This course can be worth 1 to 4 credits (each credit is equivalent to approximately three hours of work per week), and requires a Barnard faculty as a mentor. The course will be taken for a letter grade, regardless of whether the student chooses 1, 2, 3, or 4 credits. The expectations for each of these options are as follows: 1 credit, 3h/week commitment, 5-10 page "Research Report" at the end of the term; 2 credits, 6h/week commitment, 5-10 page "Research Report" at the end of the term; 3 credits, 9h/week commitment, 15-20 page "Research Report" at the end of the term; 4 credits, 12h/week commitment, 15-20 page "Research Report" at the end of the term. "Research Report" is a document submitted to the person grading the student, the instructor of record for the section in which the student has enrolled. If a student is working off-site, then input from the off-site research mentor will inform the grading. The "Research Report" can take a variety of forms: progress reports on data collected, training received, papers read, skills learned, etc.; or organized notes for lab notebooks, lab meetings, etc.; or manuscript-like papers with Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion; or some combination thereof, depending on the maturity of the project. Ultimately, this will take different forms for different students/labs.
From Frederick Douglass’s The North Star, which insisted that journalism could be a tool for liberation and collective conscience, to today’s digital-first platforms, American journalism has always been a site of struggle over truth, power, and representation. This course explores the power of journalism to shape public conscience — from the days when print was the Twitter of its time to the rise of radio, television, and digital media. At its core, this seminar centers the voices of journalists of conscience — those who speak truth to power, challenge dominant narratives, and reflect the full spectrum of human experience. We will approach journalism through a lens that foregrounds the perspectives of people of color, recognizing how mainstream media has historically erased, distorted, or marginalized their voices while also highlighting the powerful traditions of resistance and self-representation in journalism.
To foster meaningful connection and collaboration, students will be split into groups for the semester. These groups will meet in breakout rooms during each class session to workshop ideas, respond to prompts, and sometimes collaborate on short journalistic pieces. The goal is to make a large seminar feel intimate and to encourage peer-to-peer dialogue throughout the course.
Through weekly readings, in-class discussions, site visits, guest speakers, and multimedia projects, students will examine how journalism has both reflected and resisted dominant narratives across history. Students will also create original work that embodies conscience-based journalism.
For undergraduates only. Required for all undergraduate students majoring in IE, OR:EMS, OR:FE, and OR. This is a follow-up to IEOR E3608 and will cover advanced topics in optimization, including integer optimization, convex optimization, and optimization under uncertainty, with a strong focus on modeling, formulations, and applications.
This course introduces students to psychological theories of international politics. We pose a series of questions about the role of individuals in international relations and consider different theories of political decision making (including rational choice, cognitive, motivational, and organizational theories), personality and leadership, and the role of images, values, and identity in shaping international behavior. We’ll put these theories in the context of other ways of explaining state behavior, evaluate their usefulness, and you’ll make use of these theories to explain an international relations course of your choosing.
This course explores how magnetic fields shape the cosmos — from the Earth’s magnetosphere and the Sun’s corona to galaxies, clusters, and the cosmic web itself. The course introduces the fundamental physics of plasmas and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), providing a quantitative framework for understanding how magnetic fields interact with charged matter across vastly different environments. Through lectures, problem sets, and student-led presentations, students learn analytical, numerical, and observational approaches used in modern astrophysics to study magnetic phenomena. By the end of the semester, participants gain the tools to critically read and communicate research on astrophysical magnetism, bridging core physical principles with their diverse cosmic applications.
Introduction to microstructures and properties of metals, polymers, ceramics and composites; typical manufacturing processes: material removal, shaping, joining, and property alteration; behavior of engineering materials in the manufacturing processes.
For those whose knowledge is equivalent to a student whos completed the Second Year course. The course develops students reading comprehension skills through reading selected modern Tibetan literature. Tibetan is used as the medium of instruction and interaction to develop oral fluency and proficiency.
