What can literature teach us about politics? How can fiction inform our understanding of real life and lived experience? Can literature have an impact on political thought or play a role in shaping the formation of a state? This course will consider such questions through close readings of political theory together with literary texts from around the globe to explore how artists reflect—or reject—ideology and its implementation. Students will learn how to assess artistic responses to political imperatives and, in turn, discuss the implications and influences that art and politics have upon one another. From Plato to Putin, the course will examine concepts such as the nation state, violence, authority, religion, race, gender, and environmental concerns. Students will engage with classic texts as well as lesser-known works to trace the recurrence of political ideas—and anxieties surrounding them—across time, culture, and genre. By the end of the course, students should be able to identify and define specific lines of political thought, as well as the mechanisms of their expression in literary texts.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
. What makes a play alive? Often a playwright is surprised into their strongest work. The practices of experimentation and analysis, curiosity and audacity lead to new possibilities. Students will read and respond to plays, identifying elements and strategies, and each week bring in fragments and scenes written in response to weekly prompts. By the middle of the semester, students will choose the piece that feels the most viable and develop it into what in most cases will be a thirty page play. NOTE: Playwriting I (ENGL BC3113) is NOT a prerequisite, and students need not have written a play before.
Material behavior and constitutive relations. Mechanical properties of metals and cement composites. Structural materials. Modern construction materials. Experimental investigation of material properties and behavior of structural elements including fracture, fatigue, bending, torsion, buckling.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
. Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction required. Conference hours to be arranged.
Prerequisites: Designed for but not limited to sophomores; enrollment beyond 60 at the discretion of the instructor.
Modern Architecture in the World is an introduction to different arenas in which architecture’s modern condition has been disputed in the last two centuries across different geographies. The course will address significant transformations in the built environment as well as the forms of practice, epistemic frameworks, and ideologies that led them. It will also attend to the forms of labor and economies that engendered new structures and organizations of space, the material resources and industries mobilized in their construction, the identities and forms of power they represented and imposed, the manifold embodiments that they hosted and shaped, the diverse socialites and politics they supported, and the ecologies they negotiated.
The course is organized around a number of key themes, with each class covering episodes spanning the whole period under consideration, up until the present. In this way, it will question the existence of a single line of development, a master narrative, or a teleological line of progress and will highlight instead the multiple, simultaneous, conflicting, and branching genealogies unfolding throughout the period. Students will gain knowledge of key buildings, artifacts, trends, and schools as they relate to those genealogies.
Each lecture will emphasize contending and shifting positions across geographies within the arenas explored, understanding hegemonic trends as well as dissenting positions. While different locations around the world will be highlighted in each class, the course positions modern architecture in the world by privileging an exploration of the cultural and material networks and hierarchies characteristic of the period—with attention to colonialism, coloniality, migration, resource extraction, and war, among others.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
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Section 1 (taught by Weike Wang):
Flash Fiction Workshop.
This course is an intensive writing workshop focused on the art of flash fiction—stories told in under 1,500 words. The workshop will emphasize experimentation, encouraging students to push the boundaries of traditional storytelling by playing with form, language, and perspective. Readings will include works originally written in English as well as those in translation, offering a broad view of global approaches to flash fiction. Discussions will cover the mechanics of storytelling on a compressed scale, including structure, character development, point of view, dialogue, and style. Authors will include Cheever, Couto, Hempel, Davis, and Wang, and through these readings, students will explore the structural possibilities of the short form, the role of voice, and the ways in which brevity can intensify narrative impact. The class will examine how compression, omission, and implication create resonance in fiction.Each student will write and workshop three original short pieces, receiving detailed feedback from peers and the instructor. The goal is to develop a keen sense of how the economy of language can create depth and complexity in fiction.
Section 2 (taught by Idra Novey):
Old Wolves and New Grandmothers.
Once upon a time there was a fiction workshop and each student in the workshop conjured a new role for the animal in their grandmother’s bed. In this workshop, we’ll experiment with how the tone and iconic figures of fairy tales may provide a way into a new work of fiction, though not necessarily a way out. We’ll talk about myriad ways to subvert the expected meaning of the wolf and the wicked in our own time, and what new subtexts may be lurking in the shared stories we reconsider at different points in our lives. “You shift time and location to see what holds true, and why or why not,” novelist Helen Oyeyemi says of the allure of fairy tales as a place of departure for a new work of fiction. We’ll discuss work from writers drawn to subvert and repurpose fairy tales, including Helen Oyeyemi, Barbara Comyns, and Cristina Rivera Garza.
