Prerequisites: advanced calculus and general physics, or the instructors permission. Basic physical processes controlling atmospheric structure: thermodynamics; radiation physics and radiative transfer; principles of atmospheric dynamics; cloud processes; applications to Earths atmospheric general circulation, climatic variations, and the atmospheres of the other planets.
Prerequisites: GREK V1201 and V1202, or their equivalent. Since the content of the course changes from year to year, it may be taken in consecutive years.
Prerequisites: LATN V3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.
Introductory course is for individuals with an interest in medical physics and other branches of radiation science. Topics include basic concepts, nuclear models, semi-empirical mass formula, interaction of radiation with matter, nuclear detectors, nuclear structure and instability, radioactive decay process and radiation, particle accelerators, and fission and fusion processes and technologies.
Mathematical description of chemical engineering problems and the application of selected methods for their solution. General modeling principles, including model hierarchies. Linear and nonlinear ordinary differential equations and their systems, including those with variable coefficients. Partial differential equations in Cartesian and curvilinear coordinates for the solution of chemical engineering problems.
A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.
Course Description
This interdisciplinary course explores both the rights of Indigenous people in settler colonies as well as the complex historical and theoretical relationship between human rights and settler colonialism. We will pursue three lines of inquiry. The first critically explores how central political concepts of the international state system—sovereignty, property, territory, self-determination—entwine the histories of settler colonialism and human rights. The second charts the rise and mechanisms of the international Indigenous rights movement, in particular its activity at the United Nations leading to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and its contributions to ongoing debates on environmental and climate justice, group rights, natural resources and territorial autonomy, and cultural rights. The third unit interrogates settler state responses to the movement for Indigenous human rights, such as cooptation, recognition, and apology.
Through readings drawn from history, ethnography, political and critical theory, international relations, Native studies, law, and documents produced by intergovernmental organizations and NGOs, we will explore and deepen the tensions between human rights as a theory and practice and the political lives and aspirations of Indigenous peoples and activists. What technologies of rule—such as residential school systems and property law—do settler colonial states deploy to dispossess Indigenous peoples? How have Indigenous peoples used the international human rights regime to mobilize against such dispossession? How have these states resisted the global Indigenous rights movement? And can the human rights regime, rooted in the international state system, meaningfully contribute to anticolonial movements in liberal settler colonies? While we will touch on settler colonialism as it manifests around the globe, the course’s geographical focus will be on North America.
Course objectives
Throughout this course, you will:
Develop a historically-informed understanding of both international indigenous rights and settler colonialism as idea, practice, institution, and discourse;
Place the literature on human rights and settler colonialism into critical conversation in order to deepen existing conceptual problems and generate new ones;
Identify the main arguments in theoretical texts, legal and policy documents, and public debates
The Business Chinese I course is designed to prepare students to use Chinese in a present or future work situation. Students will develop skills in the practical principles of grammar, vocabulary, and cross-cultural understanding needed in today’s business world.
Prerequisites: at least 3 years of intensive Chinese language training at college level and the instructor's permission. This advanced course is designed to specifically train students' listening and speaking skills in both formal and colloquial language through various Chinese media sources. Students view and discuss excerpts of Chinese TV news broadcasts, soap operas, and movie segments on a regular basis. Close reading of newspaper and internet articles and blogs supplements the training of verbal skills.
Prerequisites: Third Year Chinese or the equivalent The course is designed to help students master formal Chinese for professional or academic purposes. It includes reading materials and discussions of selections from Chinese media on contemporary topics, Chinese literature, and modern Chinese intellectual history. The course aims to enhance students' strategies for comprehension, as well as their written and oral communication skills in formal modern Chinese.
Prerequisites: CHNS W4006 or the equivalent. This is a non-consecutive reading course designed for those whose proficiency is above 4th level. See Admission to Language Courses. Selections from contemporary Chinese authors in both traditional and simplified characters with attention to expository, journalistic, and literary styles.
Prerequisites: JPNS W4006 or the equivalent. Sections 1 & 2: Readings of advanced modern literary, historical, political, and journalistic texts, and class discussions about current issues and videos. Exercises in scanning, comprehension, and English translation. Section 3: Designed for advanced students interested in developing skills for reading and comprehending modern Japanese scholarship.
