Prerequisites: POLS V1501 or the
equivalent
.
Admission by application
through the Barnard department only. Enrollment limited to 16 students.
Barnard syllabus
.
Examination of democratic consolidation and promotion. What makes democracy work and what, if anything, can outside actors do to help this process along? Topics include the theoretical literature on democratic consolidation, historical cases of intervention, debates about America’s role in promoting democracy, and examination of some of the research on democracy promotion. (Cross-listed by the Europen Studies and Human Rights Programs.)
This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which these systems of power have operated across time and space. In particular, the course seeks to show how gender has not always been a binary or primary category system. Such approach is also useful in understanding the workings of race and sexuality as mechanisms of differentiation. In making these inquiries, the course will pay attention to the intersectional nature of race, gender, and sexuality and to strategic performances of identity by marginalized groups.
This course is a survey of Asian North American literature and its contexts. To focus our discussion, the course centers on examining recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. The second section of the course will focus on how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines; to the development of the model minority mythology during the Cold War. The final section will examine intimacies and exclusions in contemporary forms of migration, diaspora, and community communities.
Prerequisites: POLS W1201 or the
equivalent
.
Not an introductory-level course.
Not open to students who have taken the colloquium POLS BC3326. Enrollment limited to 25 students; L-course sign-up through
eBear
.
Barnard syllabus
.
Explores seminal caselaw to inform contemporary civil rights and civil liberties jurisprudence and policy. Specifically, the readings examine historical and contemporary first amendment values, including freedom of speech and the press, economic liberties, takings law, discrimination based on race, gender, class and sexual preference, affirmative action, the right to privacy, reproductive freedom, the right to die, criminal procedure and adjudication, the rights of the criminally accused post-9/11 and the death penalty. (Cross-listed by the American Studies and Human Rights Programs.)
The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester with be determined by IRWGS's Director of Undergraduate Studies in consultation with your advisor. Students receiving a grade of "B+" of higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to complete Senior Seminar II. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages in a course facilitated by the IRWGS Director.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to senior majors.
The Senior Seminar in WGSS offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research project during the first semester of your senior year. The capstone project may be freestanding, or, with permission of the instructor, may be continued during the spring semester as a Senior Thesis. The capstone project must be based on original research and involve an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your project and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester with be determined by the Senior Seminar instructor in consultation with your advisor.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor.
An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings.
Prerequisites: Non-majors admitted by permission of instructor. Students must attend first class. Enrollment limited to 16 students per section. General Education Requirement: Historical Studies.
Introduction to the historical process and social consequences of urban growth, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required.
Coercion, war, rape, murder, and riots are common in American History from the European invasion to the Civil War. How did violent acts transform early American societies? Readings are a mix of primary sources and scholarship. First and second year students are welcome with permission.
Prerequisites: Completion of one college-level literature course. Permission of instructor.
Prerequisites: one philosophy course or the instructor's permission.
Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: causation and scientific explanation; induction and real kinds; verification and falsification; models, analogies and simulations; the historical origins of the modern sciences; scientific revolutions; reductionism and supervenience; differences between physics, biology and the social sciences; the nature of life; cultural evolution; human nature; philosophical issues in cosmology.
Prerequisites: Must have taken a Dance Department Composition course, have some dance training.
This experiential, hands-on course requires all students to choreograph, dance, and film. Focusing on single-shot film-making, the duet of the camera and the dance will create an understanding of the interaction between the two, enabling students to create a final short film.
Prerequisites: Must attend first class for instructor permission. Preference to Urban Studies majors.
This lecture course examines different facets of urban development and planning in cities of the developing countries. We will begin by studying common problems in developing urban regions, gaining an understanding of common settlement patterns and urban systems in changing metropolitan areas. The class aims to formulate a repository of concepts, urban trends, and terms around the ever-growing cities of the globe. We will also focus on specific issues in representative cities of the regions studied. These particular cases, which will be selected from cities in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, will present discussions of planning and policy development regarding water and sanitation, transportation and infrastructure, historic preservation, disaster risk reduction and housing. Students will also work in teams to analyze a particular urban problem in a developing city, and present team findings to the class via Canvas.