This course is a study of the development of American political ideas, through critical analysis of the writings of intellectuals and political leaders from the American Founding to the present. As our central theme, we will focus on the traditions of American Political Thought (APT) as simultaneously theorizing freedom and liberty on the one hand, and intense, often violent forms of domination on the other, especially domination on the basis of race. Consequently, we will devote time to both classic readings in APT (the Founders, Tocqueville, Lincoln, etc.) and to multiple strands of US political thinking that challenge the dominant narratives of APT. In analyzing the competing traditions of equality and inequality in theory, we will also explore the connections between this theory and practices of equality and inequality.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
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Muriel Rukeyser remarked that “American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict.” Indeed, culture worldwide is in conflict. This course will explore “the necessity of poetry” from a phrase by Adrienne Rich. It is organized to ensure the development of new work and further study of poetic practice for committed student writers. We will examine mostly contemporary poetry using specific poetry collections from poets as varied as John Keene, Rosa Alcalá, Megan Fernandes, Harryette Mullen, Ilya Kaminsky and Emily Lee Luan as well as ancestors: Rich, June Jordan, Gertrude Stein. In the classroom, student poems and ideas about poetics are shared, questioned, and critiqued. These selected readings explore different strands of poetics that will inform the in-class and assigned prompts allowing student writers to expand their interrogation of the genre and its many forms. You will read, listen, write, and make your own voice seen and heard.
Prerequisites: POLS V1501 or POLS V1601 or the equivalent. Admission by application through the Barnard department only. Enrollment limited to 16 students. Barnard syllabus. Examination of causes and consequences of major current problems in international security. Topics will focus on state power dynamics: the rise of China and the reemergence of the Russian military, challenges facing NATO with the rise of populism and authoritarianism in the West, nuclear deterrence and proliferation, cyber conflict and information war, and chemical and biological weapons.
Prerequisites: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Priority is given to Film Studies majors/concentrations in order of class seniority. Corequisites: (Since this is a Film course, it does not count as a writing course for English majors with a Writing Concentration.)
This course is ideal for writers of their FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD screenplays. The first several weeks will focus on STORY: What it is, what it isn’t, how to recognize the difference. How to find your own individual stories that nobody else in the universe can tell.
From there we will make the transition to the highly individualized techniques, the strengths and limitations, the dynamics of telling a SCREEN STORY; what to leave in, what to leave out. As Michelangelo puts it—starting with a block of marble and chipping away everything that isn’t David. Through studies of existing screenplays and films in coordination with and hands-on writing exercises which we will share in class, we will develop our skills in all aspects of screenwriting; building fascinating characters, dialogue, story construction (The BIG PICTURE) and scene construction (The Small Picture)
Perfection is not the goal; but rather it is to be able to say truly at the end of each day’s writing, “I did the best I could with what I had at the time. (Phillip Roth quoting heavyweight champion Joe Louis)
Prerequisite: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. First priority enrollment is given to senior Film Studies majors/concentrations. For more information on this semester's visiting instructor from the Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellowship Program, visit: https://athenacenter.barnard.edu/arff
This screenwriting seminar provides students an in-depth understanding of the short form which will help them turn their ideas into a short film script (up to 10 pages in length). With a focus on studying contemporary international short films students will learn to write their own short screenplay, as well as learn to give and receive feedback and receive tips on revising their scripts. Homework assignments will include watching films, reading short stories, writing exercises and reading screenplays.
Prerequisites: VIAR R1000 and VIAR R2100. (Formerly R3210) Course provides the experience of employing a wide range of figurative applications that serve as useful tools for the contemporary artist. Non-Western applications, icon painting, and the European/American traditions are presented. Individual and group critiques. Portfolio required at end. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.
Methods of structural analysis. Trusses, arches, cables, frames; influence lines; deflections; force method; displacement method; computer applications.
Open only to undergraduates.
This course will introduce you to principles of effective public speaking and debate, and provide practical opportunities to use these principles in structured speaking situations. You will craft and deliver speeches, engage in debates and panel discussions, analyze historical and contemporary speakers, and reflect on your own speeches and those of your classmates. You will explore and practice different rhetorical strategies with an emphasis on information, persuasion and argumentation. For each speaking assignment, you will go through the speech-making process, from audience analysis, purpose and organization, to considerations of style and delivery. The key criteria in this course are content, organization, and adaptation to the audience and purpose. While this is primarily a performance course, you will be expected to participate extensively as a listener and critic, as well as a speaker.
Design criteria for varied structural applications, including buildings and bridges; design of elements using steel, concrete, masonry, wood, and other materials.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
. In this workshop, we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language– the language of our highest attention and freedom– shared between reader and writer, and consider the metaphysics and motivations for making meaning and making it our own. In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic explorations with others focusing on contemplative practices and our writing process. Readings will range diversely through eras and modes including works, among others, by Sun Buer, Audre Lorde, Hannah Emerson, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Mónica de la Torre.