The biophysics of computation: modeling biological neurons, the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron, modeling channel conductances and synapses as memristive systems, bursting neurons and central pattern generators, I/O equivalence and spiking neuron models. Information representation and neural encoding: stimulus representation with time encoding machines, the geometry of time encoding, encoding with neural circuits with feedback, population time encoding machines. Dendritic computation: elements of spike processing and neural computation, synaptic plasticity and learning algorithms, unsupervised learning and spike time-dependent plasticity, basic dendritic integration. Projects in MATLAB.
Exposes scientists and engineers to the development, protection, and exploitation of intellectual property rights. Legal processes for obtaining and defending intellectual property rights are detailed. Best practices for innovation and commercialization are explored. Methods for valuation and monetization of intellectual property are illustrated through application of basic accounting and financial principles to case studies.
Prerequisites: One semester of college-level calculus, college-level chemistry. College-level physics or geoscience. Or instructor’s permission. The accelerating climate change of the current day is driven by humanity’s modifications to the global carbon cycle. This course introduces the basic science of the global carbon cycle, focusing on large-scale processes occurring on annual to centennial timescales. Students will leave this course with an understanding of the degree to which the global carbon cycle is understood and quantified and the key uncertainties that are the focus of current research. We will build an understanding of the potential pathways and the significant challenges to limiting global warming to 2oC as intended by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
The course will begin with a brief review of climate science basics and the role of CO2 in climate and climate change (weeks 1-2). Next, the fundamental processes of the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere carbon sinks will be covered (weeks 3-7). In weeks 8-10, our focus will be the drivers of current and future anthropogenic carbon emissions. In weeks 11-12, we will consider the potential for engineered sinks to contribute to global budgets. In weeks 13-14, students will present their final projects, and we will review the course content in the context of the December release of the current year’s Global Carbon Budget.
This course explors the principal modes, media, and contexts of visual culture in Japanese Buddhist history. Through the analysis of selected case studies, the course examines of the modalities of perception, materiality, and reception that distinguish the form and function of visual media in Japanese Buddhist contexts. Students are expected to have completed preliminary coursework in relevant areas of East Asian history, religion, or art history.
Prerequisites: genetics or molecular biology. The course covers techniques currently used to explore and manipulate gene function and their applications in medicine and the environment. Part I covers key laboratory manipulations, including DNA cloning, gene characterization, association of genes with disease, and methods for studying gene regulation and activities of gene products. Part II also covers commercial applications, and includes animal cell culture, production of recombinant proteins, novel diagnostics, high throughput screening, and environmental biosensors.
Systems biology approaches are rapidly transforming the technological and conceptual foundations of research across diverse areas of biomedicine. In this course we will discuss the fundamental developments in systems biology with a focus on two important dimensions: (1) the unique conceptual frameworks that have emerged to study systems-level phenomena and (2) how these approaches are revealing fundamentally new principles that govern the organization and behavior of cellular systems. Although there will be much discussion of technologies and computational approaches, the course will emphasize the conceptual contributions of the field and the big questions that lie ahead. Lectures and discussions of primary literature will enable students to scrutinize research in the field and to internalize systems biology thinking in their own research. To make this a concrete endeavor, the students will develop mini-NIH-style grant proposals that aims to study a fundamental problem/question using systems biology approaches. The students will then convene an in-class NIH-style review panel that will assess the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals. In addition, the students will have the opportunity to defend their proposals in a live presentation to the class. The course is open to graduate students in Biological Sciences. Advanced undergraduates in biological sciences, and other graduate students with background in biology from other disciplines, including physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering may also attend after consulting with the instructor.
Poets, Rebels, Exiles examines the successive generations of the most provocative and influential Russian and Russian Jewish writers and artists who brought the cataclysm of the Soviet and post-Soviet century to North America. From Joseph Brodsky—the bad boy bard of Soviet Russia and a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, who served 18 months of hard labor near the North Pole for social parasitism before being exiled—to the most recent artistic descendants, this course will interrogate diaspora, memory, and nostalgia in the cultural production of immigrants and exiles.
Developing features - internal representations of the world, artificial neural networks, classifying handwritten digits with logistics regression, feedforward deep networks, back propagation in multilayer perceptrons, regularization of deep or distributed models, optimization for training deep models, convolutional neural networks, recurrent and recursive neural networks, deep learning in speech and object recognition.
Participants may elect to enroll in the 1-credit CWI independent study offered through the Sociology Department. CWI takes place Thursdays from 2-4pm in Knox Hall, room 509. The course ID for Fall 2025 is SOCI4043GU.