Imperial art and architecture in Beijing—the capital of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (1271-1911)—have inspired awe and admiration in the Western world since the late 19th century. Despite massive destruction caused by foreign invasions before 1911 and rapid urban development after 1949, a significant portion of historic Beijing has survived, including imperial temples and gardens, princely courtyard residences, alleyway neighborhoods, and, most importantly, the Forbidden City—the magnificent seat of imperial power. Moreover, artifacts and artworks from the palaces of Beijing are now housed in museums across the Western world.
This seminar introduces students to the imperial art and architecture of Beijing through the lens of the reign of two Qing-dynasty rulers: the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1796) and Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Their artistic legacies have profoundly shaped modern understanding of the city’s imperial past. Over the spring break, students will travel with the instructor to Beijing to visit sites that were inhabited, commissioned, or even designed by these two rulers.
Through lectures in New York City and a field study in Beijing, the course encourages students to consider questions such as: How did art and architecture serve to reinforce and glorify Qianlong’s rule over the multiethnic Qing empire for much of the 18th century—a reign often celebrated as inclusive, efficient, and prosperous, yet also criticized as despotic, corrupt, and repressive? To what extent did Empress Dowager Cixi’s artistic patronage inherit or challenge conventional imperial traditions? And how does historic Beijing continue to shape the social and political life of its inhabitants—and influence broader national identity—in contemporary China?
The course features a study trip to Beijing, where we will explore imperial palaces, gardens, and temples to engage directly with the monuments discussed in class. Each student will prepare a presentation in advance, taking the lead as a guide during our site visits. These presentations will serve as the foundation for the final research papers.
Discussions of the student's Independent Research project during the fall and spring terms that culminate in a written and oral senior thesis. Each project must be supervised by a scientist working at Barnard or at another local institution.
The causes and consequences of nationalism. Nationalism as a cause of conflict in contemporary world politics. Strategies for mitigating nationalist and ethnic conflict.
Prerequisites: at least two of the following courses: (UN1001, UN1010, UN2280, UN2620, UN2680, UN3280) and the instructor's permission. Developmental psychopathology posits that it is development itself that has gone awry when there is psychopathology. As such, it seeks to understand the early and multiple factors contributing to psychopathology emerging in childhood and later in life. We will use several models (e.g. ones dominated by biological, genetic, and psychological foci) to understand the roots of mental illness.
Prerequisites: (PSYC UN1001) Instructor permission required. A seminar for advanced undergraduate students exploring different areas of clinical psychology. This course will provide you with a broad overview of the endeavors of clinical psychology, as well as discussion of its current social context, goals, and limitations.
In 1987, the queer-feminist Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa reflected on the politics of writing and rewriting histories. Mobilized by the social revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s, Anzaldúa sought to intervene in contemporary history, arguing that the act of retrieval—mining and sifting through our past—is necessary for sensing and creating uninhibited possibilities. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s understanding of the stakes of historiography, this course explores how artists have sought to reimagine queer-feminist pasts and enact latent futures. It focuses on the period from the 1970s onward, when the proliferation of mnemonic, time-based media, such as video, sound, slides, and photography, as well as ephemeral forms like performance and participation, emerged as significant material and conceptual foci for artists. Artists’ engagements with institutions crucial to the creation and circulation of history, memory, and knowledge—such as universities, the mass media, AI companies, and museums—are examined alongside enduring queer-feminist themes of education, motherhood, family, home, exile, kin, and futurity. Students will become cognizant of how contemporary art influences cultural, political, and social traditions and institutions, and how “old” and “new” ideas co-exist and conflict. The course offers an art historical perspective on contemporary art, mapping its relations to late modern art, while also foregrounding the question: how can we, as “contemporaries,” engage with art and art history in a way that responds to the demands of the present? Artists we examine include Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, Magali Lara, Jenny Holzer, Emily Kame Kngwarray, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, D. Harding, Simone Leigh, and Jesse Darling. Writers include Anzaldúa, Rosalyn Deutsche, Tina Campt, Aileen Moreton Robinson, and Ruha Benjamin.
