Black Shakespeare

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

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

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING LAB II

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

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

Workshop in Sustainable Development: Eco

WORKSHOP IN SDEV SOUTH AF

This course is a client-based workshop in which students apply their experience and knowledge to address critical, real-world sustainability challenges. The primaryclient is Wild Tomorrow, a non-profit conservation organization focused on ecosystem restoration and community development in a biodiversity hotspot in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Students will contribute to the sustainable protection, rewilding, and expansion of a 4,600-acre wildlife corridor adjacent to the UNESCO World Heritage iSimangaliso Wetland Park. Over spring break, students will travel to the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve to learn from local experts while gaining practical experience in restoring habitat for threatened species, addressing human-wildlife conflict, and exploring the intersection of conservation and community development. Post-trip class sessions will consist of focused teamwork on the final report and presentations.

• Department: Earth Institute
• M 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenna M Lawrence
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

Archives of Possibility

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

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

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

RACE, CASTE, AND UNIVERSI

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

 

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

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

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

FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER SYSTS

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

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

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR

In this class, we will think about the various ways in which philosophers, social theorists, historians and anthropologists have thought about war, violence, and responsibility. The course focuses on a set of themes and questions: for example, the nature of violence and the question of responsibility or accountability, shifting technologies of warfare, and the phenomenology and aftermath of warfare, for civilians and for combatants. The reading list incorporates different approaches to such questions—from historical to philosophical to ethnographic accounts.

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

Citizenship: Regional and Global Histori

Citizenship in South Asia

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

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

New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, H

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

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

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR

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

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

Seminar on Law and Psychology

Psychology and Law Semina

This seminar explores how psychological theory and research—particularly from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology—can illuminate, inform, and challenge legal institutions, practices, norms, and debates. The course examines how people think about, interact with, and are affected by the legal system in roles such as defendants, jurors, judges, lawyers, and citizens. Topics include legal decision-making, responsibility and intent, bias and discrimination, forensic assessment, mental illness and legal capacity, eyewitness testimony, interrogations and false confessions, punishment, and stigma.

We will consider how psychological insights help explain how the law operates in practice and critically assess how legal policies align with—or diverge from—psychological evidence. While grounded in psychological science, the course also draws on interdisciplinary work from law and legal scholarship, sociology, public health, and neuroscience. We will read empirical studies and legal analyses that address psychological issues relevant to the law. The principal goal is to understand the legal system not only as a body of rules, but as a human institution shaped by cognitive, emotional, and social dynamics.

 

Over the course of the semester we will (1) analyze how core concepts in psychology apply to legal contexts; (2) assess psychological studies by examining the strength of their research design and considering their implications for legal concepts and practices; (3) examine how developmental, cognitive, and affective processes affect legal decision-making; (4) identify and critique the use of psychological evidence in courts and policy debates; and (5) explore how neuroscience is reshaping legal understandings of responsibility, culpability, and sentencing, while critically examining its ethical and evidentiary limitations.

• Department: Psychology
• T 8:10 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael J Naft
  Info
• 4 points

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

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

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

THE HISTORY OF KOREA TO 1900

This course traces Korean history from the earliest recorded kingdoms to 1900, situating the development of Korean civilization within both East Asian and global contexts. Students will explore major political, social, intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic issues of premodern Korea through diverse interpretive approaches and a wide range of primary sources that illuminate both everyday life and broader historical transformations. No prior knowledge of Korean history is required, and all readings are in English.

• Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jungwon Kim
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performa

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

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

OUT OF PLACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Fashion Studies

Intro to Fashion Studies

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

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

Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Inter

Photo as Material:A Studi

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

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

Tokyo

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

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

CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS

This course will review and analyze the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. It will examine Beijing's relations with the Soviet Union, the United States, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Third World during the Cold War, and will discuss Chinese foreign policy in light of the end of the Cold War, changes in the Chinese economy in the reform era, the post-Tiananmen legitimacy crisis in Beijing, and the continuing rise of Chinese power and influence in Asia and beyond.

This lecture course will analyze the causes and consequences of Beijing’s foreign policies from 1949 to the present.

Students must register for a mandatory discussion section.

