Psychedelics are receiving growing attention in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience for their therapeutic potential. Psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT produce a wide range of changes to perception, ranging from visual perception to alterations in one’s sense of self. When combined with psychological support or psychotherapy, psychedelics have been shown to lead to rapid and long-lasting therapeutic benefits for a wide range of mental health disorders, including major depression and alcohol use disorder. The acute alterations in perception and long-lasting clinical effects offer exciting insight into the relationship between the mind and the brain. This course will focus on the current state of research on the psychological and neurobiological effects of psychedelics. We will begin with a crash-course into the basics of neuroscience and research methodology. Next, the course will delve into how psychedelics alter brain functioning, both acutely during the drug effects as well as long after they have worn off. Studies covered will span molecular, cellular, and systems level analysis. A core element of the course will include reviewing methodological approaches and neuroscientific evidence for psychedelics interventions in the treatment of clinical/psychiatric disorders. We will also review the clinical data and link neurobiological findings to their practical application to move the field of psychedelic science forward. Throughout the course, there will be a specific focus on critical appraisal of research, identifying strengths and limitations surrounding current research, and important avenues for future research. Students should leave the class with an enhanced ability to evaluate research findings and a broad understanding of the mechanisms of action of psychedelics.
The format of the course will include lectures, class discussions and presentations, and guest speakers.
Prerequisites:
PSYC 1001 and any PSYC 2400-level neuroscience course or permission of the instructor.
Are you baffled by contemporary art, fascinated by it, or committed to becoming an artist? This course will prepare students to think and talk about contemporary art, by analyzing how curators, critics, and artists themselves understand the art made today. Students will learn how artists in New York conceive and produce their work, about the types of spaces in which new works are first exhibited, and common terms used to discuss art. The course will include numerous field trips––to artists’ studios, commercial galleries on the Lower East Side, and contemporary art exhibitions, particularly the
2026 Whitney Biennial
. By the end of the course, students will feel confident both navigating the New York contemporary art world on their own as well as guiding others through it. Students will be able to encounter artworks being shown for the first time, to make sense of them, and to spark urgent conversations about them.
This course explores the intertwined histories of Broadway and New York City, examining the theater as both a cultural stage and a lens for imagining urban life. By analyzing landmark musicals and plays set within the five boroughs, students will investigate how the "Great White Way" reflects shifting social landscapes and operates as a central pillar of the city's economics, tourism, and cultural identity. Students will engage with the material through traditional lectures and screenings, supplemented by immersive field experiences including museum, archive, and theater tours.
This course explores the intertwined histories of Broadway and New York City, examining the theater as both a cultural stage and a lens for imagining urban life. By analyzing landmark musicals and plays set within the five boroughs, students will investigate how the "Great White Way" reflects shifting social landscapes and operates as a central pillar of the city's economics, tourism, and cultural identity. Students will engage with the material through traditional lectures and screenings, supplemented by immersive field experiences including museum, archive, and theater tours.
The social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic development of America's metropolis from colonial days to present. Slides and walking tours supplement the readings.
Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: causation and scientific explanation; induction and real kinds; verification and falsification; models, analogies and simulations; the historical origins of the modern sciences; scientific revolutions; reductionism and supervenience; differences between physics, biology and the social sciences; the nature of life; cultural evolution; human nature; philosophical issues in cosmology.
As a population, Latino, Latina, Latine, and Latinx peoples have been prominent in the public sphere in popular culture, the media, and especially around discussions of immigration. Though individuals with a tapestry of Spanish-Indian-African ancestry (who may be described as “Latinas/os” “Hispanics” or “Latinxs” today) explored the lands of present-day Florida and New Mexico long before English colonizers reached Plymouth Rock, Latina/o/x communities are continually seen as foreigners, immigrants, and “newcomers” to American society. This course aims to place Latina/o populations in the United States within historical context. We begin by asking: Who are Latinas/os in the U.S. and how did they become part of the American nation-state? Why are they identified as a distinct group? How have they participated in American society and how have they been perceived over time? The course will familiarize students with the broad themes, periods, and questions raised in the field of Latinx History. Topics include conquest and colonization, immigration, labor recruitment, education, politics, popular culture, and social movements. The course emphasizes a comparative approach to Latinx history aiming to engage histories from the Southwest, Midwest, and Eastern United States and across national origin groups—Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and South Americans. This class is taught in mostly the modern period (after 1750) within United States history so it can count toward the history major or concentration. Where the course points may be applied depends on a student’s field of specialization within their major or concentration. The course can also count toward the
Global Core
requirement, which is reflected on the Columbia online registry. The class can, moreover, serve as three elective points toward degree progress or as non-technical elective credits. Finally, the course is regularly
cross-listed
with both the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights as well as with American Studies.