This course is concerned with what policy the American government should adopt toward several foreign policy issues in the next decade or so, using materials from contradictory viewpoints. Students will be required to state fairly alternative positions and to use policy analysis (goals, alternatives, consequences, and choice) to reach conclusions.
Corequisites: POLS UN3631 This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3631.
Depression has existed for all time. But our explanations of it has shifted, from sin, to an imbalance of the humours, and a poetic inspiration; from the eighteenth-century mechanistic understanding of the self, to the Freudian family romance that generates trauma, and to our current neuro-genetic understanding of the mind as a machine that can achieve happiness with pharmaceutical intervention. We will follow these permutations, even as we read novels, poems, plays, and view film (and art) for their diagnostic awareness of mental suffering. And we will also ask the question: what if depression comes not from within but without, the intelligent response of aware minds to a world that has become undone.
This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought.
Prerequisites: one year of general astronomy Introduction to the basic techniques used in obtaining and analyzing astronomical data. Focus on ground-based methods at optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths. Regular use of the telescope facilities atop the roof of the Pupin Labs and at Harriman Observatory. The radio-astronomy portion consists mostly of computer labs, In research projects, students also work on the analysis of data obtained at National Observatories.
This seminar explores the relationship between literature, culture, and mental health. It pays particular emphasis to the
poetics
of emotions structuring them around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and the concept of hope. During the course of the semester, we will discuss a variety of content that explores issues of race, socioeconomic status, political beliefs, abilities/disabilities, gender expressions, sexualities, and stages of life as they are connected to mental illness and healing. Emotions are anchored in the physical body through the way in which our bodily sensors help us understand the reality that we live in. By feeling backwards and thinking forwards, we will ask a number of important questions relating to literature and mental health, and will trace how human experiences are first made into language, then into science, and finally into action.
The course surveys texts from Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus and Sophocles to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, C.P. Cavafy, Dinos Christianopoulos, Margarita Karapanou, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina Gogou etc., and the work of artists such as Toshio Matsumoto, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Anohni.
This course will focus on one topic at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, modularity, mental representation, probabilistic inference, the language of thought, and the computational theory of mind.
Introductory course to probability theory and does not assume any prior knowledge of subject. Teaches foundations required to use probability in applications, but course itself is theoretical in nature. Basic definitions and axioms of probability and notions of independence and conditional probability introduced. Focus on random variables, both continuous and discrete, and covers topics of expectation, variance, conditional distributions, conditional expectation and variance, and moment generating functions. Also Central Limit Theorem for sums of random variables. Consists of lectures, recitations, weekly homework, and in-class exams.
Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism. Limit 25
Buried alive. Driven mad with guilt. Dissolved into a vast, anonymous universe. These are some of the terrors that this undergraduate seminar will address as we explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical dimensions of early American horror. How did Puritan, Gothic, and other early American horror writers complicate cultural attitudes towards the unthinkable, the cruel, and the perverse in works of supernatural horror? What do Gothic fiction’s enduring tropes—such as haunted houses, doppelgängers, and sentient machines—reveal about the massive social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, including the expansion and intensification of slavery, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the economic transition to industrial capitalism? And what might early American horror fail to capture about these underlying political realities? Our historical attention to race, labor, and gender will enable us to reconsider canonical American horror literature and illuminate the reliance on early American literary tropes in contemporary horror films for representing the uniquely disturbing experiences of modern life.
In this class we will examine the politics, organization, and experience of work. In the first three weeks we will get our bearings and consider some basic (but difficult!) questions about work, including: What counts as work and who counts as a worker? How important are our jobs to our survival in the world, and what makes for a good or bad job? In this section you will start thinking about and analyzing your own work experiences. In weeks four and five we will read what sociology’s founders had to say about work, and consider some of the important shifts to work that accompanied industrialization. Then we will turn to 20th century transformations, including the rise of the service economy and worker-customer relations, changes in forms of managerial control and worker responses to these changes, globalization, and the proliferation of precarious work. Finally, we will turn to examining gender, class and race in labor markets and on the job, paid and unpaid reproductive labor, the construction of selves at work, and the job of fashion modeling. Throughout the course we will examine how the sociology of work is bound up with other key institutions including gender, race, class, and the family.
