This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy.
In the wake of World War II, the so-called American Century rises out of the ashes of fascism, haunted by the specter of bombs blurring the boundary between victory and defeat. An ideological civil war ensues, punctuated by literary resistance to grand narratives and their discontents. Authors include Ellison, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Bishop, Pynchon, Robinson, Merrill, Morrison, Didion, and Wallace.
Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.
This course will introduce students to the international law of human rights, and give a basic orientation to fundamental issues and controversies. The course has two principal focal points: first, the nuts and bolts of how international law functions in the field of human rights, and second, the value and limitations of legal approaches to a variety of human rights issues. Throughout the course, both theoretical and practical questions will be addressed, including who bears legal duties and who can assert legal claims, how these duties might be enforced, and accountability and remedy for violations. Attention will be given to how international law is made, what sorts of assumptions underlie various legal mechanisms, and how the law works in a variety of contexts.
(Formerly called Literary Criticism - Theory.) Provides experience in the reading and analysis of literary texts and some knowledge of conspicuous works of literary criticism. Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.
Psychoanalysis, world war, and shifting gender paradigms inspire fragmented narratives, stream-of-consciousness prose, and improbable blends of erudition and the avant-garde. Stylistic innovation notwithstanding, Modernism authorizes a remarkably traditional literary canon. Special attention will be devoted to how seminal manifestos, most notably Tradition and the Individual Talent and A Room of Ones Own, frame the movements embattled aesthetics. Works by Eliot, Woolf, Barnes, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, Stein, Toomer, and Yeats.
This seminar provides an introduction and overview of key contemporary research and professional issues in the field of Educational Psychology. Educational psychology can help students develop well-informed, empirically sound, creative, and ethical judgments about educational goals, policies, and practices. This course examines the theoretical and applied aspects of learning, motivation, human development, assessment and evaluation in the educational setting. Content includes the study of learning theories as well as cognitive, emotional, and social learning theories that underlie education and human development. Emphasis is placed on developing skills to better understand learners to foster improved learning, influence and manage classroom learning, and recognize and consider individual differences.
An exploration of alternative theoretical approaches to the study of religion as well as other areas of humanistic inquiry. The methods considered include: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy, and deconstruction. (Previous title: Juniors Colloquium)
Basic non-Euclidean coordinate systems, Newtonian Mechanics, oscillations, Greens functions, Newtonian graviation, Lagrangian mechanics, central force motion, two-body collisions, noninertial reference frames, rigid body dynamics. Applications, including GPS and feedback control systems, are emphasized throughout.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor given at first class meeting. Exploration of the evolution of the director's role in Europe and the US, including the study of important figures. Emphasis on text analysis, and varied schools of acting in relation to directing practice. Students gain a foundation in composing stage pictures and using stage movement to tell a story. All students will direct at least one fully-realized scene. Fulfills one course in Directing requirement for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors. Fulfills one of three courses in performance fields for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors: directing.
Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop is for students with significant narrative and/or critical experience. Students will produce original literary nonfiction for the workshop, with an added focus on developing a distinctive voice and approach.
Prerequisites: ARCH UN2101 and ARCH UN2103. Advanced Architectural Design I explores the role of architecture and design in relationship to climate, community, and the environment through a series of design projects requiring drawings and models. Field trips, lectures, and discussions are organized in relation to studio exercises. A portfolio of design work from the prerequisite courses ARCH UN2101 and ARCH UN2103 will be reviewed the first week of classes.
A course on analysis of linear and nonlinear circuits and their applications. Formulation of circuit equations. Network theorems. Transient response of first and second order circuits. Sinusoidal steady state-analysis. Frequency response of linear circuits. Poles and zeros. Bode plots. Two-port networks.
