Prerequisites: Open to majors who have fulfilled basic major requirements or written permission of the staff member who will supervise the project. Specialized reading and research projects planned in consultation with members of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures teaching staff.
Prerequisites: Open to majors who have fulfilled basic major requirements or written permission of the staff member who will supervise the project. Specialized reading and research projects planned in consultation with members of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures teaching staff.
Prerequisites: approval prior to registration; see the director of undergraduate studies for details. A creative/scholarly project conducted under faculty supervision.
What kind of teacher would you like to become? What experience, knowledge and opinions regarding learning and teaching a language and language and communication do you bring to class? How can theoretical and practical literature help us augment our personal experiences? How do we plan and execute lesson plans? What role do institutional expectations play? What can we learn from how others teach? How can we ensure to welcome a wide spectrum of students into our classes? What impact has the pandemic on the way we approach teaching? How can we grow as educators through self-reflection, our interactions with colleagues, and through our understanding theoretical and practical knowledge that goes beyond planning the next class?
Collaboratively, we will discuss these and other questions using our concrete experience, practical and theoretical literature, and opportunities for professional development. We will apply our knowledge and create materials together, visit colleagues in other language and reflect on our learning and teaching experience.
Learning Goals: At the end of this class, you will:
be able to understand and use the concept of ‘Backward Design’
have acquired a basis in a spectrum of different research-based perspectives that you can use to decide on the usefulness of pedagogical strategies in a given situation.
be familiar with the basic terminology as well as the most relevant sources for the field of foreign language pedagogy
have familiarity with applying theory to practice by designing classroom activities you will be able to use in your class
have started to develop strategies for continuous reflection and deepening of pedagogical practices (through discussion, observations, journals)
take first steps to developing your own teaching philosophy statement
Prerequisite: Successful completion of URBS UN2200 Introduction to GIS Methods, or equivalent with instructor permission.
With the veritable explosion of urban data alongside the continued proliferation of new tools for its consideration, this course allows students to develop specialized approaches to spatial analysis while introducing a series of common advanced techniques and nuanced methodological questions. Aimed at covering a variety of topics with immediate relevance to urbanism in practice and in research, the course operates with a two-fold mission: (1) to critically discuss the theories, concepts, and research methods involved in spatial analysis and (2) to learn the techniques necessary for engaging those theories and deploying those methods. The class will work to meet this mission with a dedicated focus on the urban environment and the spatial particularities and relationships that arise from the urban context.
Among others, this course takes as a foundational premise that spatial analysis within geographic information systems is an incredibly powerful and double-edged weapon: it provides both the methods for answering complex spatial questions and the means for effectively communicating the results. Like any other weapon it can serve many ends, and as such an advanced course in spatial analysis must frame its use within the developing discourse on professional practice and responsibility.
The course is designed with a combination format. Early weeks are predominantly lecture-style presentations supplemented with discussion and technical demonstration and exercises. Students are expected to complete these exercises outside of class (as homework), bringing their questions to our discussion. The latter half of the course is a project-based seminar. Seminar-style presentation and discussion will rely heavily on student participation and preparation to consider the variety of spatial methods available and their implications on urban research and intervention. Woven throughout the semester is the development of a self-driven research project, through which students will engage and compare the methodological advantages and disadvantages of several assumptions, approaches, analyses, and datasets.
Genealogies of Feminism:
Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.
Prerequisites: GREK V1201 and V1202, or their equivalent. Since the content of the course changes from year to year, it may be taken in consecutive years.
Prerequisites: LATN V3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.
Introductory course is for individuals with an interest in medical physics and other branches of radiation science. Topics include basic concepts, nuclear models, semi-empirical mass formula, interaction of radiation with matter, nuclear detectors, nuclear structure and instability, radioactive decay process and radiation, particle accelerators, and fission and fusion processes and technologies.
A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.