The increasingly rapid development of technologies including artificial intelligence has raised fear of widespread automation. These fears are not new – rather, they have emerged frequently in the past during periods of economic slowdown and technological growth. This course will examine the relationship between work, power, and technology. It will discuss how, and how much new technologies are changing the way people work, if these changes in technology will lead to a replacement of workers or a change in the types and standards of available work. We will look at the potentials and limits of technology in the workplace, with a particular focus on power: understanding why technologies are designed, who they are used by, and for what purposes. We will put these technological developments in the context of long term changes in the American and global economy, and look at what the future may hold, and how we can imagine new futures for ourselves.
Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean.
Semester:
What are the consequences of entrenched inequalities in the context of care? How might we (re)imagine associated practices as political projects? Wherein lie the origins of utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? How might we track associated promises and failures as they travel across social hierarchies, nationalities, and geographies of care? And what do we mean when we speak of “care”? These questions define the scaffolding for this course. Our primary goals throughout this semester are threefold. First, we begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, including urban and rural America, an Amazonia borderland, South Africa, France, and Mexico. Third, we will address temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced in the here-and-now, historically, and in a futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, and most importantly, we will remain alert to the relevance of domains of difference relevant to care, most notably race, gender, class, and species.
Upper level seminar; 4 points
Summer:
What do we mean when we speak of “care”? How might we (re)imagine practices of care as political and moral projects? What promises, paradoxes, or failures surface amid entrenched inequalities? And what hopes, desires, and fears inform associated utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? These questions will serve as a scaffolding of sorts for this course, and our primary goals are fourfold.
First,
we will begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains.
Second,
we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, communities, and geographies of care.
Third
, we will remain alert to the temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced historically, in the here-and-now, and in the futuristic world of science fiction.
Finally,
we will consider the moral underpinnings of intra-human alongside interspecies care.
Enrollment limited to 10; 4 points
French and francophone literature from past centuries is replete with queer and feminist literary utopias. While some French-language authors have imagined fictional places where patriarchal structures have been weakened or reversed, others have imagined worlds in which the category of gender itself has been problematized or done away with. This course introduces students to the rich and long history of such texts from the middle ages to the present. Authors and filmmakers will include Christine de Pizan, George Sand, Alice Guy, Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, Léonora Miano, Mati Diop, Céline Sciamma and Paul Preciado. Class taught entirely in French.
Companies (or, as we’ll mostly refer to them, firms) play a number of important roles in both domestic and international politics; among other activities, they create jobs, engage in trade and in-vestment, create social responsibility programs, lobby governments, and create much of the world’s pollution. How should we think about firms as political actors? Why, when, and how do firms attempt to influence policymaking? And when do they succeed? In this course, we will study strategic collaboration, competition, and collusion between firms and governments in a range of settings and policy areas. To do so, we will draw on insights from international relations, economics, and business scholars, and we will frequently engage with current real-world examples of business-government relations. Topics will include (among others) lobbying, corporate social responsibility, taxation and tax avoidance, public-private governance, and corporate influence in foreign policy.
This course surveys Latin American literary texts that have deeply engaged with disability in the
20 th and 21 st century. Against the tendency to treat disability merely as a useful metaphor or to
simply import Global Northern vocabulary and methodologies of disability studies to other
locations, this course turns to Latin American literary texts by authors that have been directly
“touched” by disability to foreground the concerns, vocabularies, and commitments that their
texts reveal. This includes authors who either through their personal experience with disability
or as caretakers—as parents, siblings, or close friends of people with disabilities—have closely
grappled with the experience of non-normative bodies and minds in the Latin American
context. In this course we ask how are subjects with disabilities represented in a variety of
genres (novel, essay, poem, graphic novel) and what constraints and possibilities circumscribe
these subjectivities and their lives. Ultimately, we will ask what vision of disability justice
emerges from these localized experiences and creative interventions beyond now globalized
disability discourses of inclusion/access and independence/autonomy.
