VIRGINIA WOOLF

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE AMERICAN STAGE

PERFORMING THE BODY POLIT

This seminar investigates how American theatre/performance, as read through the lens of gender and sexuality, operates as a cultural force.  Simply put, the U.S. is obsessed with sex; theatre/performance has proven a fertile medium for America’s expression of this obsession. Exploring texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider how performance intersects with the nation state’s desire to regulate how we “practice” gender both publicly and behind closed doors and how that intersects, overlaps and influences the politics of American Identity. How is performance, which always includes gendered/raced/classed/sexualized bodies, situated in relationship to ideas of a national body politic?  How does the American nation state hinge on how gender and sexuality are performed both on-stage and off?

• Department: English @Barnard
• W 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
• Instructor: Pamela Cobrin
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Six major concepts of political philosophy including authority, rights, equality, justice, liberty and democracy are examined in three different ways. First the conceptual issues are analyzed through contemporary essays on these topics by authors like Peters, Hart, Williams, Berlin, Rawls and Schumpeter. Second the classical sources on these topics are discussed through readings from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Plato, Mill and Rousseau. Third some attention is paid to relevant contexts of application of these concepts in political society, including such political movements as anarchism, international human rights, conservative, liberal, and Marxist economic policies as well as competing models of democracy.

• Department: Philosophy @Barnard
• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Ding Ding
  Info
• 3 points

LITERATURE ON DRUGS

Whether as sources of artistic creativity, symbols of moral decay, avenues of escape, or
foundations for alternative forms of sociality, drugs are an inexhaustible source of inspiration
for all manner of storytellers. Why is that? This course surveys the narrative history of
“literature on drugs” from three angles: first, we examine poetry and fiction composed under
the influence of mind-altering intoxicants; second, we study literature about drug-induced
experiences and the counter-cultures they have fueled; and we ask why literary criticism is
essential to articulate the danger and allure of drugs, past, present, and future. We will read
from literary psychonauts including William Blake, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Allen
Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Anaïs Nin, and Hunter S. Thompson; historians of the highly weird like
Michel Foucault and Erik Davis; and an array of primary sources on the legal, therapeutic, and
psychological complexities of drug use, such as Billy Holiday, Sigmund Freud, William James,
and Margaret Mead. We also will consider the cinematic history of literature on drugs with
films like Altered States, Trainspotting, and Apocalypse Now. The course incorporates hands-on
archival work and includes a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

• Department: English @Barnard
• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Nathan Gorelick
  Info
• 3 points

Experimental Research

Randomized experimentation is an important methodology in political science. In this course, we will discuss the logic of experimentation, its strengths and weaknesses compared to other methodologies, and the ways in which experimentation has been -- and could be -- used to investigate political phenomena. Students will learn how to interpret, design, and execute experiments.

• Department: Political Science
• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Yamil R Velez
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 8 Info
• 4 points

LIVING, DYING, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Bringing together scholars from the fields of Philosophy, Medicine, Ethics, and Religion, this course
exposes students to modes of inquiry that can help to answer central questions that are often elusive and/or
unconsidered: What constitutes a good human life? What do I need to be truly happy? How does the fact
that I will one day die impact how I should live today? This interdisciplinary course provides a rare
opportunity to consider how a wide variety of thinkers and writers have approached these questions, while
also engaging with them in a personal way within our contemporary context. Lectures will be combined
with group discussion and a weekend retreat, creating possibilities for interpersonal engagement and deep
learning.

• Department: Philosophy
• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• 3 points

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH-DISC

This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3768.

• Department: Political Science
• 0 points

Indigenous Enlightenment

What is the source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been the restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why.

• Department: Religion @Barnard
• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Timothy Vasko
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATN,CLTR,VAL

BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATNCLTRVAL

An intensive seminar analyzing questions of migration, identity, (self-) representation, and values with regard to the Turkish minority living in Germany today. Starting with a historical description of the „guest worker“ program that brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish nationals to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the course will focus on the experiences and cultural production of the second and third generations of Turkish Germans, whose presence has profoundly transformed German society and culture. Primary materials include diaries, autobiographies, legal and historical documents, but the course will also analyze poetry, novels, theater plays and films. In German.

• Department: Germanic Languages
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Mark M Anderson
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative

Lab Lit, Weird Sci, & Spe

This course will focus on literary fiction and film about science, scientists, and scientific culture.  We’ll ask how and why writers have wanted to represent the sciences and how their work is inspired, in turn, by innovations in scientific knowledge of their time.  This is not a class on genre fiction.  Unlike a science fiction class, we will cover narratives in a variety of genres—some highly speculative, and some in a more realist vein—thinking about how literary form is related to content.  We start with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, often considered the first work of science fiction, before moving to works from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including H.G. Welles’s
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
George Schulyer’s
Black No More
, Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith
, Carl Sagan’s
Contact
, Richard Powers’s
Overstory
, and the short stories of Ted Chiang.  We will also watch such films as James Whale’s
Frankenstein
, Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
, Andrew Niccol’s
Gattaca
, and Yorgos Lanthemos’s
Poor Things
. 

In addition to asking how science and scientists are represented in these narratives, we’ll also discuss the cultural impact of such scientific innovations as the discovery of electricity, cell theory, eugenics and racial science, vaccines and immunology, space travel, new reproductive technologies, gene editing and more.  A STEM background is not required, but students will be expected to have curiosity and motivation to learn about science, as well as its narrative representation.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 4 points

Prints in 17th-Century Holland: A Curato

Holland in the seventeenth century was home to some of the most innovative and influential printmakers in the history of art, most important among them, Rembrandt van Rijn. In addition, known for producing the most professional engravers, it became the main center for the issuing and distribution of prints in Europe. Held primarily in The Met’s Drawings and Prints Study Room, this class examines printmaking from this period in its many forms – from masterworks of Dutch landscape to political broadsheets. Reproductive printmakers and peintres-graveur, professional printmakers and amateurs will be considered. How prints were made, published, and sold will be explored. Students will learn how to identify techniques as well as quality of impression by examining original works in the collection of The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints. We will also look at the subject from the point of view of the museum curator – how works are collected and exhibitions created.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nadine M Orenstein
  Info
• 4 points

Lagos: From the Pepperfarm to the Megaci

Lagos: Pepperfarm to Mega

Lagos: The City Is…


the unofficial capital of Nigeria

the go-slow capital of the world

Rem Koolhaas’ planning mystery

George Packer’s mega-city nightmare


 

Above all, as social scientist Margaret Peil once said, Lagos: The city is the people. At last count, over 15 million people to be (in)exact which makes Lagos the second most densely populated city in Africa. How does a city like Lagos come into being? What are its origins?  What is its history in regional, continental, and global context?  How does it ‘work’ and what work does it do for our understandings of cities, urbanization, urbanism, colonialism, globalization, trans-nationalism, and the spatial factor in Africanist historical analyses?  This course examines the many Lagoses that have existed over time, in space, and in the imagination from the city’s origins to the 21st century.  This is a reading, writing, viewing, and listening intensive course.  We will be reading scholarly, policy-oriented, and popular sources on Lagos as well as screening films and audio recordings that feature Lagos in order to learn about the social, cultural, and intellectual history of this West African mega-city.

• Department: History @Barnard
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Abosede A George
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Department: Education @Barnard
• Instructor: Maria S Rivera Maulucci
  h-index: 10 Info
• Instructor: Lisa Edstrom
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 1-4 points

EARTH & ENVIR ENGIN LAB

Experiments on fundamental aspects of Earth and environmental engineering with emphasis on the applications of chemistry, biology and thermodynamics to environmental processes: energy generation, analysis and purification of water, environmental biology, and biochemical treatment of wastes. Students will learn the laboratory procedures and use analytical equipment firsthand, hence demonstrating experimentally the theoretical concepts learned in class.

• Department: Earth and Environmental Engineering
• TR 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• 4 points

SEM IN CONTEMP ART PRACTICE

(Formerly R4601) New York City is the most abundant visual arts resource in the world. Visits to museums, galleries, and studios on a weekly basis. Students encounter a broad cross-section of art and are encouraged to develop ideas about what is seen. The seminar is led by a practicing artist and utilizes this perspective. Columbia College and General Studies Visual Arts Majors must take this class during their junior year. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.

• Department: Visual Arts
• T 4 p.m.-7 p.m.
• Instructor: Keli Safia Maksud
  Info
• 3 points

ENVIR SCIENCE SENIOR SEM II

Guided, independent, in-depth research culminating in the senior thesis in the spring. Includes discussion about scientific presentations and posters, data analysis, library research methods and scientific writing. Students review work in progress and share results through oral reports. Weekly seminar to review work in progress and share results through oral and written reports. Prerequisite to EESC W3901.

• Department: Environmental Sciences @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

COLL:POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT

Prerequisites: V 1501 or equivalent Description: The semester-long course aims to study political and social factors behind economic development and exam empirical cases of the success and failure in economic growth in order to understand the key features of the development processes. In the last two centuries, some countries successfully achieved economic growth and development, while other failed to do so. Even in the post-WWII period, the world has witnessed the rise and decline of economies around the world. Why do nations succeed or fail in economic development? How do political institutions affect economic outcomes? What are the ways in which state and market interact and influence each other? Can democracy be considered a cause of development, an outgrowth of development, or neither and to which extent? How do external factors such as foreign aid encourage or discourage development? We will try to examine these questions by taking a historical-institutional and comparative approach and take a critical look at the role of political and other institutions by applying theoretical guidelines and empirical cases. We will explore competing explanations for the successes and failures of economic development in the world. Objective:1. Understand some important concepts and theories within the fields of comparative politics and political economy. To explore the interconnections between politics, economy, and society in the context of development policy and practice.2. Develop basic analytic skills to explore various factors that shape political, economic, and social development and underdevelopment in the world;3. Understand some country specific political economy processes and how these processes prove or disprove certain theories and policies.

• Department: Political Science @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Xiaobo Lu
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

CHEM ENG & APPLIED CHEM LAB

Emphasizes active, experiment-based resolution of open-ended problems involving use, design, and optimization of equipment, products, or materials. Under faculty guidance students formulate, carry out, validate, and refine experimental procedures, and present results in oral and written form. Develops analytical, communications, and cooperative problem-solving skills in the context of problems that span from traditional, large scale separations and processing operations to molecular level design of materials or products. Sample projects include: scale up of apparatus, process control, chemical separations, microfluidics, surface engineering, molecular sensing, and alternative energy sources. Safety awareness is integrated.

• Department: Chemical Engineering
• MW 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
• 3 points

LITERARY APPROACHES TO BIBLE

Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature.

• Department: English @Barnard
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Margaret R Ellsberg
  CULPA: 54 Info
• 4 points

TOXIC

It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own.

• Department: Anthropology
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Knowledge, Practice, Power

COLLOQUIUM ON FEMINIST INQUIRY

Knowledge, Practice, Power is a practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for. Open to non-majors, but sophomore and junior majors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are encouraged to enroll in this course as preparation for Senior Seminar I. This course is required for students pursuing the concentration or minor in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies. Prerequisite: 
Either
 one introductory WGSS course 
or
 Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory 
or
 Permission of the Instructor.

• Department: Women's, Gender, Sexuality Studies @Barnard
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza
  Info
• 4 points

Black Shakespeare

This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring  representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s
Othello
will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor

• Department: Africana Studies (AFSB)
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Kim F Hall
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING LAB II

Biomedical experimental design and hypothesis testing. Statistical analysis of experimental measurements. Analysis of experimental measurements. Analysis of variance, post hoc testing. Fluid shear and cell adhesion, neuro-electrophysiology, soft tissue biomechanics, biomecial imaging and ultrasound, characterization of excitable tissues, microfluidics.

• Department: Biomedical Engineering
• W 1:10 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
• R 1:10 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
• 3 points

Archives of Possibility

In part due to the rise of social and political movements challenging and reshaping colonial narratives about the past, the emergence of digital technologies, and unprecedented access to information, attention to archives has increased over the last decades. This course aims to familiarize students with theories, histories, and practices of archival-building as a mode of knowledge production and to explore questions regarding the relationship between archives and power. The course also examines how and under what conditions archives open up new possibilities by producing and circulating marginalized knowledge, narratives, and perspectives; promotes archival research, and familiarizes students with the basics of preservation in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As part of the course, students will research Columbia's archives and build their own as part of this process.

• Department: Ethnicity and Race, Center for
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner
  CULPA: 18 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

RACE, CASTE, AND THE UNIVERSITY: B. R. A

RACE, CASTE, AND UNIVERSI

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey.

 

This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, Rare Books and Manuscript Library Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more.

This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and stuents will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research.  This seminar inaugurates an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with globalizing the reach and relevance of B. R. Ambedkar and to share our findings with the Columbia community and beyond.  Working independently, students will define and pursue individual research projects.  Working together, the class will create digital visualizations of these projects.

• Department: History @Barnard
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Anupama Rao
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 4 points

FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER SYSTS

Fundamentals of computer organization and digital logic. Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, basic gates and components, flipflops and latches, counters and state machines, basics of combinational and sequential digital design. Assembly language, instruction sets, ALU’s, single-cycle and multi-cycle processor design, introduction to pipelined processors, caches, and virtual memory.

• Department: Computer Science
• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Daniel S Rubenstein
  CULPA: 29 Info
• 3 points

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR

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.

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nadia Abu El-Haj
  CULPA: 13 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Citizenship: Regional and Global Histori

Citizenship in South Asia

This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities.

• Department: History
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kalyani Ramnath
  Info
• 4 points

New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, H

The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine
Partisan Review
on Astor Place.  Although usually regarded as male dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time.  Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary;  Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection
The Company She Keeps
; Susan Sontag’s debut
Against Interpretation
(1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book
On Photography
(1977) she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL

• Department: History
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Marwa Elshakry
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Tunc Sen
  Info
• Instructor: Hannah Farber
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). As the great imperial powers of Britain, France, and Belgium, among others, ceded self-rule to the colonies they once controlled, formerly colonized subjects engaged in passionate discussion about the shape of their new nations not only in essays and pamphlets but also in fiction, poetry, and theatre. Despite the common goal of independence, the heated debates showed that the postcolonial future was still up for grabs, as the boundary lines between and within nations were once again redrawn. Even such cherished notions as nationalism were disputed, and thinkers like the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore sounded the alarm about the pitfalls of narrow ethnocentric thinking. Their call for a philosophy of internationalism went against the grain of ethnic and racial particularism, which had begun to take on the character of national myth. The conflict of perspectives showed how deep were the divisions among the various groups vying to define the goals of the postcolonial nation, even as they all sought common cause in liberation from colonial rule. Nowhere was this truer than in India. The land that the British rulers viewed as a test case for the implementation of new social philosophies took it upon itself to probe their implications for the future citizenry of a free, democratic republic. We will read works by Indian writers responding to decolonization and, later, globalization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Beginning as a movement against imperial control, anti-colonialism also generated new discussions about gender relations, secularism and religious difference, the place of minorities in the nation, the effects of partition on national identity, among other issues. With the help of literary works and historical accounts, this course will explore the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society in a globalized era without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. Writers on the syllabus include Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Mahasweta Devi, Bapsi Sidwa, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu ) with the subject heading Indian Writing in English seminar. In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gauri Viswanathan
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performa

This visual arts seminar explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP.  This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Janina P Marshall
  Info
• 4 points

OUT OF PLACE

Literature has always attracted the outsider, and literature itself seems to demand from its writers to momentarily step out of the fray in order to hope to observe it. The modern age has offered different examples of this. When Bernard Levin described V.S. Naipaul as an ‘inquiline’ author — meaning, a guest or a lodger, an animal that lives in another's nest — Naipaul responded:

‘When I see the sun set here at Stonehenge, there is a way that it is somebody else’s sun, somebody else’s landscape, it has somebody’s else's history connected with it. I can't avoid that: that's the way I think.’

When Virginia Woolf received news of the death of Joseph Conrad, she sat down and penned an admiring obituary that opens with what might be read as a presumptuously arrogant statement:

‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’

Despite Woolf’s English snobbishness, her words reveal something true about Conrad’s situation, and about the place of many other writers who were, for one reason or another, obliged to operate in foreign lands, inside other languages or states of being, authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Ovid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Waguih Ghali and David Malouf.

Through the close analysis of a narrow selection of works, this class will chart the ways in which such works reveal the nature and imaginative location of the artist out of place. We will be interested in the question of to what extent is writing a process of mapping an intellectual, aesthetic, psychic or geographical territory. We will be motivated by close reading, interpretation, and the adventure of comparing different portraits of being an outsider-insider.

We may refer to fragments by travellers and explorers such as Leo Africanus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Ibn Battuta, or look at the work of artists who crossed boundaries, such as the 15th century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and the impact of his visit to Mehmed II’s court in 1479, or the influence of the Arabesque on the music of Claude Debussy.

We will explore what it is about literature and, in particular, the novel that has made it so well-suited for por

• Department: English @Barnard
• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Hisham Matar
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Introduction to Fashion Studies

Intro to Fashion Studies

This seminar examines the many meanings of fashion, design, and style; how values underlying fashion are selected, preserved, denied, reinvented or rethought; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production and consumption of fashion goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand fashion through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how fashion can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary society, and in relation to a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course. In English.

• Department: Italian
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Barbara Faedda
  Info
• 3 points

Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Inter

Photo as Material:A Studi

Images today can feel increasingly unstable, untethered to physical and interpersonal experience, and also unstoppable, generating and proliferating at accelerating speeds. What do we do with all this material? What are the global consequences of the mass circulation of images? And how do artists specifically make sense of the contemporary state of photography? This course invites students into a non-conventional, interdisciplinary approach to making, reading, critiquing, and relating to images. We begin with the fundamentally physical elements of photography—space, light, and lens—and end with the embedded histories, social relations, and personal narratives that photographs can trace or carry. We discuss case studies and readings by and about artists and theorists who research and make work across international contexts, exploring, for example, how early colonial histories of photography prefigure its contemporary conditions, and how images can echo or challenge patterns of displacement and resistance. We create artworks informed by this research, exploring how to physically manipulate, present, and disseminate images in hands-on thematic projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• R 10:10 a.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Mira Dayal
  Info
• 3 points

Tokyo

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.

• Department: Art History @Barnard
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan Reynolds
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

• Department: Anthropology @Barnard
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 4 points

LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions.  From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects.  How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

• Department: Anthropology
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

BEOWULF

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem
Beowulf
.  We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship.  As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: David M Yerkes
  CULPA: 41 Info
• 4 points

THE MONGOLS IN HISTORY

Study of the role of the Mongols in Eurasian history, focusing on the era of the Great Mongol Empire. The roles of Chinggis and Khubilai Khan and the modern fate of the Mongols to be considered.

• Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Morris Rossabi
  CULPA: 12 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students who have applied for and declared a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medical Humanities.

• Department: Comparative Literature and Society, Institute for
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• None None-None
• Instructor: Rishi K Goyal
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Tadas Bugnevicius
  Info
• 3 points

UNDERGRAD RESEARCH OR PROJECT

Independent work involving experiments, computer programming, analytical investigation, or engineering design.

• Department: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
• Instructor: Anish Agarwal
  Info
• Instructor: Shipra Agrawal
  h-index: 24 Info
• Instructor: Eric Balkanski
  h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Daniel Bienstock
  h-index: 38 Info
• Instructor: Agostino Capponi
  h-index: 19 Info
• Instructor: Rachel Cummings
  h-index: 16 Info
• Instructor: Antonius B Dieker
  CULPA: 10 h-index: 19 Info
• Instructor: Adam N Elmachtoub
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Yuri Faenza
  h-index: 11 Info
• Instructor: Vineet Goyal
  h-index: 21 Info
• Instructor: Ali Hirsa
  h-index: 8 Info
• Instructor: Anran Hu
  Info
• Instructor: Garud Iyengar
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 30 Info
• Instructor: Hardeep Johar
  Info
• Instructor: Cedric Josz
  CULPA: 2 h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Soulaymane Kachani
  CULPA: 12 Info
• Instructor: Yaren Kaya
  Info
• Instructor: Christian Kroer
  h-index: 16 Info
• Instructor: Daniel Lacker
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Henry Lam
  h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Fabrizio Lecci
  Info
• Instructor: Tianyi Lin
  Info
• Instructor: Uday Menon
  Info
• Instructor: Bento Natura
  Info
• Instructor: Jay Sethuraman
  CULPA: 10 Info
• Instructor: Karl Sigman
  CULPA: 15 Info
• Instructor: Eric Stratman
  Info
• Instructor: Clifford Stein
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia h-index: 53 Info
• Instructor: Kaizheng Wang
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 8 Info
• Instructor: Wenpin Tang
  h-index: 6 Info
• Instructor: Kaizheng Wang
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 8 Info
• Instructor: Lily Xu
  Info
• Instructor: David D Yao
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Yi Zhang
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Xunyu Zhou
  h-index: 54 Info
• Instructor: Christine Chan
  Info
• Instructor: Kelly Katsigris
  Info
• 1-3 points

SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH

Prerequisites: Permission of the departmental representative required. For specially selected students, the opportunity to do a research problem in contemporary physics under the supervision of a faculty member. Each year several juniors are chosen in the spring to carry out such a project beginning in the autumn term. A detailed report on the research is presented by the student when the project is complete.

• Department: Physics
• Instructor: Jeremy R Dodd
  CULPA: 25 Info
• 1-5 points

SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH

Prerequisites: Permission of the departmental representative required. For specially selected students, the opportunity to do a research problem in contemporary physics under the supervision of a faculty member. Each year several juniors are chosen in the spring to carry out such a project beginning in the autumn term. A detailed report on the research is presented by the student when the project is complete.

• Department: Physics and Astronomy @Barnard
• Instructor: Timothy J Halpin-Healy
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 1-5 points

SENIOR THESIS I

Department approval required. See requirements for a major in visual arts. VIAR UN3900 is the prerequisite for VIAR UN3901. Corequisites: VIAR UN3910 (Formerly R3901) Students must enroll in both semesters of the course (VIAR UN3900 and VIAR UN3901). The student is required to produce a significant body of work in which the ideas, method of investigation, and execution are determined by the student. A plan is developed in consultation with the faculty. Seminars; presentations. At the end, an exhibition or other public venue is presented for evaluation. Studio space is provided with a refundable deposit of $150.

• Department: Visual Arts
• W 5:15 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Naeem Mohaiemen
  Wikipedia h-index: 8 Info
• 2 points

INDEPENDENT STDY-UNDERGRADUATE

INDEPENDENT STUDY-UNDERGRAD

• Department: African American and African Diaspora
• Instructor: Frank Guridy
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Brandi Summers
  Info
• Instructor: Jafari S Allen
  Info
• Instructor: Nyle Fort
  Info
• Instructor: Rachel Grace Newman
  Info
• Instructor: Farah Griffin
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 1-4 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

SR SEM: ARCH & ENV S ASIA

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• Department: Architecture @Barnard
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Anooradha I Siddiqi
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

SR SEM: CURATING ARCH

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• Department: Architecture @Barnard
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
  Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS

Prerequisites: Senior majors only. Senior Seminar required of all majors in East Asian Studies. Open only to senior majors.

• Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
• Instructor: Lu Kou
  Info
• 3 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

Guided, independent, in-depth research culminating in the senior thesis in the spring. Includes discussion about scientific presentations and posters, data analysis, library research methods and scientific writing. Students review work in progress and share results through oral reports. Weekly seminar to review work in progress and share results through oral and written reports.

• Department: Earth and Environmental Sciences
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Maureen Raymo
  Wikipedia h-index: 62 Info
• 3 points

SENIOR THESIS II

Department approval required. See requirements for a major in visual arts. VIAR UN3900 is the prerequisite for VIAR UN3901. Corequisites: VIAR UN3910 (Formerly R3901) Students must enroll in both semesters of the course (VIAR UN3900 and VIAR UN3901). The student is required to produce a significant body of work in which the ideas, method of investigation, and execution are determined by the student. A plan is developed in consultation with the faculty. Seminars; presentations. At the end, an exhibition or other public venue is presented for evaluation. Studio space is provided with a refundable deposit of $150.

• Department: Visual Arts
• W 5:15 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Naeem Mohaiemen
  Wikipedia h-index: 8 Info
• 2 points

SENIOR HONORS THESIS SEM

Weekly seminar to accompany Senior Honors Thesis Lab (CHEM BC3903). Focus is on scientific presentation and writing skills and research conduct.

• Department: Chemistry @Barnard
• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Jean Vadakkan
  Info
• 4 points