Course Description
This interdisciplinary course explores both the rights of Indigenous people in settler colonies as well as the complex historical and theoretical relationship between human rights and settler colonialism. We will pursue three lines of inquiry. The first critically explores how central political concepts of the international state system—sovereignty, property, territory, self-determination—entwine the histories of settler colonialism and human rights. The second charts the rise and mechanisms of the international Indigenous rights movement, in particular its activity at the United Nations leading to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and its contributions to ongoing debates on environmental and climate justice, group rights, natural resources and territorial autonomy, and cultural rights. The third unit interrogates settler state responses to the movement for Indigenous human rights, such as cooptation, recognition, and apology.
Through readings drawn from history, ethnography, political and critical theory, international relations, Native studies, law, and documents produced by intergovernmental organizations and NGOs, we will explore and deepen the tensions between human rights as a theory and practice and the political lives and aspirations of Indigenous peoples and activists. What technologies of rule—such as residential school systems and property law—do settler colonial states deploy to dispossess Indigenous peoples? How have Indigenous peoples used the international human rights regime to mobilize against such dispossession? How have these states resisted the global Indigenous rights movement? And can the human rights regime, rooted in the international state system, meaningfully contribute to anticolonial movements in liberal settler colonies? While we will touch on settler colonialism as it manifests around the globe, the course’s geographical focus will be on North America.
Course objectives
Throughout this course, you will:
Develop a historically-informed understanding of both international indigenous rights and settler colonialism as idea, practice, institution, and discourse;
Place the literature on human rights and settler colonialism into critical conversation in order to deepen existing conceptual problems and generate new ones;
Identify the main arguments in theoretical texts, legal and policy documents, and public debates
The biophysics of computation: modeling biological neurons, the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron, modeling channel conductances and synapses as memristive systems, bursting neurons and central pattern generators, I/O equivalence and spiking neuron models. Information representation and neural encoding: stimulus representation with time encoding machines, the geometry of time encoding, encoding with neural circuits with feedback, population time encoding machines. Dendritic computation: elements of spike processing and neural computation, synaptic plasticity and learning algorithms, unsupervised learning and spike time-dependent plasticity, basic dendritic integration. Projects in MATLAB.
This course explors the principal modes, media, and contexts of visual culture in Japanese Buddhist history. Through the analysis of selected case studies, the course examines of the modalities of perception, materiality, and reception that distinguish the form and function of visual media in Japanese Buddhist contexts. Students are expected to have completed preliminary coursework in relevant areas of East Asian history, religion, or art history.
Prerequisites: genetics or molecular biology. The course covers techniques currently used to explore and manipulate gene function and their applications in medicine and the environment. Part I covers key laboratory manipulations, including DNA cloning, gene characterization, association of genes with disease, and methods for studying gene regulation and activities of gene products. Part II also covers commercial applications, and includes animal cell culture, production of recombinant proteins, novel diagnostics, high throughput screening, and environmental biosensors.
Systems biology approaches are rapidly transforming the technological and conceptual foundations of research across diverse areas of biomedicine. In this course we will discuss the fundamental developments in systems biology with a focus on two important dimensions: (1) the unique conceptual frameworks that have emerged to study systems-level phenomena and (2) how these approaches are revealing fundamentally new principles that govern the organization and behavior of cellular systems. Although there will be much discussion of technologies and computational approaches, the course will emphasize the conceptual contributions of the field and the big questions that lie ahead. Lectures and discussions of primary literature will enable students to scrutinize research in the field and to internalize systems biology thinking in their own research. To make this a concrete endeavor, the students will develop mini-NIH-style grant proposals that aims to study a fundamental problem/question using systems biology approaches. The students will then convene an in-class NIH-style review panel that will assess the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals. In addition, the students will have the opportunity to defend their proposals in a live presentation to the class. The course is open to graduate students in Biological Sciences. Advanced undergraduates in biological sciences, and other graduate students with background in biology from other disciplines, including physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering may also attend after consulting with the instructor.
Poets, Rebels, Exiles examines the successive generations of the most provocative and influential Russian and Russian Jewish writers and artists who brought the cataclysm of the Soviet and post-Soviet century to North America. From Joseph Brodsky—the bad boy bard of Soviet Russia and a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, who served 18 months of hard labor near the North Pole for social parasitism before being exiled—to the most recent artistic descendants, this course will interrogate diaspora, memory, and nostalgia in the cultural production of immigrants and exiles.
