
does not
fulfill the Columbia College and GS language requirement.
Prerequisites: (MATH UN1101 and MATH UN1102). Vectors in dimensions 2 and 3, vector-valued functions of one variable, scalar-valued functions of several variables, partial derivatives, gradients, optimization, Lagrange multipliers, double and triple integrals, line and surface integrals, vector calculus. This course is an accelerated version of MATH UN1201 - MATH UN1202. Students taking this course may not receive credit for MATH UN1201 and MATH UN1202.
Prerequisites: (see "Guidance for First-Year Students" in the Bulletin). The second term of this course may not be taken without the first. Multivariable calculus and linear algebra from a rigorous point of view. Recommended for mathematics majors. Fulfills the linear algebra requirement for the major. (SC)
An introduction to the language of classical and modern Arabic literature. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Prerequisites: First Year Arabic I or instructor permission. An introduction to the language of classical and modern Arabic literature. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Required discussion section for POLS UN1201: INTRO TO AMERICAN POLITICS
Prerequisites: ITAL W1221 or sufficient fluency to satisfy the instructor. Corequisites: Recommended: ITAL V1201-V/W1202 or ITAL W1201-W1202. Conversation courses may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or fulfill major or concentration requirements. Intensive practice in the spoken language, assigned topics for class discussions, and oral reports.