Corequisites: CIEN E3125. Introduction to software for structural analysis and design with lab. Applications to the design of structural elements and connections.
What is time travel, really? We can use a machine or walk through a secret door. Take a pill or fall asleep and wake up in the future. But when we talk about magic machines and slipstreams and Rip Van Winkle, we are also talking about memory, chronology, and narrative. In this seminar, we will approach time travel as a way of understanding "the Fourth Dimension" in fiction. Readings will range from the speculative to the strange, to the realism of timelines, flashbacks, and shifts in perspective. Coursework will include short, bi-weekly writing assignments, a completed short story, and a timeinflected adaptation.
Capstone design project in civil engineering. This project integrates structural, geotechnical and environmental/water resources design problems with construction management tasks and sustainability, legal and other social issues. Project is completed in teams, and communication skills are stressed. Outside lecturers will address important current issues in engineering practice. Every student in the course will be exposed with equal emphasis to issues related to geotechnical engineering, water resources / environmental engineering, structural engineering, and construction engineering and management.
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
--Mel Brooks
"Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the
End." --Sid Caesar
"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." --E.B. White
"What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke." --Steve Martin
"Patty Marx is the best teacher at Columbia University."
--Patty Marx
O
Topics in western music from the Classical Era to the 20th Century, focusing on the development of musical style and thought, and on analysis of selected works. Pre-req: Music Theory II or permission of instructor.
Prerequisites: completion of the language requirement in French or the equivalent. Conversation on contemporary French subjects based on readings in current popular French periodicals.
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora.
Data types and structures: arrays, stacks, singly and doubly linked lists, queues, trees, sets, and graphs. Programming techniques for processing such structures: sorting and searching, hashing, garbage collection. Storage management. Rudiments of the analysis of algorithms. Taught in Java. Note: Due to significant overlap, students may receive credit for only one of the following three courses: COMS W3134, COMS W3136, COMS W3137.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
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In this section of creative nonfiction, we will explore the essay. We will consider the essay in the original and most open-ended sense of the term—coming from French, essai, meaning “attempt." This type of essay is also known as a personal essay.
The personal essay is a paradoxical form. It makes rules and then breaks them. It announces itself and then slips out the backdoor. It is a mischief-maker and the successful essayist remembers that, remembers to stay playful. And that's what our workshop will be about. As we attempt to write and share our stories, let’s ask one another: “what’s the fun of this story?” Let’s urge each other to see how can that fun remain, adhere, and grow through the drafting process.
Most of all, let's use the essay to explore our relationship to writing overall. Phillip Lopate writes that the essay “sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue—a friendship.” Seeing the sentence as a set of relationships, one tied to our human relations, we will write and revise with the hope of fostering an enduring relationship with the page.
Writers should expect to workshop at least twice, working toward a final portfolio of 15-20 double-spaced pages. We will read as we write including essays by James Baldwin, Jo Ann Beard, Margo Jefferson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Phillip Lopate.
What does it mean to think materially? To
use
color? These are the questions that will guide this foundational course designed for painters, ranging from beginner to advanced, who want to develop their technique and material thought process.
We will begin with a focus on color, using the Albers method to learn first from experience, developing an eye for color, before we delve into color theory and color philosophy. The creative eye for color will aid us as we learn the ins and outs of acrylic painting, oil painting, the mediums, historical techniques, and associated theoretical concerns in
how
something is painted. Some of the class will be spent painting observationally, working on our ability to see creatively and translate experience into material. Many of the projects will be self-directed in subject or approach, whether you consider yourself a staunch realist or pure abstract artist, focusing mostly on the material language of the painting. Students can expect to cover the basics of a studio practice, such as stretching canvases, building a palette, developing a range of techniques, as well as gaining a critical eye for material decisions and how to realize their vision.
As 20th century literary traditions prove increasingly ill-equipped to capture the realities of 21st century life, readers look towards fictional worlds for inspiration and escape from the political chaos of day-to-day existence. When we write we shape the world, because the worlds we imagine impact the world we inhabit. But what does it mean for a writer to 'build a world?' What obligations does the creator of a fiction have to readers who inhabit a world they wish to escape? Are the worlds we build for escape always political? Can we build another world as an avenue to better understand this one?