Developing features - internal representations of the world, artificial neural networks, classifying handwritten digits with logistics regression, feedforward deep networks, back propagation in multilayer perceptrons, regularization of deep or distributed models, optimization for training deep models, convolutional neural networks, recurrent and recursive neural networks, deep learning in speech and object recognition.
Participants may elect to enroll in the 1-credit CWI independent study offered through the Sociology Department. CWI takes place Thursdays from 2-4pm in Knox Hall, room 509. The course ID for Fall 2025 is SOCI4043GU.
The Center for Wealth and Inequality (CWI), in this course, is a forum for students interested in social science topics broadly related to inequality. In particular, it will provide an opportunity for students to read and discuss the works presented in the weekly CWI seminar series, while also sharing and refining their own works in progress. The CWI seminar series is sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP) and is devoted to the investigation of social and economic inequality. The seminar invites speakers from both within and outside of Columbia to present recent papers covering a wide range of topics pertaining to inequality, such as poverty, labor market behavior, education, and the family. The research topics and methodologies are at the cutting edge of the interdisciplinary study of wealth and inequality, as the CWI seminar invites speakers from multiple social science disciplines and fields. Past speakers include Annette Lareau, Adam Gamoran, Timothy Smeeding, Lisa Kahn, Mario Small, Rob Warren and Florencia Torche, among numerous others.
The primary preparation for these gatherings is to read the papers slated for presentation, whether written by an outside speaker or a student within the course. Students will meet to constructively critique these papers collectively, raising key questions and concepts for discussion and debate. One student will serve as the discussion leader each week by kicking off the dialogue. This student also will have the opportunity to prepare a review of the paper, if desired. When discussing CWI seminar papers, the product of each meeting will be a shortlist of pertinent questions for the visiting speaker, which participants will be encouraged to ask during the Q&A following each seminar. When focusing on student papers, participants will provide detailed comments geared towards supporting further development of our peers’ work. We regularly will be joined by the CWI presenters.
The spirit behind the student independent study is one of collective student growth and learning through semi-structured discussion. While the course will pose a relatively
Intensive study of a philosophical issue or topic, or of a philosopher, group of philosophers, or philosophical school or movement. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.
A substantial paper, developing from an Autumn workshop and continuing in the Spring under the direction of an individual advisor. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.
Introduction to computational biology with emphasis on genomic data science tools and methodologies for analyzing data, such as genomic sequences, gene expression measurements and the presence of mutations. Applications of machine learning and exploratory data analysis for predicting drug response and disease progression. Latest technologies related to genomic information, such as single-cell sequencing and CRISPR, and the contributions of genomic data science to the drug development process.
Study ecology, evolution, and conservation biology in one of the world’s most biologically spectacular settings, the wildlife-rich savannas of Kenya. Although we will meet have a few meetings during the fall semester, the majority of the coursework will be completed during a 16 day field trip to Kenya during winter break. Students will spend their time immersed in an intensive field experience gaining sophisticated training in fieldwork and biological research. Note that there is a lab fee to cover all in-country expenses, and students are also responsible for the cost of airfare to and from Kenya.
Prerequisites: (CHEM UN1403 and CHEM UN1404) or (CHEM UN1604) or (CHEM UN2045 and CHEM UN2046) , or the equivalent. Principles governing the structure and reactivity of inorganic compounds surveyed from experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Topics include inorganic solids, aqueous and nonaqueous solutions, the chemistry of selected main group elements, transition metal chemistry, metal clusters, metal carbonyls, and organometallic chemistry, bonding and resonance, symmetry and molecular orbitals, and spectroscopy.
Prerequisites: Two semesters of a rigorous, molecularly-oriented, introductory biology course, such as UN2005 (
Inc.,
Biochemistry of DNA & Proteins, basic Genetics, Metabolism & Cell Physiology
) and UN2006 (
Cell biology, inc. intra-cellular transport, phagocytosis, protein regulation, as well as Inter-cellular communication, inc., cell-cell contact, receptors/ligands & transporters
). This course will cover the integration of innate and adaptive immune systems, as well as how immune response contributes to health and disease (
e.g., Infectious disease, allergies, autoimmunity, immune deficiencies, the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy
). Students will also become familiar with important immunological methods, which will provide an opportunity to explore some of the current literature. Sophomores will require permission from their advisor to enroll, and graduate student will require the instructor’s permission to enroll. SPS, Barnard, and TC students may register for this course with the instructor’s approval on a Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form), which can be downloaded (
http://registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
) and then returned to the office of the registrar.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Readings in Greek literature from Homer to the 4th century B.C.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times.