• Department: Political Science
• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Thomas J Christensen
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II

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

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

CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS-DISC

This is the required discussion section for 
POLS UN3871.

• Department: Political Science
• M 9:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
• F 9:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
• F 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• F 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 11:10 a.m.-noon
• T 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• T 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• T 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Gilbert Lai
  Info
• 0 points

LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

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

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

The Book Review: History, Theory, Practi

What is criticism? And what (or who) is a critic? How does a critic write
now
? This seminar is an approach to these questions through an investigation of the common currency of literary-intellectual life: the book review. It is intended for young writers interested in the world of reviewing— and criticism, literary journalism, the magazine— and is three things at once: a history of 20th and 21st century criticism (exploring the work of major critics past and present); a theoretical exploration of how the literary field has been, and is now, structured; and a practicum in review-writing. Our focus will primarily be the quickly mutating life of public literary criticism in American magazines from WWII to the present. We will read figures such as Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and others, but most of our time will be spent reading significant critics of the past 5-10 years; we will also read three novelistic treatments of the lives of critics and writers; and some time will be devoted to in-person discussions with current editors and writers in NYC about the conditions of their work.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

The Afro-Feminist Novel

What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms? 

The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision.   

The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937); Ann Petry’s
The Narrows
(1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s
The Salt Eaters
(1980); Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
(1987); and Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
(2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
(1899) and Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
(1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice.

• Department: English and Comparative Literature
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Zoe L Henry
  Info
• 4 points

BEOWULF

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

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

THE MONGOLS IN HISTORY

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

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

Arabs and the West: The Andalusian Symbi

The Andalusian Symbiosis

This interdisciplinary seminar deals with the rich culture of Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal) during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory—from the eighth to the fifteenth century. This theme course is significant in its approach to the study of Andalusia for a number of reasons: it grounds the study of Muslim Spain in the larger context of the history of Islam and of Arabic culture outside of Spain; it embraces many aspects of the hybrid Andalusian legacy:  history, language, literature, philosophy, music, art, architecture, and sciences, among others; and, while the course includes materials from Christian writers, the textual materials focus more on Arabic writings and the viewpoint of Muslim Spaniards. The course closely examines the cultural symbiosis between Arab Muslims and Christian Europeans during the eight centuries of their coexistence in Andalusia. Through a critical reading of an appropriately chosen set of texts translated into English from Arabic, Latin, Spanish and other Iberian dialects, students will study the historical, literary, linguistic, religious, artistic, architectural, and technological products that were created by the remarkable symbiosis that took place in Andalusia. With its multiethnic and multilingual forms the Andalusian legacy bears direct resemblance to our contemporary multicultural world and provides students with a rare opportunity to integrate knowledge of different sources and viewpoints. In the third and final weeks, we compare how two contemporary historical novels, by Tariq Ali (of Pakistani extraction) and Arab writer Radwa Ashour, treat the fall of Granada in 1492. Class discussion and readings in English. Counts towards Global Core requirement.

• Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures
• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 4 points

Research Training

Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.

• Department: Biomedical Engineering
• Instructor: Gerard A Ateshian
  Info
• Instructor: Tal Danino
  Wikipedia h-index: 18 Info
• Instructor: X. Edward Guo
  CULPA: 2 h-index: 70 Info
• Instructor: Henry Hess
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 45 Info
• Instructor: Clark T Hung
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 65 Info
• Instructor: Lance Kam
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 38 Info
• Instructor: Elisa Konofagou
  Wikipedia h-index: 71 Info
• Instructor: Andrew Laine
  Wikipedia h-index: 43 Info
• Instructor: Kam W Leong
  h-index: 126 Info
• Instructor: Helen Lu
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 54 Info
• Instructor: Barclay Morrison
  CULPA: 9 h-index: 42 Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Olson
  h-index: 28 Info
• Instructor: Paul Sajda
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 47 Info
• Instructor: Kenneth Shepard
  CULPA: 2 Wikipedia h-index: 64 Info
• Instructor: Shunichi Homma
  h-index: 88 Info
• Instructor: Samuel Sia
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 39 Info
• Instructor: Milan N Stojanovic
  Info
• Instructor: Stavros Thomopoulos
  h-index: 63 Info
• Instructor: John T Vaughan
  Info
• Instructor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
  Wikipedia h-index: 132 Info
• Instructor: Qi Wang
  h-index: 24 Info
• Instructor: Nandan L Nerurkar
  Info
• Instructor: Stephen H Tsang
  Wikipedia h-index: 58 Info
• Instructor: Elham Azizi
  h-index: 10 Info
• Instructor: Jose McFaline-Figueroa
  Info
• Instructor: Treena L Arinzeh
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Sanja Vickovic
  Info
• Instructor: Santiago Correa
  Info
• Instructor: Kaveri A Thakoor
  Info
• Instructor: Yvon Woappi
  Info
• Instructor: Yasmine El-Shamayleh
  Info
• Instructor: Kaveri A Thakoor
  Info
• Instructor: Lauren N Heckelman
  Info
• 0 points