The Center for Wealth and Inequality (CWI), in this course, is a forum for students interested in social science topics broadly related to inequality. In particular, it will provide an opportunity for students to read and discuss the works presented in the weekly CWI seminar series, while also sharing and refining their own works in progress. The CWI seminar series is sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP) and is devoted to the investigation of social and economic inequality. The seminar invites speakers from both within and outside of Columbia to present recent papers covering a wide range of topics pertaining to inequality, such as poverty, labor market behavior, education, and the family. The research topics and methodologies are at the cutting edge of the interdisciplinary study of wealth and inequality, as the CWI seminar invites speakers from multiple social science disciplines and fields. Past speakers include Annette Lareau, Adam Gamoran, Timothy Smeeding, Lisa Kahn, Mario Small, Rob Warren and Florencia Torche, among numerous others.
The primary preparation for these gatherings is to read the papers slated for presentation, whether written by an outside speaker or a student within the course. Students will meet to constructively critique these papers collectively, raising key questions and concepts for discussion and debate. One student will serve as the discussion leader each week by kicking off the dialogue. This student also will have the opportunity to prepare a review of the paper, if desired. When discussing CWI seminar papers, the product of each meeting will be a shortlist of pertinent questions for the visiting speaker, which participants will be encouraged to ask during the Q&A following each seminar. When focusing on student papers, participants will provide detailed comments geared towards supporting further development of our peers’ work. We regularly will be joined by the CWI presenters.
The spirit behind the student independent study is one of collective student growth and learning through semi-structured discussion. While the course will pose a relatively
Prerequisites: Course Cap 20 students. Priority given to graduate students in the natural sciences and engineering. Advanced level undergraduates may be admitted with the instructors permission. Calculus I and Physics I & II are required for undergraduates who wish to take this course. General introduction to fundamentals of remote sensing; electromagnetic radiation, sensors, interpretation, quantitative image analysis and modeling. Example applications in the Earth and environmental sciences are explored through the analysis of remote sensing imagery in a state-or-the-art visualization laboratory.
Intensive study of a philosophical issue or topic, or of a philosopher, group of philosophers, or philosophical school or movement. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.
A substantial paper, developing from an Autumn workshop and continuing in the Spring under the direction of an individual advisor. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.
Enrollment limited to 12 students. Mechatronics is the application of electronics and microcomputers to control mechanical systems. Systems explored include on/off systems, solenoids, stepper motors, DC motors, thermal systems, magnetic levitation. Use of analog and digital electronics and various sensors for control. Programming microcomputers in Assembly and C. Lab required.
Introduction to computational biology with emphasis on genomic data science tools and methodologies for analyzing data, such as genomic sequences, gene expression measurements and the presence of mutations. Applications of machine learning and exploratory data analysis for predicting drug response and disease progression. Latest technologies related to genomic information, such as single-cell sequencing and CRISPR, and the contributions of genomic data science to the drug development process.
Study ecology, evolution, and conservation biology in one of the world’s most biologically spectacular settings, the wildlife-rich savannas of Kenya. Although we will meet have a few meetings during the fall semester, the majority of the coursework will be completed during a 16 day field trip to Kenya during winter break. Students will spend their time immersed in an intensive field experience gaining sophisticated training in fieldwork and biological research. Note that there is a lab fee to cover all in-country expenses, and students are also responsible for the cost of airfare to and from Kenya.
Prerequisites: (CHEM UN1403 and CHEM UN1404) or (CHEM UN1604) or (CHEM UN2045 and CHEM UN2046) , or the equivalent. Principles governing the structure and reactivity of inorganic compounds surveyed from experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Topics include inorganic solids, aqueous and nonaqueous solutions, the chemistry of selected main group elements, transition metal chemistry, metal clusters, metal carbonyls, and organometallic chemistry, bonding and resonance, symmetry and molecular orbitals, and spectroscopy.
Prerequisites: Two semesters of a rigorous, molecularly-oriented, introductory biology course, such as UN2005 (
Inc.,
Biochemistry of DNA & Proteins, basic Genetics, Metabolism & Cell Physiology
) and UN2006 (
Cell biology, inc. intra-cellular transport, phagocytosis, protein regulation, as well as Inter-cellular communication, inc., cell-cell contact, receptors/ligands & transporters
). This course will cover the integration of innate and adaptive immune systems, as well as how immune response contributes to health and disease (
e.g., Infectious disease, allergies, autoimmunity, immune deficiencies, the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy
). Students will also become familiar with important immunological methods, which will provide an opportunity to explore some of the current literature. Sophomores will require permission from their advisor to enroll, and graduate student will require the instructor’s permission to enroll. SPS, Barnard, and TC students may register for this course with the instructor’s approval on a Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form), which can be downloaded (
http://registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
) and then returned to the office of the registrar.