In their research, scholars of religion employ a variety of methods to analyze texts ranging from historical documents to objects of visual culture. This course acquaints students with both the methods and the materials utilized in the field of religious studies. Through guided exercises, they acquire research skills for utilizing sources and become familiarized with dominant modes of scholarly discourse. The class is organized around a series of research scavenger hunts that are due at the start of each week's class and assigned during the discussion section (to be scheduled on the first day of class). Additional class meeting on Thursdays.
Crystal structure and energy band theory of solids. Carrier concentration and transport in semiconductors. P-n junction and junction transistors. Semiconductor surface and MOS transistors. Optical effects and optoelectronic devices. Fabrication of devices and the effect of process variation and distribution statistics on device and circuit performance. Course shares lectures with ELEN E3106, but the work requirements differ. Undergraduate students are not eligible to register.
Prerequisites: LING 3101: Introduction to Linguistics and LING 4376: Phonetics & Phonology
This course provides training in linguistic fieldwork for language
documentation and description. We will work with a speaker of an understudied language
to investigate the structure of the language (its sounds, word and sentence formation,
ways of expressing meaning, and usage) and learn about its speakers and their
communities, both in NYC and abroad. Through this process, students will learn
collaborative linguistic fieldwork techniques as well as the art of writing linguistic
descriptions. This course will draw on all aspects of students’ linguistic training to date,
and the success of the course will depend on our ability as a class to work together
cooperatively with the language consultant and language community more broadly to
document and describe the language.
The main task of this course will be to read novels by African writers. But the novel in Africa also involves connections between the literary genre of the novel and the historical processes of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. One important question we'll consider is how African novels depict those historical experiences in their themes and plots—we'll read novels that are about colonialism, etc. A more complex question is how these historical processes relate to the emergence of the novel as an important genre for African writers. Edward Said went so far as to say that without imperialism, there would be no European novel as we know it. How can we understand the novel in Africa (whether read or written) as a product of the colonial encounter? How did it shape the process of decolonization? What contribution to history, whether literary or political, does the novel in Africa make? We'll undertake a historical survey of African novels from the 1930s to the present, with attention to various subgenres (village novel, war novel, urbanization novel, novel of postcolonial disillusion, Bildungsroman). We'll attend to how African novelists blend literate and oral storytelling traditions, how they address their work to local and global audiences, and how they use scenes of characters reading novels (whether African or European) in order to position their writing within national, continental, and world literary space.
Israel has a unique and constantly-evolving national cinema, the product of its diverse immigrant population, influences from neighboring nations, and dramatic national history. Beginning with artistic influences from abroad and culminating with native self-examinations, this course will provide a survey of Israeli film history, recurring foci of Israeli cinema, and introductions to influential filmmakers from early director and impresario Menahem Golan to Orthodox writer/director Rama Burshtein.
Each class meeting will include a complete screening of an Israeli feature film, as well as clips of related works. Readings will include critical essays and histories which elaborate on in-class screenings and cover additional topics and films. Written assignments will be three analytical essays which will encourage critical thinking, close analysis of films, and independent research beyond the materials presented in class.
All readings are in English. All feature films and film clips are in Hebrew (some include Arabic), and will be presented with English subtitles. Students fluent in Hebrew and Arabic are encouraged to interpret the dialogue for additional meaning that may not be translated in the subtitles.
Prerequisites: elementary organic and physical chemistry. The mechanisms of organic reactions, structure of organic molecules, and theories of reactivity. How reactive intermediates are recognized and mechanisms are deduced using kinetics, stereochemistry, isotopes, and physical measurements.
Prerequisites: at least 4 college-level biology or biotechnology courses. This course will introduce students to the interrelated fields of patent law, regulatory law, and contract law that are vital to the biotech and biopharmaceutical sectors. The course will present core concepts in a way that permits students to use them throughout their corporate, academic, and government careers. SCE and TC students may register for this course, but they must first obtain the written permission of the instructor, by filling out a paper Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form). The form can be downloaded at the URL below, but must be signed by the instructor and returned to the office of the registrar. http://registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
This course offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins, foundations and evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing during the four decades following 1895. Via close readings of his texts, with neither worship nor condescension, we will situate the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind within historical context, and explore its applications to education, society, culture, and the humanities.
This seminar will concentrate on close readings of four key texts:
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Mourning and Melancholia; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
;
and
one
additional text to be chosen by the class
. These texts are chosen in part to not overlap with those covered in CLPS GU4200. Key supplemental readings will explore aspects of the text’s historical, cultural and intellectual context, contemporary reception, and influence on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and beyond.
This course explores the recording studio and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) as tools for diverse compositional practices. By exploring a range of recording and editing techniques to craft new musical works beyond the limitations of live performance, this class encourages a seamless blend of composition and music production. Various genres, artists, and techniques that push the boundaries of music recording will be studied, such as Jamaican dub, musique concrète, hyper-pop, jazz fusion, and more. Students will gain hands-on experience with DAWs, exploring tools like effects processing, layering, and spatial placement. They will learn to listen closely to pieces exemplifying these techniques, building a shared analytic vocabulary to describe them. Students will also create original pieces, applying and building on the techniques studied in class, while engaging in constructive feedback with peers.
NOTE: There are 2 sections of Third Year Arabic I. Section 001 follows the standard curriculum building all 4 language skills, as described below. Section 002 follows a reading-intensive curriculum, with less emphasis on listening and writing while still conducted in Arabic, and is intended for those preparing for advanced research in modern or classical Arabic texts. Students in the regular third-year Arabic track improve reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills through close reading, compositions, class discussions, and presentations in Arabic on topics such as cultures of the Arab world, classical and modern Arabic literature, and contemporary Arabic media. Review of grammatical and syntactic rules as needed. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)
Through reading articles and essays by Arab thinkers and intellectuals, students will be able to increase their fluency and accuracy in Arabic while working on reading text and being exposed to the main themes in Arab thought The course works with all four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). Arabic is the language of instruction. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
The Cold War epoch saw broad transformations in science, technology, and politics. At their nexus a new knowledge was proclaimed, cybernetics, a putative universal science of communication and control. It has disappeared so completely that most have forgotten that it ever existed. Its failure seems complete and final. Yet in another sense, cybernetics was so powerful and successful that the concepts, habits, and institutions born with it have become intrinsic parts of our world and how we make sense of it. Key cybernetic concepts of information, system, and feedback are now fundamental to our basic ways of understanding the mind, brain and computer, of grasping the economy and ecology, and finally of imagining the nature of human life itself. This course will trace the echoes of the cybernetic explosion from the wake of World War II to the onset of Silicon Valley euphoria.
This class takes a social movement perspective to analyze and understand the international human rights movement. The course will address the evolution of the international human rights movement and focus on the NGOs that drive the movement on the international, regional and domestic levels. Sessions will highlight the experiences of major human rights NGOs and will address topics including strategy development, institutional representation, research methodologies, partnerships, networks, venues of engagement, campaigning, fundraising and, perhaps most importantly, the fraught and complex debates about adaptation to changing global circumstances, starting with the pre-Cold War period and including some of the most up-to-date issues and questions going on in this field today.
We are used to thinking of history in national terms, or at least in reference to major civilizations (“Western civilization,” “Near Eastern civilization,” etc.). In “real life,” however, interactions among people, linguistic communities, and cultures frequently cut across political divisions. Water - rivers, streams, seas - is often an invitation to settlement, commerce, and conquest. This course offers a look (inspired in part by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean) at a body of water - the Black Sea - and the lands around it, in sweeping historical perspective. Focus is on those moments when the various civilizations and empires that originated and flourished around the Black Sea met and intersected in friendship or in enmity. We will look at ancient civilizations, Greek colonization, Byzantine-Slav interactions, the period of Ottoman dominance, Russian-Turkish rivalry, and decolonization and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. We hope that we will be able to pay particular attention to questions of ecology, language, religion, and cultural interaction throughout.
Prerequisites: (MDES UN2201) and (MDES UN2202) $10 Arabic Materials Fee; $15 Language Resource Fee. This is an introductory course to Levantine Arabic for students who have completed two years of Standard Arabic studies, at the Intermediate level. The course is designed to further develop fluency in oral communication, through building students’ familiarity with a less formal register of Arabic, namely the Levantine dialect. The course will convert and recycle some of the previous Standard Arabic knowledge to the dialect, by comparing their prior knowledge to its dialectal counterpart; while at the same time developing students’ new communicative skills in a diverse range of contexts that are essential in any conversational interaction. The course will build students abilities to interact effectively in various areas where Levantine Arabic is spoken. In addition to varied thematic topics, the course exposes students to cultural aspects specific to the region. Additionally, the course will work on both constructing students’ knowledge of dialectal diction as well as other grammatical features of the dialects. Even though the course is designed for communication in the four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking), the emphasis will be mostly on speaking and listening. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Prerequisites: elementary physical chemistry. Basic quantum mechanics: the Schrodinger equation and its interpretation, exact solutions in simple cases, methods or approximations including time-independent and time-dependent perturbation theory, spin and orbital angular momentum, spin-spin interactions, and an introduction to atomic and molecular structure.
This is not a class in Theology. It is a class dealing with the
Qur’an
as a text and its linguistic and cultural significance. The readings will cover various
Suwar
(chapters) and excerpts dealing with a logical sequence of themes, starting with how the
Qur’an
defines itself, addresses its audiences, depicts and dialogues with other religions and religious groups, refers to itself as a historical source, especially through storytelling, and ending with how it legislates. They will also cover a choice of Hadiths. By being exposed to such a range of texts, students will gain a basic knowledge of types and structure of Hadith and a general sense of Qur’anic styles, textual arrangements, terminology and concepts. Specifically, the assignments will guide students toward an ability to read these texts in detail by expanding their vocabulary, deepening their understanding of advanced grammar points, and by providing an opportunity to discuss the texts and write about them. Student will also acquire research skills by identifying and working with sources and references.
Prerequisites: elementary physical chemistry. Corequisites: CHEM G4221. Topics include the classical and quantum statistical mechanics of gases, liquids, and solids.
This course studies the effects and strategies of the cold war on Arab writing, education, arts and translation, and the counter movement in Arab culture to have its own identities. As the cold war functioned and still functions on a global scale, thematic and methodological comparisons are drawn with Latin America, India and Africa.
Money in its multiple forms has received renewed attention in recent decades, especially since the financial crises in 2008 and the emergence of new cryptocurrencies. Money has been described as a means of exchange, a store of value, a measure of debt, a commodity, a social institution, or a tool in the formation of identity. In all of these instances, money fuses economic purposes with social and cultural practices. Exploring the intersections between economics and aesthetics, this course will juxtapose some of the most influential theories of money from Adam Smith to the present with contemporaneous literary texts that reflect on various aspects of money in their poetics on a thematic or formal level. Literary texts include Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Zola, Thomas Mann, and Martin Amis.
Prerequisites: PSYC UN1001 and Preferably, an additional course in psychology, focusing on cognition, development, or research methods. Instructor permission required. This seminar explores the relationship between language and thought by investigating how language is mentally represented and processed; how various aspects of language interact with each other; and how language interacts with other aspects of cognition including perception, concepts, world knowledge, and memory. Students will examine how empirical data at the linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific levels can bear on some of the biggest questions in the philosophy of mind and language and in psychology.
This course offers an introduction to German intellectual history by focusing on the key texts from the 18th and 19th century concerned with the philosophy of art and the philosophy of history. Instead of providing a general survey, this thematic focus that isolates the relatively new philosophical subspecialties allows for a careful tracing of a number of key problematics. The texts chosen for discussion in many cases are engaged in lively exchanges and controversies. For instance, Winckelmann provides an entry into the debate on the ancients versus the moderns by making a claim for both the historical, cultural specificity of a particular kind of art, and by advertising the art of Greek antiquity as a model to be imitated by the modern artist. Lessings Laocoon counters Winckelmanns idealizing approach to Greek art with a media specific reflection. According to Lessing, the fact that the Laocoon priest from the classical sculpture doesnt scream has nothing to do with the nobility of the Greek soul but all with the fact that a screaming mouth hewn in stone would be ugly. Herders piece on sculpture offers yet another take on this debate, one that refines and radicalizes an aesthetics based on the careful examination of the different senses, especially touch and feeling versus sight.—The second set of texts in this class deals with key enlightenment concepts of a philosophical anthropology informing the then emerging philosophy of history. Two literary texts will serve to mark key epochal units: Goethes Prometheus, which will be used in the introductory meeting, will be examined in view of its basic humanist program, Kleists Earthquake in Chili will serve as a base for the discussion of what would be considered the end of the Enlightenment: be that the collapse of a belief in progress or the critique of the beautiful and the sublime. The last unit of the class focuses on Hegels sweeping supra-individualist approach to the philosophy of history and Nietzsches fierce critique of Hegel. Readings are apportioned such that students can be expected to fully familiarize themselves with the arguments of these texts and inhabit them.
This course deals with the proteome: the expressed protein complement of a cell, organelle, matrix, tissue, organ or organism. The study of the proteome (proteomics) is broadly applicable to life sciences research, and is increasingly important in academic, government and industrial research through extension of the impact of advances in genomics. These techniques are being applied to basic research, exploratory studies of cancer and other diseases, drug discovery and many other topics. Emphasis will be on mastery of practical techniques of sample preparation, liquid chromatography/ mass spectrometry (LC/MS) with electrospray ionization, and Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption and Ionization (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry. Database searching and interpretation for identification of proteins will be intensively studied, and practiced supported by background tutorials and exercises covering other techniques used in proteomics. Open to students in M.A. in Biotechnology Program (points can be counted against laboratory requirement for that program), Ph.D. and advanced undergraduate students with background in genetics or molecular biology. Students should be comfortable with basic biotechnology laboratory techniques as well as being interested in doing computational work in a Windows environment.
This seminar course explores the intersection of human rights and populism, examining how the rise of populist movements, leaders, and ideologies impact democratic institutions, global politics, and the protection of fundamental human rights. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the course evaluates the sociological, economic, and cultural factors driving populist surges, as well as their consequences for civic culture, governance, and international relations. Students will analyze the implications of populism for human rights in the context of migration, authoritarianism, freedom of speech, minorities, and challenges to international and regional courts and institutions. The course will investigate both left-wing and right-wing populist movements, considering the threat they pose to human rights, their pursuit of socio-economic rights through the redistribution of wealth, and how the human rights project could and is being rethought in light of these challenges and opportunities.
Prerequisites: PSYC UN1010 PSYC UN1010 or equivalent; background in statistics/research methods recommended How does the human brain make sense of the acoustic world? What aspects of auditory perception do humans share with other animals? How does the brain perform the computations necessary for skills such as soundlocalization? How do we focus our auditory attention on one voice in a crowd? What acoustic cues are important for speech perception? How is music perceived? These are the types of questions we will address by studyingthe basics of auditory perception from textbook readings and reviews, and reading classic and current literatureto understand scientific progress in the field today.
Few places in the world have witnessed the shift from a multiethnic territory to a nationally homogeneous nation-state as profoundly as the Polish lands. A crucial site of the collapse of Central and Eastern European empires, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, Nazi occupation, Soviet-style socialism, and accession to the European Union, Poland’s twentieth-century and contemporary culture has developed in the shadow of catastrophe and political and economic revolutions.
This seminar investigates shifting meanings of cultural difference and sameness from 1918 to the present, including Polish debates on multiculturalism spurred by the ongoing European refugee crisis. We will examine meanings attached to people, things, and landscapes - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, Nazi or Soviet - through the lens of visual arts, everyday objects, scholarly discourses, and urban and rural topographies. While we will pay special attention to the historiography of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the course relies on interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes students interested in the history of art and architecture, literature, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical museology.