A range of dance genres, from the traditional to the innovative, co-exist as representations of "Indianness" in India, and beyond. Identities onstage and in films, morph as colonial, national, and global contexts change. This course zooms from micro to macro views of twentieth century staged dances as culturally inflected discourse. We review how Indian classical dance aligns with the oldest of performance texts, and with lively discourses (rasa as a performance aesthetic, Orientalism, nationalism, global recirculations) through the ages, not only in India but also in Europe, Britain and America. Throughout the course, we ask:- How is culture embodied? How do historical texts configure dance today? How might they affect our thinking on mind-body, practice-theory, and traditional-contemporary divides? How does bodily patterning influence the ways that we experience our surroundings and vice versa? Can cultural imaginaries instigate action? How is gender is performed? What are dance discourses?
Prerequisites: BIOL BC1500, BIOL BC1501, BIOL BC1502, BIOL BC1503, and BIOL BC2100.
Required of all majors who do not select Senior Thesis (BIOL BC3593x / BC3594y) to fulfill the senior requirement, these seminars allow students to explore the primary literature in the Biological Sciences in greater depth than can be achieved in a lecture course. Attention will be focused on both theoretical and empirical work. Seminar periods are devoted to oral reports and discussion of assigned readings and student reports. Students will write one extensive literature review of a topic related to the central theme of the seminar section.
Topics vary per semester and include:
1. Plant Development
2. Animal Development and Evolution
3
. Molecular Evolution 4. Microbiology and Global Change 5. Genomics 6. Comparative and Reproductive Endocrinology.
An independent research project in Biology under the guidance of a faculty member and suiting the needs of the individual student. Projects conducted outside of the Barnard Biology Department must have a member of the Department acting as a sponsor. Attendance at a weekly seminar is required. By the end of the year, students write a scientific paper and orally present their results to the Barnard Biology Department. Completion of both BIOL BC3591 and BIOL BC3592 fulfills two upper-level laboratory requirements in the major. Must be taken in sequence, beginning in the fall.
Prerequisites: Permission of a faculty sponsor and the department. Cannot be taken concurrently with BIOL BC3591 or BIOL BC3592.
Same as BIOL BC3591x-BC3592y, including the weekly seminar. Completion of both BIOL BC3593x and BC3594y fulfills the senior requirement in the major. Must be taken in sequence, beginning in the fall.
This course is a survey history of the role that religion has played in the major political movements and events of the United States from 1945 to the present. We will explore how the historical analysis of religion in the postwar period affects our understanding of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, the War on Terror, and on legal and policy debates over immigration, education, abortion, gay marriage, and the environment, among other issues. There are no prerequisites for the course, though basic knowledge of American twentieth century history is useful.
Prerequisites: Permission of a faculty sponsor.
Similar to BIOL BC3591x/ BC3592y but a variable point course without seminar or an oral presentation. Does not fulfill Biology major requirements.
Prerequisites: (MATH UN2030) MATH V2030.
Analysis and design of feedback control systems. Transfer functions; block diagrams; proportional, rate, and integral controllers; hardware, implementation. Routh stability criterion, root locus, Bode and Nyquist plots, compensation techniques.
This course will explore the background and examine some of the manifestations of the first Jewish cultural explosion after 70 CE. Among the topics discussed: the Late Roman state and the Jews, the rise of the synagogue, the redaction of the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim, the piyyut and the Hekhalot.
Corequisites:
PHIL V3611
Required Discussion Section (0 points).
Systematic treatment of some major topics in metaphysics (e.g. modality, causation, identity through time, particulars and universals). Readings from contemporary authors.