While focusing on the Decameron, this course follows the arc of Boccaccios career from the Ninfale Fiesolano, through the Decameron, and concluding with the Corbaccio, using the treatment of women as the connective thread. The Decameron is read in the light of its cultural density and contextualized in terms of its antecedents, both classical and vernacular, and of its intertexts, especially Dantes Commedia, with particular attention to Boccaccios masterful exploitation of narrative as a means for undercutting all absolute certainty. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Readings in Greek literature from Homer to the 4th century B.C.
Prerequisites: KORN W4006 or the equivalent. Selections from advanced modern Korean writings in social sciences, literature, culture, history, journalistic texts, and intensive conversation exercises.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times.
In their research, scholars of religion employ a variety of methods to analyze texts ranging from historical documents to objects of visual culture. This course acquaints students with both the methods and the materials utilized in the field of religious studies. Through guided exercises, they acquire research skills for utilizing sources and become familiarized with dominant modes of scholarly discourse. The class is organized around a series of research scavenger hunts that are due at the start of each week's class and assigned during the discussion section (to be scheduled on the first day of class). Additional class meeting on Thursdays.
Crystal structure and energy band theory of solids. Carrier concentration and transport in semiconductors. P-n junction and junction transistors. Semiconductor surface and MOS transistors. Optical effects and optoelectronic devices. Fabrication of devices and the effect of process variation and distribution statistics on device and circuit performance. Course shares lectures with ELEN E3106, but the work requirements differ. Undergraduate students are not eligible to register.
Fundamental concepts of probability and statistics applied to biology and medicine. Probability distributions, hypothesis testing and inference, summarizing data and testing for trends. Signal detection theory and the receiver operator characteristic. Lectures accompanied by data analysis assignments using MATLAB as well as discussion of case studies in biomedicine.
Continuum frame-work for modeling non-equilibrium phenomena in fluids with clear connections to the molecular/microscopic mechanisms for conductive transport. Continuum balances of mass and momentum; continuum-level development of conductive momentum flux (stress tensor) for simple fluids; applications of continuum framework for simple fluids (lubrication flows, creeping flows). Microscopic developments of the stress for simple and/or complex fluids; kinetic theory and/or liquid state models for transport coefficients in simple fluids; Langevin/Fokker- Plank/Smoluchowski framework for the stress in complex fluids; stress in active matter; applications for complex fluids.
Advanced Business Chinese is designed to help students who have studied at least three years of Chinese (or the equivalent) to achieve greater proficiency in the oral and written use of the language and gain knowledge in depth about China’s business environment and proven strategies. Student will critically examine the successes and failures of firms within the Chinese business arena.
Prerequisites: LING 3101: Introduction to Linguistics and LING 4376: Phonetics & Phonology
This course provides training in linguistic fieldwork for language
documentation and description. We will work with a speaker of an understudied language
to investigate the structure of the language (its sounds, word and sentence formation,
ways of expressing meaning, and usage) and learn about its speakers and their
communities, both in NYC and abroad. Through this process, students will learn
collaborative linguistic fieldwork techniques as well as the art of writing linguistic
descriptions. This course will draw on all aspects of students’ linguistic training to date,
and the success of the course will depend on our ability as a class to work together
cooperatively with the language consultant and language community more broadly to
document and describe the language.
The main task of this course will be to read novels by African writers. But the novel in Africa also involves connections between the literary genre of the novel and the historical processes of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. One important question we'll consider is how African novels depict those historical experiences in their themes and plots—we'll read novels that are about colonialism, etc. A more complex question is how these historical processes relate to the emergence of the novel as an important genre for African writers. Edward Said went so far as to say that without imperialism, there would be no European novel as we know it. How can we understand the novel in Africa (whether read or written) as a product of the colonial encounter? How did it shape the process of decolonization? What contribution to history, whether literary or political, does the novel in Africa make? We'll undertake a historical survey of African novels from the 1930s to the present, with attention to various subgenres (village novel, war novel, urbanization novel, novel of postcolonial disillusion, Bildungsroman). We'll attend to how African novelists blend literate and oral storytelling traditions, how they address their work to local and global audiences, and how they use scenes of characters reading novels (whether African or European) in order to position their writing within national, continental, and world literary space.