A seminar for advanced undergraduate students exploring different areas of clinical psychology. The specific focus within clinical psychology may differ each time the course is offered, so it is possible for the course to be retaken for additional credit.
This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission required; contact emccaski@barnard.edu. An introductory course in neuroscience like PSYC 1001 or PSYC 2450. Analysis of the assessment of physical and psychiatric diseases impacting the central nervous system, with emphasis on the relationship between neuropathology and cognitive and behavioral deficits.
This course examines questions in international political economy, asking what we know and how we know it. It addresses questions such as: Why do some countries promote globalization while others resist it? What do IOs do in international politics? Who runs our system of global governance? We will explore these questions and others by focusing on topics such as international trade, foreign aid, investment, and the environment. For each topic, we will use a variety of theoretical lenses and then investigate the evidence in favor of each. More generally, the course will consider the challenges of drawing casual inferences in the field of international political economy. There are no prerequisites for this course but an introductory economy course would be helpful. Students will write a short reading response each week and produce a research proposal for studying a topic related to international political economy, though they do not need to actually conduct this research.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS S3628.
Yaddo is an artists community located in Saratoga Springs, New York. In the words of John Cheever, “the forty or so acres on which the studios and principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts that any other piece of ground in the English speaking community.” Cheever, however, also described Yaddo’s menagerie of creatives as a group of, “lushes down on their luck, men and women at the top of their powers, nervous breakdowns, thieves, geniuses, cranky noblemen, and poets who ate their peas with a knife.” In total this makes for spectacular drama.
Historically speaking Yaddo is an idealized synergy of Gilded Age gender roles and is best understood as ½ Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park (“the Menlo Park factory was a loud, rowdy, and raucous place full of nightly sing-alongs around a large organ, gaming, practical jokes, and midnight feasts”) and one half Settlement House (a space where American women, “expropriated the previously male world of literature and the arts as their own, feeling they possessed a special humanistic sensitivity which provided an alternative to the acquisitive and the competitive goals of men in an industrializing America.”).
Yaddo’s guest list is a “whose who” of American Art and letters. We will, however, study Yaddo as a compelling introduction to the shifts, evolutions, and challenges to American art across the 20th century; including: the study of politically radical art during the 1930s and a remarkable study of Cold War era political threats to American creativity with a special focus on the Lavender Scare.
Because The Yaddo Records (Yaddo’s archive) are at NYPL, and because I served as project archivist for these records we will also spend a day at NYPL that will include introduction to Yaddo’s archive specifically but also to archives more generally. Finally, we will be visited (either in person or online) from a variety of Yaddo alum who will share their experiences and impressions and answer student questions etc.
Prerequisites: One philosophy course This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.
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.
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 course examines the processes of colonization and decolonization that define the making of a modern, integrated world (c. 1500 to the present). We will study primary source materials. We focus on the instruments of colonization—the treaty, the charter, the map, the ethnology—and the engines of decolonization—the manifesto, the resistance, the solidarity with the colonial, the demand for self rule. We are interested in the processes and contents of social and cultural contact and exchange, the development of knowledge, and how they shape relations of power; the place of colonialism in the development of western capitalism; and the elements of colonial power and resistance, including ideologies of liberal political philosophy, social Darwinism, and nationalism. We will consider how ideas about race, civilization, religion, self and other, and freedom have evolved over time and shaped the making of the modern world.
This course explores techniques to harness the power of ``big data'' to answer questions related to political science and/or American politics. Students will learn how to use R---a popular open-source programming language---to obtain, clean, analyze, and visualize data. No previous knowledge of R is required.
We will focus on applied problems using real data wherever possible, using R's ``Tidyverse.'' In total, in this course we will cover concepts such as reading data in various formats (including ``cracking'' atypical government data sources and pdf documents); web scraping; data joins; data manipulation and cleaning (including string variables and regular expressions); data mining; making effective data visualizations; using data to make informed prediction, and basic text analysis. We will also cover programming basics including writing functions and loops in R. Finally, we will discuss how to use R Markdown to communicate our results effectively to outside audiences. Class sessions are applied in nature, and our exercises are designed around practical problems: Predicting election outcomes, determining the author of anonymous texts, and cleaning up messy government data so we can use it.
This course explores techniques to harness the power of ``big data'' to answer questions related to political science and/or American politics. Students will learn how to use R---a popular open-source programming language---to obtain, clean, analyze, and visualize data. No previous knowledge of R is required.