This course examines the role of media in shaping religious identities, beliefs, practices, and institutions using case studies from American history and contemporary American culture. For the purpose of this course, the term media will be interpreted broadly to mean any technique or technology designed to communicate information such as verbal discourses, written texts, visual representations, ritual gestures, sacred objects, and telecommunication technologies. In foregrounding media, we will examine how religious beliefs and practices have been remembered, disseminated, translated, and contested in the American context. Just as important, we will examine how religious groups have negotiated their American identity through media practices and their narrative content.
As we will see, acts of transmission such as writing, mapping, broadcasting, and televising play essential parts in drawing and erasing communal boundaries from both within and without. With this in mind, we will not be attempting to identify what religion is, so much as the ways in which historical actors understood themselves to be religious. We will find that what counts as religion varies, sometimes dramatically, across times, spaces, and cultures; “America” is similarly unstable and contested. Our job, then, will be to understand the role of media and mediation in constituting their contours.
For those whose knowledge is equivalent to a student who’s completed the Second Year course. The course develops students’ reading comprehension skills through reading selected modern Tibetan literature. Tibetan is used as the medium of instruction and interaction to develop oral fluency and proficiency.
This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.
The act of speculation is central to our thinking about the environment, be it through projections of catastrophe, visions of a more sustainable society, or conceptualizations of vast and complex planetary systems. This course will explore this form of speculation by tracing the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism in the American twentieth century, the setting for the maturation of the genre and the movement alike. For the purposes of this course, “speculative fiction” (SF) will be taken to include the commonly accepted genre of science-fiction and fantasy as well as any work of fiction based on a counterfactual present world, an extrapolative future, an alternative past, or a reality entirely imagined. More conceptually, we will consider SF in the expansive sense Donna Haraway proposes: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far,” asking what these distinct but related acts of mind can reveal about environmental thought. The semester will be divided into pre-1960 and post-1960 works, a boundary that on one hand divides the Golden Age and New Wave periods of science fiction, and on the other hand roughly marks the birth of the modern environmental movement. As the course moves chronologically through representative works of environmental SF, it will also trace the development of foundational concepts in ecology and environmentalism by cross-referencing works of SF with texts in ecology and environmentalist theory that either established or discuss contemporaneous theories. This exploration will touch on topics such as: ecofeminism, ecological economics, ecological succession and the climax community, the Gaia hypothesis, environmental justice, and early recognitions of climate change.
Prerequisites: Solid knowledge of calculus, including multiple variable integration.
For undergraduates only. Required for the OR:FE concentration. Must be taken during (or before) the third semester. Students who take IEOR E3658 may not take W4150 due to significant overlap. Recommended: strong mathematical skills. Introductory course to probability theory, and does not assume any prior knowledge of the subject. Teaches foundations required to use probability in applications, but the course itself is theoretical in nature. Basic definitions and axioms of probability and notions of independence and conditional probability introduced. Focus on random variables, both continuous and discrete, and covers topics of expectation, variance, conditional distributions, conditional expectation and variance, and moment generating functions. Also Central Limit Theorem for sums of random variables. Consists of lectures, recitations, weekly homework, and in-class exams.
This course asks, “What conceptions of Justice emerge from a selection of works by canonical African American writers? Are there other moral/ethical/social values that emerge as more significant than Justice ?” We open with an exploration of Justice in the works of the Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, the Hebrew Bible and recent scholarship on Pre-Colonial West Africa in order to consider what concepts of Justice African-American writers have inherited or that have informed them in less formal ways. We then turn to texts by Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, to examine the way these writers engage, negotiate and critique the relationship between Justice and Race in the United States.
This course examines major innovations in organizations and asks whether innovation itself can be organized. We study a range of forms of organizing (e.g., bureaucratic, post-bureaucratic, and open architecture network forms) in a broad variety of settings: from fast food franchises to the military-entertainment complex, from airline cockpits to Wall Street trading rooms, from engineering firms to mega-churches, from scientific management at the turn of the twentieth century to collaborative filtering and open source programming at the beginning of the twenty-first. Special attention will be paid to the relationship between organizational forms and new digital technologies.