Research Training

Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.

• Department: Chemical Engineering
• Instructor: Scott Banta
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 36 Info
• Instructor: Kyle Bishop
  h-index: 42 Info
• Instructor: Christopher M Boyce
  h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Juliana Silva Alves Carneiro
  Info
• Instructor: Jingguang Chen
  Wikipedia h-index: 89 Info
• Instructor: Christopher J Durning
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Daniel Esposito
  h-index: 22 Info
• Instructor: Oleg Gang
  h-index: 45 Info
• Instructor: Jingyue Ju
  h-index: 77 Info
• Instructor: Sanat Kumar
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 79 Info
• Instructor: Lauren E Marbella
  Info
• Instructor: Vivian F McNeill
  Info
• Instructor: Allie Obermeyer
  h-index: 16 Info
• Instructor: Ben O'Shaughnessy
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Neil D Dolinski
  Info
• Instructor: Mijo Simunovic
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Dan Steingart
  CULPA: 1 Wikipedia h-index: 36 Info
• Instructor: Alexander Urban
  h-index: 24 Info
• Instructor: Venkat Venkatasubramanian
  h-index: 58 Info
• Instructor: Alan West
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 48 Info
• Instructor: Asher Williams
  Info
• 0 points

The Art of the Question in Latin America

The Question in Latin Ame

This course investigates the role of the question as a central artistic, political, and epistemological device in Latin American art from the early twentieth century to the present. We will explore how artists have deployed questions not merely as rhetorical devices or titles, but as strategies that shape form, content, and spectatorship—provoking reflection, resistance, and transformation.

Through case studies ranging from Oswald de Andrade’s provocative “Tupy or not Tupy?” (1928) and Marta Minujín’s playful “What types of materials turn you on?” (1968) to Alfredo Jaar’s public survey ¿Es usted feliz? (1981) and Clemencia Lucena’s feminist intervention ¿Qué hacen ellas mientras ellos trabajan? (1970), students will examine the diverse functions of questioning in visual art, performance, literature, and other media. Class discussions will focus on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic implications of questions in art: How do these works shape audience engagement? In what ways do they resist resolution? How do they generate critique, knowledge, or political action? We will also consider transnational and diasporic contexts, exploring how Latin American artists navigate questions across cultural and geographic boundaries.

The course is structured around five modules—Questioning Identity, Questioning the Patriarchy, Questioning Dictatorship, Questioning Spectatorship, and Questioning the Real—that highlight key moments in modern and contemporary Latin American art to uncover how uncertainty and questioning have shaped aesthetic and political imagination.

• Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures
• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Jeronimo Duarte Riascos
  Info
• 3 points

UNDERGRAD RESRCH-APPLD PHYSICS

This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied physics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.

• Department: Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
• Instructor: Elizabeth Paul
  Info
• Instructor: Carlos Paz Soldan
  h-index: 28 Info
• 0-4 points

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECT

Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation of some problem in chemical engineering or applied chemistry or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Up to 6 points may be counted toward the technical elective content requirement. (Note that if more than 3 points of research are pursued, an undergraduate thesis is required.)

• Department: Chemical Engineering
• Instructor: Scott Banta
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 36 Info
• Instructor: Kyle Bishop
  h-index: 42 Info
• Instructor: Christopher M Boyce
  h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Juliana Silva Alves Carneiro
  Info
• 0-6 points