In this seminar we will explore the concept of "world building" by looking at a variety of work from authors who are known for their immense secondary worlds (such as J.R.R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, or Octavia Butler) but also at fiction that applies techniques of both immersion and politics in ways that may subvert our understanding of what it means to 'create.' Writers discussed are as wide ranging as Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, all the way up to contemporary writers whose works populate our best loved Independent bookstores: Helen Oyeyemi, Victor LaValle, Ted Chiang, Marlon James, Jeff VanderMeer, Colson Whitehead, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexandra Kleeman, or Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
On her “Record of Freshman Interest” form, Zora Neale Hurston, Barnard class of 1928, wrote in response to the question of what vocation or profession she had in mind after graduation, “I have had some small success as a writer and wish above all to succeed at it. Either teaching or social work would be interesting, but consolation prizes.” No consolation prize was necessary as Hurston became one of American and African American literature’s finest writers, America’s first Black anthropologist, and a Black feminist ancestor and icon. A deep dive into Hurston’s work and writing life, this course reads Hurston as a narrative stylist and theorist in multiple genres: as poet, essayist, writer of short stories, novelist, playwright, folklorist, and memorist. The goal of this class is to read Hurston closely and widely and to identify and examine her aesthetic philosophy and stylistic choices as one of the first African American women able to have a writing “career.” We will concentrate on her work from the 1920s through the 1930s, when she was at Barnard, and a leading figure in the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance.
In her time, Hurston was adamant about writing for and about people like herself; she saw ordinary black people as keepers of a rich culture that should be celebrated and shared. In this spirit, the assignments for this course will lead to final digital projects that can be shared with the Barnard community in anticipation of the centennial of Hurston’s matriculation and graduation from Barnard (1925-1928). We will partner with the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard, as well as Barnard Archives; we will engage resources at Barnard, such as Hurston-focused issues of
The Scholar and Feminist Online
, and other institutions, such as Columbia’s Rare Book Collection, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library of Congress. No prior experience with digital tools is necessary.
In this course we will explore the possibilities of scientific language and ideas both as literature and in literature. The texts we will consider will range from science fiction, to writings by scientists, to nature writing, and much else. We will also consider works that might at first appear unrelated to scientific thinking, such as folk tales, mysteries, and fantastical stories. Special attention will be paid to the special effects generated by scientific language when it appears near other styles of expression. Students will also be responsible for four short creative assignments inspired by the readings, as well as a brief in-class presentation.
Shakespeare's plays as theatrical events. Differing performance spaces, acting traditions, directorial frames, theatre practices, performance theories, critical studies, cultural codes, and historical conventions promote differing modes of engagement with drama in performance. We will explore Shakespeare's plays in the context of actual and possible performance from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.
Performance practices, historical commentaries, and creative theories that focus, but not exclusively, on 1660 to 1790. These include re-imagined revivals, cross-cultural adaptations, transnational perspectives, and inventive investigations from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. In our seminar, we will investigate how people often think of themselves and others in terms of group identifications, which typically rely upon unexamined stereotypes. We will explore how dramatists create characters who not only play predictable roles but also play with these roles, often adapting them as well as adopting them. This enables dramatists to use inherited conventions to explore the realms of individual agency and social change. Playwrights may include William Wycherley, George Etheredge, Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, William Congreve, George Farquhar, Susannah Centlivre, John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Bertolt Brecht, Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Biyi Bandele, and Tanika Gupta.
From love to anger to disappointment to hope, political activism mobilizes emotions towards certain ends but also generates new affective states and feelings along the way. This advanced seminar will familiarize students with feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship on affect, feelings and emotion as intrinsic to politics and as crucial for understanding how political thought and action unfold in contingent and often unexpected ways. Mixing theoretical and cultural texts with case studies, we will look at how affect permeates structures of power and domination, embodiment and identity, and collective activist projects concerned with gender and sexual liberation. Students will have an opportunity to read theories of affect as well as to “read” activist movements
for
affect by working with archival documents (such as zines, manifestos, and movement ephemera) and other primary sources (such as memoir, photography and documentary film).
This course is for the intermediate advanced dancer. Material presented will focus on healthy anatomical alignment in barre work, extended combinations in the center, fostering personal artistic expression, and integrating improvisation in combinations with the ballet vocabulary. Clarification, analysis and repetition are fundamental elements for a sound technique of any dancer and are the foundation of this course. Center work will include attention to shaping adagio work, multiple turns in the large poses, batterie, and extended grand allegro.
This course is designed for developing singers. Group vocalizing, learning of songs and individual workshop performances are aimed at improving the students technical skill and the elements necessary to create a meaningful musical and dramatic experience. Attention to text, subtext, emotional and psychological aspects of a piece and the performers relationship to the audience are included in the work. Repertoire is predominantly in English and comes from both classical and popular traditions Individual coaching sessions are available with the class accompanist and help strengthen the students confidence and skill. The class culminates with an in-class performance.
Vocal exercises and exploration of wide-ranging repertoires, styles, and languages of the Western European song tradition. The rich variety of English, French, Italian and German poetry and music from the Baroque period through the Twentieth Century allows the student to experience both the music and the cultural environment of each of these styles. Attention is given both to meaning oftext and musical interpretation. Individual coaching sessions are available with the class accompanist and help strengthen the students confidence and skill. The class culminates with an in-class performance.