Prerequisites: concurrent with registering for this course, a student must register with the department, provide a written invitation from a mentor, and submit a research proposal.
BIOL 3700
will provide an opportunity for students interested in independent research work in a hospital or hospice setting. In these settings, where patients and their needs are paramount, and where IRB rules and basic medical ethics make “wet-lab biology research” inappropriate, undergraduates may well find a way nevertheless, to assist and participate in ongoing clinical research. Such students, once they have identified a mentor willing to provide support, participation, and advising, may apply to the faculty member in charge of the course for 2-4 points/semester in
BIOL W3700
. This course will closely follow procedures already in place for
BIOL 3500
, but will ask potential mentors to provide evidence that students will gain hands-on experience in a clinical setting, while participating in a hospital- or hospice-based research agenda. A paper summarizing results of the work is required by the last day of finals for a letter grade; no late papers will be accepted.
Prerequisites: one course in philosophy.
Corequisites:
PHIL V3711
Required Discussion Section (0 points).
This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.
This course examines two of the most important genres of Western lyric poetry. We will begin our study of the elegiac tradition with classical pastoral elegies (Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, Virgil) before continuing with major English-language elegies from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including works by Milton, Shelley, Whitman, Hardy, and Auden. The second half of the course will explore the tradition of the amatory sonnet sequence that begins with Petrarch; we will read works by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The course concludes with Alfred Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
, which offers a combination of both genres.
James & Wharton, America's two greatest novelists in the half century after the civil war and the eve of the first world war, were friends and fellow cosmopolitans, at home in the US & Europe, chroniclers of an emerging transatlantic urban modernity traversing New York, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva. Their fiction often portrays glamorous surfaces and intricate social texts that their brilliant heroines --Isabel Archer of
The Portrait of a Lady
& Lily Bart of
The House of Mirth
, for example--negotiate with wit and subtlety, confusion and daring, amidst fear and fascination. They find themselves immersed in bruising plots--crafted by society's disciplinary imperatives and by their creators, the latter standing in uneasy complicity with the social order even as they seek its transformation. Giving female protagonists unprecedented boldness and ambition, Wharton & James chart how intense exertion of will and desire collides with "the customs of the country," to cite the title of a great Wharton novel. We will read the three novels mentioned above as well as Wharton's
Summer
&
Ethan Frome
and James's "Daisy Miller,"
Washington Square
&
The Ambassadors
.
Prerequisites: Physical, paper applications must be submitted to my box in 602 Philosophy Hall. Please explain why you are interested in the course and any relevant coursework. Attendance to the first class is absolutely mandatory.
Selected poems, plays, and prose.
This course examines the debate over Britain’s decline in the twentieth century. When Britain lost its manufacturing power, its imperial holdings, and its Anglo-Christian values, who cared, what or who did they blame, and how did these shifts affect Britain’s place in Europe and the world? We will explore how the narrative of decline became a catch-all term to describe issues as various as industrial discontent, postcolonial politics, and the permissive society. There are no prerequisites for this course, but basic knowledge and/or interest in modern British and European history would be advantageous.
This course explores philosophical reflection on the relationship between law, society and morality. We discuss the nature of law, the nature of legal reasoning, the relationship between law and social policy, and central concepts in civil and criminal law. Readings are drawn from such sources as the natural law tradition, legal positivism, legal realism, and Critical Legal Theory. Readings will be supplemented by analysis of classic cases.
This course charts the history of health and healing from, as far as is possible, a perspective interior to Africa. It explores changing practices and understandings of disease, etiology, healing and well-being from pre-colonial times through into the post-colonial. A major theme running throughout the course is the relationship between medicine, the body, power and social groups. This is balanced by an examination of the creative ways in which Africans have struggled to compose healthy communities, albeit with varied success, whether in the fifteenth century or the twenty-first.