This undergraduate seminar offers an introduction to the study of mass media and politics in Latin America from the early 19th to the early 21st century. Throughout the course, the students will get acquainted with some of the key concepts, problems, and methods through which historians and communication scholars have probed the relationship between mass media and political power in the region. We will define and understand media broadly, but we will focus largely on printed media and, to a lesser extent, radio, cinema, and television. We will discuss both breaks and continuities between different media technologies, journalistic cultures, and political regimes. Knowledge of Spanish is welcome, but not mandatory.
An overview of active research areas in Operations Research and Data Analytics, and an introduction to the essential components of research studies. This course helps students develop fundamental research skills, including paper reading, problem formulation, problem-solving, scientific writing, and research presentation. Classes are in seminar format, with students analyzing research papers, developing research projects, and presenting research findings.
This class is an introduction to strategic management and the decisions that firms make in their historical context. We look at the growth of the large multi-product firm in almost all countries in the world and the the process by which they internationalized their activities and, very often, were also forced to retreat from their international positions. We treat strategies as relation to two broad goals of the class: to understand why some companies are financially much more successful than others; and to analyze how managers can devise a set of actions (the strategy) and design processes and structures that allow their company to obtain a competitive advantage. You will learn the analytical tools developed in universities, in consulting and industrial firms, and even in the military. These tools include what companies do to outperform their rivals; to analyze the competitive moves of rival firms by game-theoretic concepts; and when it makes sense for companies to diversify and globalize their business. Applications will be to Walmart and Apple, European firms and to Asian firms, and developing country firms.
Guided exploration of chemistry research using modern library resources. Topics include: organization and evaluation of information, information ethics, the history of citation, and use of databases. Culminates in the creation of an online research guide on a specific chemistry topic, using a variety of carefully considered and annotated sources.
The course will investigate the impact of racial identity among Latinx in the U.S. on cultural production of Latinos in literature, media, politics and film. The seminar will consider the impact of bilingualism, shifting racial identification, and the viability of monolithic terms like Latinx. We will see how the construction of Latinx racial identity affects acculturation in the U.S., with particular attention to hybrid identities and the centering of black and indigenous cultures. Examples will be drawn from different Latinx ethnicities from the Caribbean, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
A basic course in communication theory, stressing modern digital communication systems. Nyquist sampling, PAM and PCM/DPCM systems, time division multipliexing, high frequency digital (ASK, OOK, FSK, PSK) systems, and AM and FM systems. An introduction to noise processes, detecting signals in the presence of noise, Shannons theorem on channel capacity, and elements of coding theory.
Traditional film history has consigned a multitude of cinema practices to an inferior position. By accepting Hollywood’s narrative model as central, film scholars have often relegated non-male, non-white, non-Western films to a secondary role. Often described as “marginal” or “peripheral” cinemas, the outcomes of these film practices have been systematically excluded from the canon. Yet… are these motion pictures really “secondary”? In relation to what? And according to whom? This course looks at major films by women filmmakers of the 20th Century within a tradition of political cinema that 1) directly confronts the hegemonic masculinity of the Hollywood film industry, and 2) relocates the so-called “alternative women’s cinema” at the core of film history. Unlike conventional feminist film courses, which tend to be contemporary and anglocentric, this class adopts a historical and worldwide perspective; rather than focusing on female directors working in America today, we trace the origins of women’s cinema in different cities of the world (Berlin, Paris, New York) during the silent period, and, from there, we move forward to study major works by international radical directors such as Lorenza Mazzetti, Agnès Varda, Forough Farrokhzad, Věra Chytilová, Chantal Akerman, Lina Wertmüller, Barbara Loden, Julie Dash, and Mira Nair. We analyse how these filmmakers have explored womanhood not only as a source of oppresion (critique of patriarchal phallocentrism, challenge to heteronormativity, etc) but, most importantly, as a source of empowerment (defense of matriarchy, equal rights, lesbian love, inter- and transexuality...). Required readings include seminal texts of feminist film theory by Claire Johnston, Laura Mulvey, Ann Kaplan, bell hooks, and Judith Butler. Among the films screened in the classroom are silent movies –
Suspense
(Lois Weber, 1913),
The Seashell and the Clergyman
(Germaine Dulac, 1928)—, early independent and experimental cinema –
Girls in Uniform
(Leontine Sagan, 1931),
Ritual in Transfigured Time
(Maya Deren, 1946)—, “new wave” films of the 1950s and 1960s –
Cléo from 5 to 7
(Varda, 1962),
Daisies
(Chytilová, 1966)–,
auteur
cinema of the 1970s –
Seven Beauties
(Wertmüller, 1974),
Jeanne Dielman
(Akerman, 1975)–, and documentary films –
Course Description: This course focuses on discovering patterns, relationships, and insights in real-world data through exploratory techniques.
This course examines the basic methods data analysis and statistics that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. The same methods apply to other kinds of problems about cause and effect relationships more generally. The course will provide students with extensive experience in analyzing data and in writing (and thus reading) research papers about testable theories and hypotheses. It will cover basic data analysis and statistical methods, from univariate and bivariate descriptive and inferential statistics through multivariate regression analysis. Computer applications will be emphasized. The course will focus largely on observational data used in cross-sectional statistical analysis, but it will consider issues of research design more broadly as well. It will assume that students have no mathematical background beyond high school algebra and no experience using computers for data analysis.
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, ChatGPT, LLaMA are models that are trained on large amounts of data and are adaptable to a wide range of tasks. They are the basis of most state-of-the-art systems in Natural Language Processing. While the potential of these technologies for social good is large, the risks are also comparable. In this course, the students will learn the fundamentals about the modeling, theory and ethical aspects of LLMs and their applications, while gaining experience working with them. The course will be structured as a seminar, where one class is dedicated to instructor-led lecture and one to studentled discussion of papers around topics covered in the lecture. Each paper discussion will be structured as a panel of 3-4 students, each with an assigned role. Each panel role covers one aspect of critically assessing an academic/industry paper. Everyone in the class should participate by commenting and asking questions from the panel. The class is project-based, meaning there will be a semester-long project focused on evaluating LLMs and/or building LLMs around a topic/problem/task you care about, with an end of semester final paper. The projects will be done by groups of 3-4 students.
Prerequisite(s): COMS W3134 or W3136 or W3137 (or equivalent). Background in probability/statistics and linear algebra is also required and experience with Python programming is strongly encouraged. Some previous or concurrent exposure to NLP, AI or machine learning is beneficial, but not required.
By employing statistical and computational methods, including randomized controlled trials, natural experiments, and machine learning techniques, students will engage directly with real-world data to uncover the intricacies of persuasion across different sectors, including but not limited to quantifying the effects of partisan media, social media, and political campaigns. The course will also delve into the historical evolution of these persuasive techniques, providing students with a rich contextual background to better understand current trends and anticipate future developments.
This course fulfills the quantitative methods requirement for the Political Science major.
This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s
Phaedo
to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them.
Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with 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. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
Technology has long shaped our understanding of sex and gender, from stone tools to artificial intelligence. Likewise, scientific knowledge systems and practices have profoundly impacted processes of categorization and defined what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’ Yet, simultaneously, sociocultural conceptions of sex and gender bear upon science and technology. How might we think about this nexus in a time of fraught contestations over sex, gender, and visions of what the world ought to be like, vis-à-vis science and technology? Leveraging intersections of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist and queer studies, this seminar queries the mutually constitutive relationships between science, technology, gender, and sex across time and space.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3768.
This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3768.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.