This course serves as a continuation of BIOL2500 R for Scientists. The course will meet weekly. Students will explore a range of methods and resources used by contemporary computational biologists. These include advanced statistical modeling approaches, manipulating genomic and spatial data, and working in R outside of the RStudio environment (including git, bash, Shiny and high-performance computing). Students will have opportunities to explore diverse biological and statistical R packages in the context of homework assignments, and will analyze a dataset of their own choosing for a semester project.
This course is for the advanced dancer. Material presented will focus on healthy anatomical alignment in barre work, extended combinations in the center, fostering personal artistic expression, and integrating improvisation in combinations with the ballet vocabulary. Clarification, analysis and repetition are fundamental elements for a sound technique of any dancer and are the foundation of this course. Center work will include attention to shaping adagio work, multiple turns in the large poses, batterie, and extended grand allegro.
The beginning of the 20th century in the United States was a time of turbulence: the excitement of a new century mixed with the flurry of voices trying to define “What makes an American, American.” Theatre reflected and inflected discussions, arguments, debates and celebrations of identity and belonging. And, everything was up for debate: morals, religion, sexuality, gender roles, race–all factions clawing towards ideals of citizenship. In this seminar, we will explore early 20th-century American theater as a forum for these debates–plays and performances of all types assert visibility of both issues and bodies, politicizing both in the process. We will begin by looking at the end of the 19th century as the nation engaged with the end of legally enslaving African Americans, the Women’s Suffrage movement gearing up, and the national debates on immigration, morality and religion–and all made their way to the stages of theater and Performance in the United States. Topics in this seminar will include The Harlem Renaissance, The Little Theatre Movement, Comstock/Censorship Laws, Broadway Fare, Popular Entertainment, Female Playwrights, Queer Theatre, Popular Music (to name a few more than “a few”).
Variations
class is a course for the intermediate to advanced dancer. As in all other ballet classes, there will be a focus on correct physical alignment, proper technique and musicality. The added challenges in this course will be the pointe shoe technique, creative choreographic choices, and musical phrasing. The class will include variations based on works ranging from Petipa to Balanchine to today’s choreographers. Dancers will explore personalizing already known works, pushing the boundaries of the pointe shoe, examining how choreography has evolved and developing the stamina required to execute a full variation. Learning material rapidly while paying attention to the stylistic demands of each choreographer’s works and being able to shift from one stylistic choice to another is simply expected.
The objective of this class is to examine a given topic and relate it to a number of literary texts. Students will examine a variety of literary genres and to an equally wide variety of cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts.
Jacques Derrida was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and his impact on literary studies was enormously significant. The objective of this course is to take stock of Derrida’s contribution to literature, and to do so by assessing the intricate relations he establishes between literature, philosophy, economic and political theory, gender studies, translation studies, postcolonial theory, and theology. The course is divided into six parts. Part 1 introduces Derrida’s approach to ‘deconstruction,’ particularly as regards his engagement with the fundamental concepts of Western thought and the importance he confers upon the notion of ‘writing’ itself. Part 2 examines Derrida’s autobiographical texts wherein he positions himself as a subject for deconstruction, interrogating his own gender, his sense of being an organic, creaturely life-form, the relationship he has to his own language, and the matter of his identity as French, but also as Algerian, and Jewish. While the majority of the Derrida texts we will be reading are excerpts from larger works or short essays and interviews, in this section we will read a full-length text –
Monolingualism of the Other
– so that we can trace Derrida’s train of thought from beginning to end. In Part 3 we will use an interview conducted by Derek Attridge, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” as a template for thinking about Derrida’s relation to literature, and in Part 4 we will read our second full-length text by Derrida, namely
Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money
, an in-depth analysis of a prose poem by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Part 5 considers an aspect of Derrida’s work that reveals the extent of his embrace of provisional, in-between positions for thought in general, and for literary texts in particular, namely translation. For deconstruction is keenly invested in words beginning with ‘trans’: transposition, transplant, trans-valuation, and indeed trans-gender. Translation provides Derrida with a scenario whereby crossings and transits can be imagined – for literary texts, and for identities that wish to remain un-determined by fixed poles or normative values. The course finishes with an assessment of Derrida’s reflections on death, mourning, and the matter of leaving a legacy. In Part 6, we therefore read more of the essay “Living On,” and also Derrida’s final interview, “Learning to Live, F
Since the beginning of the movement that would become Christianity, Jews have occupied a unique – and uniquely fraught – position in the Christian imagination. Why did so few of
the very Jews to whom Jesus preached accept him as their messiah? Why, as the Church grew in wealth and influence, did Jews continue to live in Christian communities, and what was their proper place in Christian society? In our course, we will read early and medieval Christian narratives about Jews that are, in many ways, an attempt to answer these questions – dark imaginative visions of Jews as child-killers, cannibals, and devil worshippers. We will use narrative, psychological, and literary theory as tools to analyze these tales and to make sense of their complicated and continuing legacy.