We will focus on applied problems using real data wherever possible, using R's ``Tidyverse.'' In total, in this course we will cover concepts such as reading data in various formats (including ``cracking'' atypical government data sources and pdf documents); web scraping; data joins; data manipulation and cleaning (including string variables and regular expressions); data mining; making effective data visualizations; using data to make informed prediction, and basic text analysis. We will also cover programming basics including writing functions and loops in R. Finally, we will discuss how to use R Markdown to communicate our results effectively to outside audiences. Class sessions are applied in nature, and our exercises are designed around practical problems: Predicting election outcomes, determining the author of anonymous texts, and cleaning up messy government data so we can use it.
This course explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of water primarily through ethnographic studies, in a variety of geographic and spatial contexts, that engage both with water itself and with the things that surround and mix with it (pipes, walls, ditches, dirt, waste, sugar). Anthropology encourages us to consider water in its myriad arrangements and meanings—water can be dynamic, vital, threatening, toxic, a material through which our lives are structured and governed. Its relevance has only become heightened amid the constraints and hazards of climatic and sociopolitical change. We will be attentive to the many forms and combinations that characterize water’s place in our world, finding inspiration in its liquid ways while taking care not to become too occupied with its metaphorical qualities. The course is divided into thematic areas that have taken on critical weight and urgency in recent years: water futures, infrastructure and power, urban ecologies, and (de)colonial waters.
Mathematical foundations of machine learning: Linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and probability and statistics. Comprehensive review and additional treatment of
relevant topics used in the analysis and design of machine learning models. Preliminary exposure to core algorithms such as linear regression, gradient descent, principal
component analysis, low-rank approximations, and kernel methods.
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.
This course endeavors to understand the development of the peculiar and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France, the nation-states that are its former African colonies, and other contemporary African states. It covers the period from the 19th century colonial expansion through the current ‘memory wars’ in French politics and debates over migration and colonial history in Africa. Historical episodes include French participation in and eventual withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade, emancipation in the French possessions, colonial conquest, African participation in the world wars, the wars of decolonization, and French-African relations in the contexts of immigration and the construction of the European Union. Readings will be drawn extensively from primary accounts by African and French intellectuals, dissidents, and colonial administrators. However, the course offers neither a collective biography of the compelling intellectuals who have emerged from this relationship nor a survey of French-African literary or cultural production nor a course in international relations. Indeed, the course avoids the common emphasis in francophone studies on literary production and the experiences of elites and the common focus of international relations on states and bureaucrats. The focus throughout the course is on the historical development of fields of political possibility and the emphasis is on sub-Saharan Africa. Group(s): B, C Field(s): AFR, MEU
In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of
The Wire
) President Barak Obama offered that
The Wire
is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of American art in the last couple of decades."
The Wire
combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city. On a more macro level
The Wire
humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.
The Wire
, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end. That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos. Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order):
The Sopranos
;
The Wire
;
Deadwood
;
Madmen
; and
Breaking Bad.
This course will examine British women writers including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in the context of the (long-) nineteenth-century "Woman Question". Our inquiry will engage the controversy over a woman’s status in terms of the social and political debates of early feminism as well as the enigma of “woman’s nature” in light of the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the period. We will consider how women writers negotiate these current social and psychological discourses in the stories they tell about themselves and others: how do they portray a woman’s life, especially as it manifests the tension George Eliot articulates between “inward impulse and outward fact”? We will pay attention to representations of gender, subjectivity, interiority, desire, domestic affections, friendship, education, economic and professional experience, faith, and creativity as reflecting the struggle, rising influence, and emergent identity of woman. In addition to novels, poetry, and drama, we will read excerpts of critical essays from among our primary authors and other prominent thinkers of the period, such as Wollstonecraft, Martineau, Taylor Mill, and Freud, who, by the early twentieth century, still famously puzzles: “What does a woman want?”
This class focuses on the role of a creative producer during development of low budget film. Students will learn the framework for identifying good stories and developing them into a 3-5 minute short screenplay. We will explore the fundamental aspects of script development and the collaborative relationship between a producer and writer during the development phase. Students will learn critical elements such as writing an effective logline, treatment, and screenplay, and how to provide constructive notes and script analysis thereafter. Through lectures, screenings, writing assignments, and discussions, students will complete the course having written a first draft of a short screenplay, revision and set of written notes as a producer.
This practical lab focuses on the fundamental aspects of development, planning and preparation for low budget films. While using a short film script as their own case study – students will learn pitching, development, script breakdown, scheduling, budgeting and fundraising. Discussion of legal issues, location scouting, deliverables, marketing, distribution and film festival strategy will allow students to move forward with their own projects after completing the class. Using weekly assignments, in-class presentations and textbook readings to reinforce each class discussion topic, students will complete the class having created a final prep/production binder for their project, which includes the script breakdown, production schedule, line item budget, financing/fundraising plan and film festival strategy for their chosen script.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
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.)
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Independent work involving experiments, computer programming, analytical investigation, or engineering design.