This course investigates the theories and practices of documentary film in Japan. Spanning from the 1920s to the present, we will engage in rigorous examination of the transformations of cinematic forms and contents, and of the social, cultural, and political elements bound up with those transformations. We will also juxtapose aspects of Japanese documentary film with global movements, and wider theories of documentary and non-fiction.
The course provides a rigorous and advanced foundation in chemical engineering thermodynamics suitable for chemical engineering PhD students expected to undertake diverse research projects. Topics include Intermolecular interactions, non-ideal systems, mixtures, phase equilibria and phase transitions and interfacial thermodynamics.
Israel has a unique and constantly-evolving national cinema, the product of its diverse immigrant population, influences from neighboring nations, and dramatic national history. Beginning with artistic influences from abroad and culminating with native self-examinations, this course will provide a survey of Israeli film history, recurring foci of Israeli cinema, and introductions to influential filmmakers from early director and impresario Menahem Golan to Orthodox writer/director Rama Burshtein.
Each class meeting will include a complete screening of an Israeli feature film, as well as clips of related works. Readings will include critical essays and histories which elaborate on in-class screenings and cover additional topics and films. Written assignments will be three analytical essays which will encourage critical thinking, close analysis of films, and independent research beyond the materials presented in class.
All readings are in English. All feature films and film clips are in Hebrew (some include Arabic), and will be presented with English subtitles. Students fluent in Hebrew and Arabic are encouraged to interpret the dialogue for additional meaning that may not be translated in the subtitles.
Prerequisites: elementary organic and physical chemistry. The mechanisms of organic reactions, structure of organic molecules, and theories of reactivity. How reactive intermediates are recognized and mechanisms are deduced using kinetics, stereochemistry, isotopes, and physical measurements.
Prerequisites: at least 4 college-level biology or biotechnology courses. This course will introduce students to the interrelated fields of patent law, regulatory law, and contract law that are vital to the biotech and biopharmaceutical sectors. The course will present core concepts in a way that permits students to use them throughout their corporate, academic, and government careers. SCE and TC students may register for this course, but they must first obtain the written permission of the instructor, by filling out a paper Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form). The form can be downloaded at the URL below, but must be signed by the instructor and returned to the office of the registrar. http://registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
This seminar examines the multifaceted experiences of Jewish communities in the Maghreb during the colonial period, spanning from the early 19th century through the independence movements of the mid-20th century. We will explore how these communities navigated the social, political, and cultural landscape of colonial rule, focusing on key themes that shaped the Jewish experience in colonial North Africa. These themes include the impact of French colonial policies, evolving legal status, the involvement of French Jews in colonial dynamics, the rise and decline of the Judeo-Arabic press and literature, the emergence of Jewish women's writing, rabbinical responses to colonialism, and Jewish participation in anti-colonial movements. By analyzing a diverse range of primary sources—from rabbinical responsa and colonial legal documents to Judeo-Arabic literature and photographs—we will examine how Maghrebi Jews confronted, subverted, and negotiated the colonial order while reconfiguring their cultural and religious identities.
By the end of the course, students will have developed a deeper understanding of the transformations in Jewish religious, cultural, and social life during the colonial period in North Africa. They will be able to evaluate the varied strategies of adaptation and resistance employed by Jewish communities in response to colonial rule. Students will also strengthen their ability to analyze a broad range of primary sources. Finally, they will learn to apply interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from history, postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, and literary analysis, to better understand Jewish life under colonial rule in the Maghreb.
Introduction to machine learning techniques with applications to biological systems, emphasizing cell-biological molecular mechanisms and applications, and computational simulation. Overview of biology. Introduction to biological neurons and neural networks, learning and memory. Parallels between biological and artificial neural networks. Deep neural networks are introduced, hands-on computational experience for students. Big data from experiments or computational simulations: machine learning to extract mechanisms, dimensional reduction. Deep learning applications include drug discovery, protein structure prediction, molecular coarse-graining for simulations, and acceleration of molecular dynamics simulations.
This course offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins, foundations and evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing during the four decades following 1895. Via close readings of his texts, with neither worship nor condescension, we will situate the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind within historical context, and explore its applications to education, society, culture, and the humanities.
This seminar will concentrate on close readings of four key texts:
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Mourning and Melancholia; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
;
and
one
additional text to be chosen by the class
. These texts are chosen in part to not overlap with those covered in CLPS GU4200. Key supplemental readings will explore aspects of the text’s historical, cultural and intellectual context, contemporary reception, and influence on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and beyond.