Worldmuse Ensemble delves into compelling music from many genres such as world music, gospel, classical--old and new. We perform without a conductor, increasing awareness and interaction among ourselves and our audience. We collaboratively integrate music, dance, and theatre traditions (masks etc.). For experienced singers, and instrumentalists and dancers who sing.
Whats in a walk? This course undertakes an interdisciplinary study of a fundamental human activity, focusing on philosophical and aesthetic treatments of human locomotion. After first examining the history of walking as a social, economic, religious, and political activity, the course will concentrate on urban walking and how it has been represented in text and image from ancient times to the present. Topics will include walking as introspection, escape, recreation, and discovery; walking and gender; the psychogeography of walking, walking in the city, etc. Readings from Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Thoreau, Whitman, Joyce, Woolf, OHara, De Certeau, and many others. Images from film, painting, and photography to be provided by student research. Ditto for musical strolls.
Discussion section for SOCI BC3248: Race, Ethnicity, and Education in the US
This course undertakes a dialectical approach to reading and thinking about the history of dramatic theatre, interrogating the ways writing inflects, and is inflected by, the material dynamics of performance in the modern era. Course undertakes careful study of the practices of performance, and of the sociocultural, economic, political, and aesthetic conditions animating representative performances in theatres globally; course will also emphasize development of important critical concepts for the analysis of drama, theatre, and performance. Topics include the sociology of theatre, the impact of print on conceptions of performance, representing gender and race, the politics of intercultural performance, and the dynamics of emerging forms and critical practices of performance analysis. Writing: 2-3 papers; Reading: 1-2 plays, critical and historical reading per week; final examination. Fulfills one (of two) lecture requirements for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors.
Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years.
Following Foucault’s formulation of a history of the present—a genealogy of how we got here—this course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicises the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism’s legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made.
The path towards trans’ contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose “binary logic” trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender “really are”. Trans people
do
have a history. And it is longer than transphobes would like us to believe. But it is not a pleasant or necessarily radical history. It is also not solely the history of people who are trans. Rather, this history is plural and fractious, and is a history of everyone who has ever existed in a world where gender and sex are operating concepts.
C programming language and Unix systems programming. Also covers Git, Make, TCP/IP networking basics, C++ fundamentals.
Geoffrey Chaucer, “the father of English literature,” was also the first known English reader of Dante – generally regarded as the greatest poet in a modern European language – and the question of how to respond to the legacy of his powerful predecessor left its mark on many of Chaucer’s works. Was “Chaucer,” the self-identified hero of The Canterbury Tales, based on “Dante,” the poet pilgrim who, in the Commedia, claims to have personally visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise? And if so, as seems likely, what do we make of Chaucer’s rejection of Dante’s “beautiful style,” and his comparative emphasis on irony, incompleteness, and bodily humor? Reading these foundational authors side-by-side sheds unexpected light on each. Could it be that Chaucer was Dante’s canniest reader? In this
seminar we will read generous extracts from Chaucer in the original Middle English, as well as the Commedia of Dante, and additional short texts, in modern English translation.
E3156: a design problem in materials science or metallurgical engineering selected jointly by the student and a professor in the department. The project requires research by the student, directed reading, and regular conferences with the professor in charge. E3157: completion of the research, directed reading, and conferences, culminating in a written report and an oral presentation to the department.
This class is a close reading of postcolonial plays, both as they form a recognizable canon, and as counters to it. Through a grounding in postcolonial theory, students will explore how the colonial encounter leaves a lasting impact on language and performance. How do these playwrights tackle questions of authenticity, influence, inspiration and agency? What stories do they adapt, translate or reimagine? Also, we read in equal measure male and female playwrights, attending to the ways in which power and authority are negotiated by them. This class looks both at plays that are seminal to postcolonial writing and also newer ones that unsettle the position of the greats. Do we then understand postcolonialism as a historically bound literary trend or an ongoing process of exploration? Fundamentally we ask, in our efforts to decolonize the theatre, how do we find new ways or reading? Course fulfills lecture/seminar in drama studies, theatre studies, performance studies requirement for Theatre major.
This course examines Asian American experience through the lens of theatre and performance. These performances are often critical sites where members of the community preserve their cultural legacies and negotiate American racial politics. By discussing representative works by Asian American playwrights, performance artists, and filmmakers, we will cover the following topics: key events in Asian American history; immigration and citizenship; identity and community formation; intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality; generational differences in Asian American culture; trauma and memory; U.S. imperialism and social justice. This course examines Asian American experience through the lens of theatre and performance. These performances are often critical sites where members of the community preserve their cultural legacies and negotiate American racial politics. By discussing representative works by Asian American playwrights, performance artists, and filmmakers, we will cover the following topics: key events in Asian American history; immigration and citizenship; identity and community formation; intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality; generational differences in Asian American culture; trauma and memory; U.S. imperialism and social justice.