Prerequisites: Open to first-year students. We derive much of our information about the world from visual media. Social networks, television, cinema: all shape our aesthetic sensibilities and our political visions. Yet we often lack a basic understanding of what could be called “visual literacy.” This introductory course gives students the critical tools to analyze how film and other visual media
really
work – in order to appreciate their artistic and social achievements, as well as to guard against their insidious manipulative devices. In the first part of the semester, we focus on
film analysis
through a detailed study of the different production phases of filmmaking – from screenwriting and mise-en-scène to editing and film scoring. We pay special attention to the way in which certain stylistic and narrative choices have particular ideological effects. The second part of the course looks at
film history
through a comprehensive, chronological overview of its main movements and periods, including the coming of sound in Hollywood cinema, post-war Italian Neorealism, the emergence of world
auteurs
, New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, etc. Students will use the hermeneutical tools learnt in film analysis to intellectually engage with some masterworks of film history. In the third and final part of the semester, we study the major debates of
film theory
from perspectives such as auteurism, formalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial and queer studies, etc. Required screenings include
Nanook of the North
(Flaherty, 1922),
Sunrise
(Murnau, 1927),
Man with a Movie Camera
(Vertov, 1929),
Casablanca
(Curtiz, 1942),
Bicycle Thieves
(De Sica, 1948),
Rashomon
(Kurosawa, 1950),
Breathless
(Godard, 1960),
Belle de Jour
(Buñuel, 1967),
The Hour of the Furnaces
(Solanas, 1968),
Seven Beauties
(Wertmüller, 1974),
Blue Velvet
(Lynch, 1986),
Paris Is Burning
(Livingstone, 1990), and
Children of Men
(Cuarón, 2006).
This course offers a survey of American religions from the 1500s through the mid-1800s. We examine the politics of conversion in different kinds of colonialisms; the different strands of Christianity in early America and their cultural contexts; the emergence of evangelical Protestantism; the effects of religious disestablishment in the early republic; and the relationship between religion and social movements.
Prerequisites: Open to students who have taken at least one course in directing. Required for students approved for Directing thesis, but open to all qualified students. Permission of instructor given at first class meeting. This course requires students to draw on all previous theatre training, synthesizing scholarship and research toward dynamic fully-realized scene work. Emphasis is on the director-actor relationship; students will direct at least three fully-realized scenes, typically drawn from Shakespeare, Chekhov, or other playwrights. Students may have the opportunity to make devised work, and will collaborate with students in the Advanced Acting class. Required for, but not limited to, students undertaking a senior thesis in directing. Fulfills additional directing coursework in Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major.
Prerequisites: Any introductory course in computer programming. Logic and formal proofs, sequences and summation, mathematical induction, binomial coefficients, elements of finite probability, recurrence relations, equivalence relations and partial orderings, and topics in graph theory (including isomorphism, traversability, planarity, and colorings).
This course investigates how works of fiction reflect on what it means to make moral, aesthetic, and political judgments. It focuses on works by two Romantic-era authors, Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who were contemporaries of one another but have rarely been read together as they inhabited and wrote about vastly different milieux. Strikingly, both have been hailed for their precise mastery of language and form, their keen sense of irony, and their singularly philosophical dispositions. They wrote at a crucial time in both Western and global modernity when European philosophers were re-defining the very activity of judgment itself in relation to new understandings of reason, truth, and the conditions of knowledge. We will read three of Austen’s six completed novels and a play, short stories, a novella, and prose writings by Kleist, paying attention to philosophical problems of self-knowledge, judgment, freedom, and autonomy in relation to historical instantiations of gender, class, and race. Besides studying how these early nineteenth-century works staged processes and crises of judgment, we will ask ourselves what lessons in judgment these works may continue to offer us today.
Power, Politics, and Society
introduces students to the field of political sociology, a subfield within sociology that is deeply engaged in the study of power in formal and diffuse forms. Using sociological theories and current events from the US and around the world, this course is designed to help students analyze their social worlds, and understand the significance of the old adage, “everything is political.”
(Please note that you do not need to take
ENGL BC3204
World Literature Revisited I and
ENGL BC3205
World Literature Revisited II in sequence; you may take them in any order.) What/where/whom constitutes the world in World Literature? Traditionally, why have some types of writing and inscription been privileged over others when determining the category of literature? How can we read and trace literary influence across these literatures without reducing them to a mere repetition of the same themes and ideas? Finally, we will think about the role that translation plays in the production and politics of World Literature and how the issue of translation differentiates between the disciplines of Comparative Literature and World Literature.This course will be taught over one year. Taking both halves of the course is recommended, but not required. In the first semester, we will deal with ancient texts until around the 14th century, and our focus will be origin stories and epic narratives, lyric poetry, and sacred/religious texts.
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
.
In this class we will explore the process of healing from trauma through the art of storytelling. We will ground ourselves in the writing of Latina authors whose work demonstrates the resistance from erasure in the United States. The goal of the class is to understand the connection between trauma and healing, through storytelling and creative writing. Moreover, we will develop three pieces of creative non-fiction that will encompass this relationship over the three different lenses of place, person and personal experience.