This course explores the recording studio and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) as tools for diverse compositional practices. By exploring a range of recording and editing techniques to craft new musical works beyond the limitations of live performance, this class encourages a seamless blend of composition and music production. Various genres, artists, and techniques that push the boundaries of music recording will be studied, such as Jamaican dub, musique concrète, hyper-pop, jazz fusion, and more. Students will gain hands-on experience with DAWs, exploring tools like effects processing, layering, and spatial placement. They will learn to listen closely to pieces exemplifying these techniques, building a shared analytic vocabulary to describe them. Students will also create original pieces, applying and building on the techniques studied in class, while engaging in constructive feedback with peers.
NOTE: There are 2 sections of Third Year Arabic I. Section 001 follows the standard curriculum building all 4 language skills, as described below. Section 002 follows a reading-intensive curriculum, with less emphasis on listening and writing while still conducted in Arabic, and is intended for those preparing for advanced research in modern or classical Arabic texts. Students in the regular third-year Arabic track improve reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills through close reading, compositions, class discussions, and presentations in Arabic on topics such as cultures of the Arab world, classical and modern Arabic literature, and contemporary Arabic media. Review of grammatical and syntactic rules as needed. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)
Energy sources such as oil, gas, coal, gas hydrates, hydrogen, solar, and wind. Energy conversion systems for electrical power generation, automobiles, propulsion and refrigeration. Engines, steam and gas turbines, wind turbines; devices such as fuel cells, thermoelectric converters, and photovoltaic cells. Specialized topics may include carbon-dioxide sequestration, cogeneration, hybrid vehicles and energy storage devices.
Through reading articles and essays by Arab thinkers and intellectuals, students will be able to increase their fluency and accuracy in Arabic while working on reading text and being exposed to the main themes in Arab thought The course works with all four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). Arabic is the language of instruction. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
MEMS markets and applications; scaling laws; silicon as a mechanical material; Sensors and actuators; micromechanical analysis and design; substrate (bulk) and surface micromachining; computer aided design; packaging; testing and characterization; microfluidics.
The Cold War epoch saw broad transformations in science, technology, and politics. At their nexus a new knowledge was proclaimed, cybernetics, a putative universal science of communication and control. It has disappeared so completely that most have forgotten that it ever existed. Its failure seems complete and final. Yet in another sense, cybernetics was so powerful and successful that the concepts, habits, and institutions born with it have become intrinsic parts of our world and how we make sense of it. Key cybernetic concepts of information, system, and feedback are now fundamental to our basic ways of understanding the mind, brain and computer, of grasping the economy and ecology, and finally of imagining the nature of human life itself. This course will trace the echoes of the cybernetic explosion from the wake of World War II to the onset of Silicon Valley euphoria.
Introduction to lab-on-a-chip and microrobotic devices with a focus on biomedical applications. Microfabrication techniques. Basics of micro- and nanoscale transport phenomena. Microsensors and microactuators. Microfluidic devices. Lab-on-a-chip systems. Microrobots.
This class takes a social movement perspective to analyze and understand the international human rights movement. The course will address the evolution of the international human rights movement and focus on the NGOs that drive the movement on the international, regional and domestic levels. Sessions will highlight the experiences of major human rights NGOs and will address topics including strategy development, institutional representation, research methodologies, partnerships, networks, venues of engagement, campaigning, fundraising and, perhaps most importantly, the fraught and complex debates about adaptation to changing global circumstances, starting with the pre-Cold War period and including some of the most up-to-date issues and questions going on in this field today.
We are used to thinking of history in national terms, or at least in reference to major civilizations (“Western civilization,” “Near Eastern civilization,” etc.). In “real life,” however, interactions among people, linguistic communities, and cultures frequently cut across political divisions. Water - rivers, streams, seas - is often an invitation to settlement, commerce, and conquest. This course offers a look (inspired in part by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean) at a body of water - the Black Sea - and the lands around it, in sweeping historical perspective. Focus is on those moments when the various civilizations and empires that originated and flourished around the Black Sea met and intersected in friendship or in enmity. We will look at ancient civilizations, Greek colonization, Byzantine-Slav interactions, the period of Ottoman dominance, Russian-Turkish rivalry, and decolonization and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. We hope that we will be able to pay particular attention to questions of ecology, language, religion, and cultural interaction throughout.