This is the fieldwork component for the proposed course described below.
Using the overarching theme of “Computer Science in the City,” this course will build participants’ knowledge of pedagogical methods for the teaching of computer science while exploring ways to use the City as a resource for teaching and learning. Course participants will have an opportunity to gain an understanding of concepts and practices appropriate for K-12 students as they explore the New York State Learning Standards.
As we explore the multitude of opportunities for teaching computer science in New York City, we will also take into consideration the diversity of the students that course participants teach or are preparing to teach. We will examine the social and political contexts that learning and teaching happen in, and consider the implications of these contexts for different groups of students. As participants develop an understanding of what it means to be literate in computer science, they will explore ways to make computer science education more meaningful and accessible to all students by infusing it with students’ daily and cultural experiences. We will explore notions of social justice and the implications for teaching computer science for social justice by addressing barriers to engagement, persistence, and achievement in mathematics.
Working in teams to plan for Computer Science Enrichment lessons, participants will explore ways to teach computer science using a constructivist approach while being responsive to the demands of the NYS Next Generation Standards, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), growth mindsets, critiques of growth mindsets, and tenets of justice and caring. Participants will also have an opportunity to build positive computer science mindsets for themselves and for K-12 students as they engage in experiential learning, plan for Computer Science Enrichment sessions that incorporate ways to visualize and communicate computer science content and skills, and evaluate the efficacy of their planning and teaching in light of their students’ learning outcomes.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Enlightenment colloquium we will look at English and European imaginative and intellectual life during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, writers tried in new ways to reconcile the tensions between reason and religion. Categories of thought that underlie our world today were taking shape: secularity, progress, the public and the private, individual rights, religious tolerance. Writers articulated principles of equality in an era of slavery. Literary forms like the novel, which emerges into prominence during this period, express in irreducibly complex ways these and other changes. In this intensive course, we will study from multiple angles a variety of authors that may include Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Spinoza, Lafayette, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Voltaire, Fielding, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, and Wollstonecraft, among others.
Love dominates, according to received opinion, the literature of the Middle Ages, a period that indeed saw the emergence of courtly romance and Troubadour poetry. But medieval love literature is not all brave knights pining for haughty ladies. Love, for medieval writers, could be sacred or transgressive, irrational or philosophical, transcendent or debasing – and often it was several of these things at once. On the other hand, in a time when everything claims to be about love, one may sometimes be tempted to wonder if nothing is, and the topic certainly provided a space for medieval writers to explore a number of related themes such as gender, class, cultural difference, nature, and truth. In this course we will consider a selection of these rich and paradoxical texts, as we read in a variety of
genres by authors across Europe including but not limited to: Abelard and Heloise, Ibn Hazm, Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Christine de Pisan.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. Critical and historical introduction to selected comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances by Shakespeare. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students.
Course surveys the wide range of genres and categories addressed by the practice of modern "performance studies"; it introduces a number of performance practices, as well as relevant interdisciplinary methodologies. Students consider live performances as well as a number of mediated works, learning to think critically and creatively about the relation between text, technology, and the body. Course may fill
either
the Theory requirement,
or
one (of two) required courses in dramatic literature/theatre studies/performance studies for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major, but not both.
The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of
Devotions
grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natural world and friendship (Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Henry Vaughan). Robert Burton wrote a book on melancholy, which he kept adding to. Francis Bacon thought a revolution in science could redeem the world. Thomas Browne, a physician as well as writer, tackled the problem of intolerance and religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes thought only a firm (authoritarian?) government could reestablish peace and security, while Gerard Winstanley (a “Leveller”) thought that owning land (and money) was the source of all war and misery. Transgressive women had their own ideas. The Quaker leader Margaret Fell defended women's right to preach. We will read selections from these and other writers, understanding them in their historical context and with a sense of their current resonance.The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of
Devotions
grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natura
This undergraduate course covers deep learning basics, related math and the fundamental theory and application of AI algorithms that are popular in the field of computer graphics. Programming assignments will help students develop GPU programming skills while implementing concepts learned in lectures and readings using deep learning APIs on a GPU cluster. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for colorizing black and white movies is an example. Pre-Requisites: COMS W3157 Advanced Programming, Linear Algebra (UN2010), and Calculus I or higher.