Study of apocalyptic thinking and practice in the western religious tradition, with a focus on American apocalyptic religious movements and their relation to contemporary cultural productions, as well as notions of history and politics.
Application required: A design portfolio and application is required for this course. The class list will be announced before classes start. Advanced Architectural Research and Design is an opportunity for students to consider international locations and address contemporary global concerns, incorporating critical questions, research methods, and design strategies that are characteristic of an architect’s operations at this scale.
Prerequisites: ECON UN1105 and MATH UN1101 and (MATH UN1201 or MATH UN1207) The determination of the relative prices of goods and factors of production and the allocation of resources.
Required Discussion section for ECON UN3211 intermediate Economics.
Prerequisites: (MATH UN1101 or MATH UN1207) and ECON UN1105 or the equivalent. Corequisites: MATH UN1201 This course covers the determination of output, employment, inflation and interest rates. Topics include economic growth, business cycles, monetary and fiscal policy, consumption and savings and national income accounting.
Discussion section for ECON UN3213 Intermediate Macro. Student must register for a section.
This course encompasses themes of race, ethnicity, mass incarceration, and immigration in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will consider the roles of journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives in shaping public policy and attitudes towards lives behind bars. Guest speakers will also provide personal experiences to help reframe our own narratives and perspectives on these issues. The course’s primary goal is to challenge the process of how stories of race, immigration, and mass incarceration are written, by developing scholarly pieces.
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Creative nonfiction is a frustratingly vague term. How do we give it real literary meaning; examine its compositional aims and techniques, its achievements and especially its aspirations? This course will focus on works that we might call visionary - works that combine art forms, genres and styles in striking ways. Works in which image and text combine to create a third interactive language for the reader. Works still termed fiction history or journalism that join fact and fiction to interrogate their uses and implications. Certain memoirs that are deliberately anti-autobiographical, turning from personal narrative to the sounds, sight, impressions and ideas of the writers milieu. Certain essays that join personal reflection to arts and cultural criticism, drawing on research and imagination, the vernacular and the formal, even prose and poetry. The assemblage or collage that, created from notebook entries, lists, quotations, footnotes and indexes achieves its coherence through fragments and associations, found and original texts.
This course traces the history of Korean cinema and literature from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Particular attention is given to colonialism, national division, war, gender relations, authoritarianism, urbanization, consumer culture, and diaspora. What kinds of familial, social, economic, and political relations do these films and literary works envision? We will link films and literary texts to their historical context, noting how representations of people, places, and ideas have changed over time—from colonialism, through poverty and malaise in the aftermath of the Korean War, to North Korea’s continuing search for autonomy in the world system and South Korea’s current position as global economic power and maker of the “Korean Wave ”
Although Victorian fiction is best known today for its realist commitment to representing the world “as it really is,” especially in genres such as the courtship novel and the Bildungsroman, Victorian novelists also wrote during an age of enthusiastic scientific inquiry that questioned and revised the very fabric of the reality that realist genres purported to represent. This course will accordingly explore the more adventurous and speculative fiction of the Victorian period that was most closely attuned to these new ways of representing and thinking about reality. How did new scientific developments such as evolutionary theory in biology, and the atomic theory in physics, reshape how writers viewed the relationships between human and animal, self and other, space and time, body and mind? How did departing from traditional realist modes enable Victorian science fiction writers to explore the ethical, social, and political implications of scientific theories in ways that scientific prose may not have envisioned? In this course we will read major works of Victorian fiction, by such authors as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, alongside selections of scientific prose in such fields of Victorian science as biology, physics, mathematics, anthropology, and psychology. Throughout the course, we will understand “science” to include both major developments in the history of science, such as the emergence of evolutionary thought, as well as more eccentric Victorian areas of inquiry, such as phrenology, mesmerism, telepathy, and degeneration. The first three units into which the course is divided each explore a major field of Victorian science alongside a major conceptual category that it challenged and altered: biology and the nature of the human; psychology and the constitution of the self; the physical sciences and the nature of space and time. In each unit, we will investigate how writers’ engagements with these conceptual questions led them to experiment with literary categories such as character, narration, and plot. The course will close with a unit on texts that more broadly address Victorian conceptions of progress, technology, and development. In addition to these specific thematic and formal questions, we will think broadly about how the Victorians understood the value of science and technology in relation to the arts and to literature, and ask what their answers to these questions can offer us as we navigate similar questions today. What
This course proposes to examine the implications of what Trinh T. Minh-Ha has called "specialness," or the distinctiveness of "ethnic" or "third world" experience, as it is represented and consumed in the literary marketplace (including classes like this one). That consumption has a discourse of its own, centered on often conflicting demands for authenticity. The test of authenticity for one reading community might be a book's perceived difference from that community's own experience; for another community (usually the one the author is perceived as coming from), the same book must represent a familiar experience to pass the test. Some questions we will address: How might "ethnic" writing and production both expose itself to and insulate itself from critique via claims to authenticity? How does an author negotiate others' demands for a certain kind of authenticity, and his or her own deeply felt (authentic?) need to consolidate identity by returning to ethnic “origins”? What in a set of publisher’s or reader’s demands for the “real” form or shape what we determine to be “fake”? We will study the primary texts in the context of mainstream literary reviews and other theoretical/polemical statements concerning the “meaning” of ethnic experience. Authors studied may include: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Ishmael Reed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Jeanine Cummins, and Trinh Minh-Ha.
Explores the aesthetic and formal developments in Russian prose, especially the rise of the monumental 19th-century novel, as one manifestation of a complex array of national and cultural aspirations, humanistic and imperialist ones alike. Works by Pushkin, Lermonotov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Knowledge of Russian not required.
Prerequisites: POLS W1201 or the equivalent, or the instructors permission. Inquiry into the dynamics, organization, and policy-making processes of the American Congress. Particular emphasis on the relationship of legislators to constituents, lobbyists, bureaucrats, the president, and with one another.
"New York in Ten Objects" introduces students to the creative possibilities of the podcast. Drawing on the possibilities of interdisciplinary analysis and creative non-fiction, this course aims to use quotidian objects to critically engage with the city, re-rendering those objects extraordinary and telling untold stories. The starting points for our investigation are ten concrete objects – some iconic, some ironic, but all characteristic of New York City. Beginning with these objects, students will develop projects, in small groups and individually, that connect these objects with a broader societal movement, cultural idea, political cause, or scientific development significant to past or present New York City life. To prepare students to develop their projects in an audio medium, we will first become familiar with a range of current podcasts, and will begin to break down the elements of podcast-storytelling as practiced today. Through workshops with IMATS in a weekly lab session and hands-on experience, students will learn how to collect audio interviews, ambient sound, and to record voice-over narration. Every student will outline their ideas, develop scripts, and produce a podcast by layering and editing their audio files. In the end, this course will investigate how the popular medium of the podcast can serve as a locus of local conversation and public intellectual activity. Students will learn how ordinary objects can breathe life into a story and how audio stories can advance critical analysis. Applications are due by 1 August:
https://forms.gle/Gtb5YWgeq59Mnfhy5
. Please note that this seminar is limited to 14 students. You will be notified of your acceptance or non-acceptance to the course before the first day of classes. After receiving admittance into the course, you MUST come to the first class to secure your seat.
Prerequisites: FILM BC 3201 or equivalent. Some film scholars seem confused when the term “Independent Cinema” is used in academic discussions. “Independent of what?” and “How independent really?” immediately come up as questions to dismiss the term as too general and misleading. Yet Independent Cinema is not a vague concept: quite the contrary, it very specifically designates the terrain where one of the most controversial debates in America’s film history has taken place. In this course, we study 1) the most important alternative film practices in the US during the 1980s and 1990s, assessing their political and aesthetic accomplishments, and 2) the way “Indie” Cinema was simultaneously incorporated, neutralized, and/or neglected by mainstream media conglomerates. For that purpose, we first focus on the development of non-standard modes of production in the 1940s and 1950s – as exemplified in some works by Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and John Cassavetes – as well as Hollywood’s commercial strategies to renew its hegemony from the 1960s onwards – we take Dennis Hopper’s
Easy Rider
(1969) as a case study. We then turn to the analysis of “minor” American cinemas, their forms of thinking, and their impact in public debates concerning freedom of speech, civil rights, and the representation of minorities in the screen during the 1980s. In the last part of the semester, we examine the commodification of independent filmmaking in the 1990s (Disney’s takeover of Miramax, cooptation of the Sundance Film Festival, etc) to further understand that subtle division between art and commercialism in recent American cinema. In-class screenings include
Eraserhead
(David Lynch, 1977),
Chan Is Missing
(Wayne Wang, 1982),
Down by Law
(Jim Jarmusch, 1986),
Do the Right Thing
(Spike Lee, 1989),
sex, lies, and videotape
(Steven Soderbergh, 1989),
American Dream
(Barbara Kopple, 1990),
Reservoir Dogs
(Quentin Tarantino, 1992), and
Inside Llewyn Davis
(Coen brothers, 2013).
The course proposes to examine the major works of Aldous Huxley as vital contributions to the emerging 20th century canon of modernism, internationalism, pacifism, spiritualism, and the psychology of modern consciousness. Critical studies of Huxley have typically split his work into two phases—social satire and mysticism—that roughly correspond to Huxley’s perceived oscillation between cynicism and religiosity. This course proposes a less disjunctive approach to his writings. Huxley’s starkly dystopian vision in Brave New World often overshadowed his earnest endeavors to find a meeting point between mainstream Western thought and the philosophical traditions of the non-Western world, particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism. His early novels, including Brave New World, bear traces of his deep-seated spiritual quest, even as his works were steeped in critiques of the ominous trends towards regimentation and authoritarian control of the social body. As a novelist of ideas, Huxley gave voice to the most vexing intellectual and moral conflicts of his time, refusing to retreat into the solipsism of experimental writing while at the same time searching for wholeness in Eastern meditative systems. This course probes Huxley’s writings from a multitude of angles, examining his works (both fiction and nonfiction) in the context of evolutionary, secular thought, while also reading them as strivings towards models of world peace inspired, to some extent, by mystical thought. The latter invoked concepts drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought, alongside Christian mysticism and Taoism, in an eclectic practice that Huxley called “the perennial philosophy.” Organized chronologically, course readings include Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Perennial Philosophy (1944), Ape and Essence (1948), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Doors of Perception (1954), The Genius and the Goddess (1955), Island (1962), and The Divine Within (1992). This course will be of importance especially to students interested in the intersections of 20th century British modernist literature and non-Western philosophical and religious systems, as well as more generally to students interested in an intensive study of one of the 20th century’s most prolific authors.
Prerequisites: CHEM BC3230. Lecture: MWF 10:00-10:50. Extension of concepts from Organic Chemistry I to conjugated systems; chemistry of the carbonyl group; NMR and IR spectroscopy; bioorganic chemistry.
This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure. We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.
This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure. We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.
This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure. We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.
Prerequisites: One introductory course in Sociology suggested. Social movements and the theories social scientists use to explain them, with emphasis on contemporary American activism. Cases include the Southern civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, contemporary feminist mobilizations, LGBTQ activism, immigrant rights and more recent forms of grassroots politics.
Seeing the Body: Movement and Physicality in Modern Visual Culture will examine how concepts of
movement, space, and time gained an outsized role in photographic and cinematic experimentation,
typography, interior design and exhibition, contributing a “choreographic voice” to the interwar age.
Prerequisites: EEEB UN1010 or EEEB UN1011 or the instructor's permission. Throughout their range, numerous primate species are on the brink of extinction. This course examines the central issues relating to conservation of wild primates and explores strategies and solutions for preserving these endangered populations. Through the analysis of the ecological and social traits linked to vulnerability and the direct and indirect threats from human activities, students will gain a practical understanding of how to develop successful, sustainable, and practical conservation strategies.
Prerequisites: FREN UN2102 French socio-political issues and language through the prism of film. Especially designed for non-majors wishing to further develop their French language skills and learn about French culture. Each module includes assignments targeting the four language competencies: reading, writing, speaking and oral comprehension, as well as cultural understanding.
Shelter is one of our most basic human needs. Yet
housing
, and its legal, social and political meanings and struggles around its distribution, possession and safety, is a concept that can only be fully understood as a historical phenomenon. In the industrializing and urbanizing world, the concept of “housing” emerged at the intersection of questions of property rights, the study of urban problems, and the legal and cultural distinctions between public and private spheres. Throughout the world, the provision of shelter for urban populations has been at the center of urban crises and conflicts, as well as their solutions. This course will examine the deep history of urban segregation, fights for healthy and safe housing, and scholarly and policy debates about the “planet of slums.” The course’s geographic scope is global, using both comparative and transnational approaches, and we will explore the connections between local and global movements and historical processes. Through a historically-oriented but interdisciplinary set of readings, students in this class will become familiar with the terms of debates about the right to shelter as a social, political and legal problem in the modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) world. We will explore how history provides a unique view on how the question of housing is a social justice issue connected to other ones like mass incarceration and the destruction wrought by wars, famines, and intergenerational racial, ethnic and class inequalities. There are no pre- or co-requisites for this class.
Composition in more extended forms. Study of advanced techniques of contemporary composition. Readings of student works.
Prerequisites: 2 years of college French Paris may be referred to as the capital of modernity, as the city of romance and pleasure, as the center of social and political powers, or as a privileged stage for crises and revolutions. Analyzing and researching the meanings of these diverse representations would expose students to key aspects of French and Francophone political, social, and cultural history. This is a proposal for a course intended for students who, having completed their language requirement in French, would like to better their knowledge of French language and society. It would offer students the opportunity to study representations of Paris over the centuries as a way to practice writing, reading, and conversation in French and as a way to deepen their understanding of French and Francophone cultures. Materials for the course would include major literary texts as well as paintings, movies and popular songs, but also museum websites, local newspapers and local ads, brochures from retail and food malls, restaurant menus, postcards... such variety can be utilitarian and intellectually compelling at the same time. It would allow students not only to study language registers and vocabulary contextualization but also work on finding patterns and making connections.
This course covers a wide range of male- and female-authored mystical texts (poetry and prose) ranging in date from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth centuries and provides an introduction to some of the major medieval Christian mystical texts in the Western tradition. In addition, we will see how the legacy of mysticism has permeated later philosophical traditions and contemporary culture, whether it be in Descartes’ meditations, contemporary narratives of psychedelic experiences, or in representations of outsiders in film. Throughout our readings, we will confront the question of what mysticism means, how women’s and men’s mystical texts compare, and how “literariness” impacts mystical experience. How does poetic form or literary prose shape the nature of mystical experience? What do we make of the insistence on bodily experience and on the appearance of biography? How does it relate to the role of exemplarity, pedagogy, hermeneutics, or to narrative in general? Where do we find the language and tropes of mysticism in contemporary culture and to what end?
Texts will include works by St. Paul, St. Augustine, Origen, Beatrice of Nazareth and her hagiographer, Hadewijch of Brabant and William of St. Thierry, Bonaventure and Angela of Foligno, Marguerite d'Oignt and Guigo II, St. Francis and St. Claire, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, St. Juan de la Cruz and Teresa of Avila Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton and Richard Rolle. Middle English texts (Julian, Rolle, Hilton, and Margery) will be available in Middle English; all other texts will, however, be read in modern English translation. No prerequisites necessary. Assignments will include: two written papers (6 pp) and weekly responses to prompts.
The study of contemporary flamenco dance technique with special emphasis on improvisation and performance. Through video and reading assignments and attendance at live performances, students will also develop a context for understanding flamenco art, pedagogy, and culture.
This course introduces students to a growing body of work by Latina and Latino writers in the United States, and engages with the critical tools necessary for analyzing a field of inquiry and practice that continues to reframe itself, right down to the label "Latinx." What does that name include, and what does it exclude, in cultural productions born of conflicts of origin, language, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality? For some understanding of context, we will turn to the history and pressures of transnational migration, exile, assimilation, bilingualism and queerness as these variously affect the means and modes of the literary productions with which we're concerned. At the same time, the course will emphasize the invented and hybrid nature of Latinx literary and cultural traditions, and it will investigate the place of those inventions in the larger framework of American intellectual and literary traditions. Readings will be drawn from work written primarily in English, but we will also consider graphic novels, Latinx performance, and works in translation.
This course explores fascism through an interdisciplinary, trans-historical lens. Beginning with Germany’s Third Reich, we will examine fascism’s history and foundations in social, political, religious, and scientic developments. We will explore various theories—ranging from psychoanalytic to philosophical—which try to explain the rise and spread of fascism. To help conceptualize fascism, we will analyze its complex relationship with race, ideology, and nationalism, and in particular, its deployment of technology, aesthetics, and propaganda. We will apply our own working denition of fascism to the contemporary moment by analyzing current populist, authoritarian movements around the globe. Taught in English.
This course explores fascism through an interdisciplinary, trans-historical lens. Beginning with Germany’s Third Reich, we will examine fascism’s history and foundations in social, political, religious, and scientic developments. We will explore various theories—ranging from psychoanalytic to philosophical—which try to explain the rise and spread of fascism. To help conceptualize fascism, we will analyze its complex relationship with race, ideology, and nationalism, and in particular, its deployment of technology, aesthetics, and propaganda. We will apply our own working denition of fascism to the contemporary moment by analyzing current populist, authoritarian movements around the globe. Taught in English.
Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Enrollment limited to 18 students. Attend first class for instructor permission. Registering for the course only through myBarnard or SSOL will NOT ensure your enrollment. Explores the transformation of sociality, consciousness and geo-politics by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze audio-visual analog and digital media, and explore political theory and media theory written since the rise of the internet. Final projects on contemporary media forms.
Black Lives Matter is an American phenomenon. This course situates BLM in relation to other and earlier movements in the Global South and elsewhere. Through textual analysis and critical reading, we take up the discursive, rhetorical, and poetical strategies of opposition to marginalization, criminalization, and racial othering.
Prerequisites: 2 semesters of calculus-based introductory physics, Calculus II, BC3242 Quantitative Analysis, or permission of instructor. Exact and approximate solutions to the Schrodinger equation. The structure of atoms and molecules. Chemical bonding and spectroscopy. Computer-based molecular modeling.
Corequisites: Please note that since this is a Film course, it does not count as a writing course for English majors with a Writing Concentration. This course will focus on the primary pillar of television production: the teleplay. Through a number of creative exercises, students will learn the intricacies of the unique screenwriting formats that are the half-hour and hour-long teleplays. Together we will cover the differences between an episode arc and a seasonal one, the requirements of A/B/C story plotting, and how to write an effective show bible. We will survey the existing pantheon of great television writing in order to help students narrow in on their individual sensibilities. By the end of the course, students will have a written original pilot.
Prerequisites: (COMS W3203) Corequisites: COMS W3134,COMS W3136,COMS W3137 Regular languages: deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata, regular expressions. Context-free languages: context-free grammars, push-down automata. Turing machines, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the Church-Turing thesis. Introduction to Complexity Theory and NP-Completeness.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 or the equivalent. Introduction to the principles of money and banking. The intermediary institutions of the American economy and their historical developments, current issues in monetary and financial reform.
Prerequisites: some background in psychology and/or neurophysiology (e.g. PSYC UN1001, PSYC UN1010, PSYC UN2230, PSYC UN2450; BIOL UN3004 or BIOL UN3005) is desirable. See instructor if you have questions about your background. Some background in mathematics and computer science (e.g. calculus or linear algebra, a programming language) is highly recommended. Study of human vision--both behavioral and physiological data--within a framework of computational and mathematical descriptions. Please contact Prof. Graham by e-mail (nvg1@columbia.edu) if you are interested in this course.
Nonfiction Digital Video Production: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Registering for the course only through myBarnard or SSOL will NOT ensure your enrollment. Attend first class for instructor permission. Lab section required. This workshop course is designed to familiarize students with digital video technologies while they investigate various aesthetic and theoretical concepts related to nonfiction cinema and its engagement with the real. Through weekly readings, discussions, screenings, critiques, and practical exercises, students will develop a solid understanding of how to use digital video as an expressive tool. The course will culminate in the completion of a short video work by each student. Students should be both self-directed and interested in developing a support system for each others work.
The upper level undergraduate Sustainable Development Workshop will be modeled on client based graduate-level workshops, but with more time devoted to methods of applied policy analysis and issues in Sustainable Development. The heart of the course is the group project on an issue of sustainable development with a faculty advisor providing guidance and ultimately grading student performance. Students would receive instruction on methodology, group work, communication and the context of policy analysis. Much of the reading in the course would be project-specific and identified by the student research teams. Offered in Fall and Spring. For registration issues contact Cari Shimkus (cshimkus@ei.columbia.edu).
Prerequisites: (CHEM BC3230) and (CHEM BC3231) BIOL BC1502. Introduction to biochemical building blocks, macromolecules, and metabolism. Structures of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids. Protein structure and folding. Enzyme mechanisms, kinetics, allostery. Membranes and biosignaling. Catabolism and anabolism with emphasis on chemical intermediates, metabolic energy, catalysis by specific enzymes, regulation.
Examines the constitutional right of freedom of speech and press in the United States. Examines, in depth, various areas of law, including extremist or seditious speech, obscenity, libel, fighting words, the public forum doctrine, and public access to the mass media. Follows the law school course model, with readings focused on actual judicial decisions.
Elections and public opinion; history of U.S. electoral politics; the problem of voter participation; partisanship and voting; accounting for voting decisions; explaining and forecasting election outcomes; elections and divided government; money and elections; electoral politics and representative democracy.
Prerequisites: one year each of Introductory Biology and General Chemistry. Corequisites: Organic Chemistry. Primarily aimed at nontraditional students and undergraduates who have course conflicts with BIOC GU4501. Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes within organisms that give rise to the immense complexity of life. This complexity emerges from a highly regulated and coordinated flow of chemical energy from one biomolecule to another. This course serves to familiarize students with the spectrum of biomolecules (carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, nucleic acids, etc.) as well as the fundamental chemical processes (glycolysis, citric acid cycle, fatty acid metabolism, etc.) that allow life to happen. In particular, this course will employ active learning techniques and critical thinking problem-solving to engage students in answering the question: how is the complexity of life possible? NOTE: While Organic Chemistry is listed as a corequisite, it is highly recommended that you take Organic Chemistry beforehand.
This course examines the long history of global interconnectivity, the forces that have forged it, the vulnerabilities and debates it has engendered, and the worlds it has created. It departs from civilizational approaches to world history that revolve around certain cultural centers and focuses instead on the webs of interconnection and interdependence generated by the movement of people, ideas, technologies, material cultures, pathogens, and flora and fauna across space and through time. In the face of surging ethno-nationalism and claims of cultural essentialism today, this approach underscores the hybridity of human societies and individual identities as well. The course consists of three units. A brief opening unit lays a foundation by examining civilizational and global approaches and considering methods for thinking globally through comparison, contextualization, and connection. Unit Two takes up instances in the long history of global interconnectivity from ancient to contemporary times, showing how distant societies became bound together, for better and for worse, as well as the ways increasing interdependence continually reshape(d) local realities. The goal is not to fashion a comprehensive global history, but to understand the connections that have made the interdependent world what it is today. Unit Three addresses contemporary issues of global connection, including the ways ideas circulate in the digital age, creating expectations and sparking movements that resonate locally in diverse ways. We conclude by considering the ways the dislocations of globalization have contributed to the political polarization that divides many societies and thinking together about how to build a better interconnected world.
Corequisites: PORT UN1220 An intensive exposure to advanced points of Portuguese grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Portuguese. This course is required for the concentration in Portuguese Studies. This course is intended to improve Portuguese language skills in grammar, comprehension, and critical thinking through an archive of texts from literature, film, music, newspapers, critical reception and more. To do so, we will work through Portuguese-speaking communities and cultures from Brazil, to Portugal and Angola, during the twentieth and twenty-first century, to consider the mode in which genre, gender and sexuality materialize and are codified, disoriented, made, unmade and refigured through cultural productions, bodies, nation and resistant vernaculars of aesthetics and performance, always attentive to the intersections of gender with class and racism.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor given at first class meeting. Students will create and workshop plays, with a focus on learning new approaches to language and structure. Recommended for students undertaking a senior thesis in playwriting. Fulfills one of three courses in performance fields for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors: playwriting.
Prerequisites: The departments permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poetry will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop.
Classical thermodynamics. Basic properties and concepts, thermodynamic properties of pure substances, equation of state, work, heat, the first and second laws for flow and nonflow processes, energy equations, entropy, and irreversibility. Introduction to power and refrigeration cycles.
Classical thermodynamics. Basic properties and concepts, thermodynamic properties of pure substances, equation of state, work, heat, the first and second laws for flow and nonflow processes, energy equations, entropy, and irreversibility. Introduction to power and refrigeration cycles.
Prerequisites: SWHL UN2101-UN2102 or the instructor's permission. An introduction to the advanced syntactical, morphological, and grammatical structures of Swahili grammar; detailed analysis of Swahili texts; practice in conversation. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Prerequisites: Two years of Wolof or instructor permission. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class
Introduction to the use of molecular techniques to answer questions about subcellular biological phenomena. Techniques include isolation of genomic and plasmid DNAs, restriction enzyme analysis, DNA and protein electrophoresis, bacterial transformation, and plasmid subcloning.
A project on civil engineering subjects approved by the chairman of the department.