Corequisites: MATH UN1201,APMA E2000
Modeling, description, and classification of signals and systems. Continuous-time systems. Time domain analysis, convolution. Frequency domain analysis, transfer functions. Fourier series. Fourier and Laplace transforms. Discrete-time systems and the Z transform.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
(Seminar). This course examines literary and artistic works by and about women from the 16th and 17th centuries alongside recent historical and theoretical criticism on gender and sexuality in the Renaissance. We will cover a range of literary genres that reflect and produce early modern notions of sex and gender in England, France, Italy and Spain, as well as medical guides, self-portraits, conduct manuals, and scurrilous tracts on females behavior. Topics include Queens (rulers) and Queens (prostitutes); cross-dressing and biological difference; the status of work and school; separatist communities and same-sex eroticism; kinship, patronage and domesticity; the gender and economics of authorship; the sexuality of racial and national identity. Readings in the original language provided and strongly encouraged. Secondary readings or films will be provided each week.
Prerequisites:
WMST V1001
and the instructor's permission.
A survey of research methods from the social sciences and interpretive models from the humanities, inviting students to examine the tension between the production and interpretation of data. Students receive firsthand experience practicing various research methods and interpretive strategies, while considering larger questions about how we know what we know.
The Modern History of the Brain explores the intellectual, cultural, and scientific history of the brain, focusing on the sciences of the brain in Europe and the United States in the past two centuries. We will examine how the brain has been studied and represented, how conceptions of the brain have interacted with ideas about the self and the soul, and how disciplines in the brain and mind sciences have merged and developed. This course will be relevant to students interested in modern American and European history, the history of science, and students interested in psychology and the neurosciences. No preliminary knowledge or coursework is required.
This is an undergraduate seminar that takes up primary and secondary sources and reflections to: a) provide students with an historical overview of Native American issues and representational practices, b) provide students with an understanding of the ways in which land expropriation and concomitant military and legal struggle have formed the core of Native-State relations and are themselves central to American and Native American history and culture, and c) provide students with an understanding of Native representational practices, political subjectivity, and aspiration.
This course explores the conceptual origins of "sense" and "sensibility" in the work of the eighteenth-century's most radical thinkers. We will discover how Jane Austen responded to and reformulated major intellectual and political debates of the Enlightenment, and so brought the novel to full fruition as a philosophical medium. We will ground our approach to Austen's novels in contemporary theories of human behavior, psychology, and right--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who devised a system of education which might utterly subject the female spirit to male desire; to Mary Wollstonecraft and Ottobah Cugoano, whose philosophies respectively equate marriage with slavery, and urge slaves to rise and destroy their captors. We will read in full most of Austen's completed novels and a sampling of her juveneilia, as well as extensive excerpts from major philosophical works of the Enlightenment. Interspersed throughout the course will be a handful of landmark critical texts addressing the role of gender and race in Austen's works. Students will leave the course Austen experts! They will also emerge well-versed in certain major arguments of Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstencraft, as well as a number of less-widely canonized authors whose works were nevertheless high highly influential in their time. The critical methods learned will provide students with a launching point for sophisticated, historically-based study of fascinating and challenging authors from any place and time.
In this class, we will think about the various ways in which philosophers, social theorists, historians and anthropologists have thought about war, violence, and responsibility. The course focuses on a set of themes and questions: for example, the nature of violence and the question of responsibility or accountability, shifting technologies of warfare, and the phenomenology and aftermath of warfare, for civilians and for combatants. The reading list incorporates different approaches to such questions—from historical to philosophical to ethnographic accounts.
Humans have a complicated relationship with other animals. We love them, befriend them and save them. We hunt, farm and eat them. We experiment on and observe them to discover more about them and to discover more about ourselves. For many of us, our pets are amongst the most familiar inhabitants of our world. Yet when we try to imagine what is going on in a dog or cat's mind--let alone that of a crow, octopus or bee--many of us are either stumped about how to go about this, or (the science strongly suggests) getting things radically wrong. Is our thought about and behavior towards animals ethically permissible, or even consistent, Can we reshape our habits of thought about animals to allow for a more rational, richer relationship with the other inhabitants of our planet? In this course, students will reflect on two closely intertwined questions: an ethical question, what sort of relationship ought we to have with animals?; and a metaphysical question, what is the nature of animal minds? Readings will primarily be be from philosophy and ethics and the cognitive sciences, with additional readings from literature and biology. There are no prerequisites for this class--it will be helpful but certainly not necessary to have taken previous classes in philosophy(especially ethics and philosophy of mind) or in cognitive science.
We begin in relation, helpless and dependent. "You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring," writes Maggie Nelson. This course will explore the "relational turn," which proposes a shift from the model of an autonomous, discrete, self-determining individuality, to an understanding of the self as comprehensible only within a tapestry of relationships, past and present, historical and contextual. In this light, the basic '"unit of study" is not the individual as a separate entity, but as an interactional field, one that craves mutual recognition. In a parallel move, Mikhail Bakhtin offers that every utterance is a "two-sided act;" it is a "territory shared," the product of "the reciprocal relationship between the addresser and addressee." As we read, we too are read. Indeed, stories, novels and films present us with complex interactional fields in which we learn to ruminate on the subjective meanings humans attach to their behavior. Reading fiction is one of the ways we develop intersubjective capacities, what Max Weber calls interpretive understanding or
Verstehen
. Fictions have much to teach us about the under-examined relational features of our own lives. They locate readers in a shaped world where we feel the cumulative weight of things left unsaid, where we fill in the narrative gaps, where we are confronted with the dynamics of self and other, connection and rupture, perception and evaluation. This course offers a deep dive into theories of intersubjectivity and psychoanalytic writings on object relations and relational theory. We will single out works by Max Weber, Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, D.W. Winnicott, Franz Fanon, Judith Butler, Stephen A. Mitchell, Edouard Glissant and a few others toward readings of fictions by Bechdel, Coetzee, Dostoevsky, Ishiguro, Kurtz, Morrison, Sebald, Rankine, Woolf, and films by Michael Roemer, Mike Leigh, Spike Jonz, and Lance Hammer.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the course is open to 18 undergraduates who have completed at least one core course in human rights and /or international law.
This seminar introduces students to the field of health and human rights. It examines how to advocate for and implement public health strategies using a human rights framework. It takes note of current international and domestic debates about the utility of a “human rights-based approach” to health, discusses methods and ethics of health-related human rights research, and examines case studies of human rights investigations to explore the role of human rights analysis in promoting public health.
The course is a survey of the canonical texts of the Early Americas, with emphasis on how those writers experienced the natural world of their new country. Some of them had to cope with extreme cold, others with tropical heat. Some of them encountered abundance, others sparsity and famine. They all encountered new life forms – from marine life to birds, reptiles and animals. They had to cope with frequent earthquakes and hurricanes, and classify newly discovered species of vegetal life. What they saw, however, they read not only through the lenses of natural history, but also theologically and politically. For some, the natural world was rich with signs sent by God for them to interpret, for others it was a political space that they organized according to the logic either of a theocracy or the plantation. Addressing the early natural histories of the Americas, the class will also pay special attention to their politics, and investigate how the ecological spaces that the colonist encountered shaped their politics and ethics.
Prerequisites: At least one course on Human Rights or Religion, or permission of the instructor
This seminar will provide students with the concepts and methodologies necessary to assess some of the different, often ambiguous, roles that the world's major religions play in contemporary international affairs, notably in relation to poverty alleviation and human rights abuses in general as well as to the use of violence and community relations.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. Sophomore Standing.
Explores migration as a gendered process and what factors account for migratory differences by gender across place and time; including labor markets, education demographic and family structure, gender ideologies, religion, government regulations and legal status, and intrinsic aspects of the migratory flow itself.
An interdisciplinary examination of human feelings, emotions, and passions, with a focus on the romantic era (the poetry of Keats & Shelley, Beethoven's 9th symphony, Turner's paintings), in coordination with more scientific approaches to these phenomena in affective neuroscience (Jaak Panksepp), psychoanalysis (selected Lacan, references to Freud) and philosophy (excerpts and references to Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, & Schiller). A feeling, an emotion, an affect is something that comes into existence or happens or that shows itself (Greek Phainein=to show) without our knowing exactly what it is, what caused it, or what it is "showing" or "saying." How have these phenomena and their function been interpreted? What do we at this point know, how does this compare to earlier speculations, and what should or can we try to do with our emotions and passions?
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
This course will take a transnational look at the strange ways that race and mass rumors have interacted. From the judicial and popular riots in the U.S. justified by recurrent rumors of African-American insurrection, to accusations that French Jews were players in the 'white slave trade,' to tales of white fat-stealing monsters among indigenous people of Bolivia and Peru, rumors play a key role in constructing, enforcing, and contesting regimes of racial identity and domination. In order to grasp rumor's importance for race, we will need to understand how it works, so our readings will cover both instances of racialized rumor-telling, conspiracy theories and mass panics, and some key approaches to how rumors work as a social phenomenon. The instructor will expect you to post a response to the reading on Courseworks each week and to engage actively in class discussion. There will be an in-class midterm exam, and you will be able to choose between writing an independent research project or doing a take-home exam.
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what "Dickensian" means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. . Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
In this seminar. we will trace the historic shifts in causal theories of deviance and their significance for the societal response. The readings are classics of social research that have been of great historical impact. They range from the early focus on individual pathologies to sociological explanations, the most recent being attempts to understand deviance as a product of organization factors that result in harmful outcomes. Examples are Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and school shootings.
Examines the historical and contemporary social, economic, and political factors that shape immigration law and policy along with the social consequences of those laws and policies. Addresses the development and function of immigration law and aspects of the immigration debate including unauthorized immigration, anti-immigration sentiments, and critiques of immigration policy.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer and Alice Walker.
Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.
Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.
This class will examine the historical roots and ongoing persistence of social, economic, and political inequality and the continuing role that it plays in U.S. society by examining how such issues have been addressed both in social science and in law.
This is an undergraduate senior seminar in social stratication. The course focuses on the current American experience with socioeconomic inequality and mobility. The goals of the course are to understand how inequality is conceptualized and measured in the social sciences, to understand the structure of inequality in the contemporary U.S., to learn the principal theories and evidence for long term trends in inequality, to understand the persistence of poverty and the impact of social policies on American rates of poverty, and to understand the forces that both produce and inhibit intergenerational social mobility in the U.S. Given the nature of the subject matter, a minority of the readings will sometimes involve quantitative social science material. The course does not presume that students have advanced training in statistics, and any readings sections that contain mathematical or statistical content will be explained in class in nontechnical terms as needed. In these instances, our focus will not be on the methods, but rather on the conclusions reached by the author concerning the research question that is addressed in the text.
Prerequisites: Instructor approval required
Considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist politics, and human rights. , If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine both men’s and women’s positions as as workers and political subjects? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the home, religious institutions, refugee camps, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. We will use specific sociological and anthropological case studies, to look at how various regimes of power operate to constrain individuals as well as give them new spaces for agency.This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender as a lens through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and identities.
The rise of crossover culture: racially segregated markets and genres; organizational environments and the rise of independent labels; the creative process and black-white conflict and connection; the emergence of rock as a "white" genre; civil rights, Black Power, and the politics of soul; cultural borrowing and the postracial ethos.
Drama in a period of rapid transition. The interaction of changing social structures and performative traditions. Protest plays, problem plays, and plays pursuing new social and aesthetic possibilities vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation. We will read texts, view films and stage adaptations, and attend NYC productions. Playwrights may include Dion Boucicault, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Colin Hazelwood/ Mary Bratton, Arthur Wing Pinero, Patrick Marber, Elizabeth Robins, Evelyn Glover, Lillian Hellman, Oscar Wilde, Theresa Rebeck, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Noel Coward, and Emma Rice.
Course Description TBA.