This course is a cross-cultural exploration of the construction of gender through significant landmarks in contemporary literature, from feminist and queer theory perspectives. The course will focus on a range of novels, short stories, essays and poetry written in the twentieth- and the twenty-first century from or about the United States, Europe and the MENA region. Through an examination of these works, alongside seminal works of feminist and queer theory (Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, etc.) we will ask: is it possible to write about a similar issue as represented across texts from different geographical and cultural zones, and how do you do so ethically without either erasing difference or exaggerating it? How do these texts (critical and creative) dismantle the ways we have been taught to evaluate canonical, male-dominated literary histories? Authors will include Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Hanan al-Shaykh, Nawal El Saadawi and Abdellah Taïa.
Love him or hate him—or both, as is more often and more fittingly the case—you must admit that Freud turned the world upside-down. Against the supposed supremacy of rational consciousness, he found the power of the unconscious. At the heart of civilized order, he uncovered ever more sophisticated mechanisms of repression. Where the world saw the march of progress, he saw the death drive. And he discovered all of this through a new invention, a science of narrative, called psychoanalysis. According to this science, we are the stories we tell. And this means that we, our lives, our joys and anxieties, our past and our future, are like any story: always open to interpretation. In this course, we turn this lens back upon psychoanalysis, opening its clinical history and fundamental concepts to critical, literary interpretation. Beginning with Freud but moving beyond him, we will read foundational psychoanalytic texts alongside plays, poetry, novels, short stories, and films that corroborate, complicate, and contest the Freudian framework. We will consider the intrinsically literary qualities of psychoanalysis and, inversely, we will ask what literature, literary criticism, and literary theory gain or lose in this critical relation to psychoanalysis.
Prerequisites: Completion of Music Humanities (or the consent of the instructor) is a pre-requisite for this course. This course explores Parisian musical life during the long nineteenth century, situating musical discourses, institutions, and forms within the broader landscapes of literary and artistic Romanticism. Topics to be considered include: the musical echoes of the Revolution; operatic genres and theaters; the music of the salons; cultures of consumerism and domestic performance; and issues of nationalism and historicism after 1870. Composers to be considered include: Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Massenet, and Debussy. Completion of Music Humanities (or the consent of the instructor) is a pre-requisite for this course.
Philosophers have only interpreted the world, wrote Marx in the
Theses on Feuerbach
: the point is to change it. Perhaps this is the origin of
theory
. In this seminar we will examine theories that both explain the world and help us change it, to make it more peaceable, sustainable, equal, and just.
Our point of departure is therefore Marx and his understanding of equality rooted in economic justice. We will familiarize ourselves with concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation, and explore how they have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformations in a changing world system. Other theorists may include J-J Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon, Eric Williams, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Gayatri Spivak, Vivek Chibber, Achille Mbebe, Kohei Saito, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, Slavov Zizek, and Melinda Cooper. Seminar members are invited to bring examples from texts – poems, novels, art, film, media, and digital culture –that reveal, through their depictions of injustice, what justice might be.
DISCUSSION SECTION FOR AHIS BC3673
This seminar is designed to introduce you to the methods used to discern and describe the cognitive repertoire of novel, understudied, animals. The animals which we will specifically examine in the class are octopuses and cuttlefish. Over the course of the semester you will learn how we define cognitive abilities in humans and examine them in various animal species for modeling and comparison purposes. Each week you will examine one specific ability in humans, a traditional animal model, and a cephalopod. In this manner you will come to understand the historical process of understanding animal cognition, the current state of the literature in at least one area of cephalopod cognition and be capable of proposing a novel experiment as a way to extend our knowledge of that area of cephalopod cognition.
Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore a range of intersecting literary, political, philosophical, and theological issues, including the literary implications of American independence, the status of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson.
Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.
This course considers how Postmodernisms profound distrust of language and narrative transforms the form and function of literature. Writers include Stoppard, Pynchon, Didion, Morrison, Robinson, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Wallace, Ashbery, and Hejinian.
This course will introduce students to the international law of human rights, and give a basic orientation to fundamental issues and controversies. The course has two principal focal points: first, the nuts and bolts of how international law functions in the field of human rights, and second, the value and limitations of legal approaches to a variety of human rights issues. Throughout the course, both theoretical and practical questions will be addressed, including who bears legal duties and who can assert legal claims, how these duties might be enforced, and accountability and remedy for violations. Attention will be given to how international law is made, what sorts of assumptions underlie various legal mechanisms, and how the law works in a variety of contexts.
Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies. Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.
Home to Harlem focuses on the relationship between art, activism and social justice during the Harlem/ New Negro Renaissance. Exploring the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated Harlem in 1920s to 1930s, the course discusses the politics of literary and theatrical production, while exploring the fashioning and performance of New Negro identity through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork. Topics considered include: role of Africa/slavery/the south in New Negro expression, patronage, passing, primitivism/popular culture, black dialect as literary language, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin.