Cinema and videogames are moving-image-based media, and, especially over the past two decades, they have been credited with influencing each other. But how deep do their similarities actually go? In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers? How does each medium segment and present space, time, and action? What aesthetic effects are open to games that are not open to cinema, and vice versa? This course offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between cinema and video games. Through a combination of film screenings, gameplay, theoretical reading/discussions, and practical assignments, students will examine the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and narrative connections between these two influential media forms. The course aims to foster an understanding of how cinema and video games intersect, inform, and influence one another, providing a unique perspective on storytelling techniques within these mediums. The course will culminate in a final presentation where students will adapt an existing intellectual property, preferably a film or TV show, into a video game (or vice versa), justifying their creative choices.
In 1933’s
King Kong
, the titular giant ape is brought to New York City in chains—he is brought to Broadway, becoming an object of spectacle for the gaping crowds. Film scholar James Snead describes the film as an “allegory of the slave trade… and of various other forms of exploitation and despoilment.” Snead finds in the monster movie gestures towards the fears of an emancipated Black America as represented by the Harlem Renaissance and even, with its climax at the very top of the Empire State Building, a critique of American Capitalism. How the scholar uncovers, in
King Kong,
anxieties about the city and the wider American experience, emblematizes the ‘against-the-grain’ approach of this class which asks: what kind of subterranean views of New York City and its taboo/unseen histories emerge when we look deep into the shadows of the horror genre?
Our eye will move across the city as well as across film and media history, plunging from the heights of King Kong’s looming skyscraper to Greenwich Village where murderers lurk among our neighbors (
Rear Window
). We will move from the macabre world of a cruel, sometimes demonic upper class (
American Psycho
,
Rosemary’s Baby
) to the gay cruising scene of the 1970s menaced by slashers who may be hiding in the dancing crowd (
Cruising
).
With its emphasis on field trips, the course will offer a holistic view of an iconic yet always changing city with visits to the top of the Empire State Building and to the Museum of Reclaimed Space. There, we will gain lessons on gentrification’s costs as well as strategies to resist its insidiously flattening force. For our week on Roman Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby
, we will visit the setting of the Dakota Hotel, mulling how the film about a woman who may be giving birth to an otherworldly creature visualizes urban space as a place of profound disconnection. It will mobilize the archival resources of Columbia’s collections around the featured films, so students can appreciate how New York-based critics perceived these films’ representations of the city. To further frame how horror can be a space to explore unsung histories and the impacts of ongoing cultural traumas, acclaimed artists will be invited into the classroom. These include: Pornsak Pichetshote whose graphic novel
Infidel
presents the prejudices, paranoias, and fears of post-9/11 New York in a monstruous light a
Prerequisites: STAT UN1201, ECON UN3211 Intermediate Microeconomics and ECON UN3213 Intermediate Macroeconomics. Equivalent to ECON UN3025. Institutional nature and economic function of financial markets. Emphasis on both domestic and international markets (debt, stock, foreign exchange, Eurobond, Eurocurrency, futures, options, and others). Principles of security pricing and portfolio management; the capital asset pricing model and the efficient markets hypothesis.
Traditionally, stories have followed a linear path, with a clear distinction between teller and audience. Yet, since the late 20th century, this model is shifting. Today, postmodern fiction, video games, interactive films, VR, participatory theater and immersive experiences offer audiences agency, creating a challenge for creators: how do they uphold narrative integrity while allowing for choice, collaboration, and remixing?
In this class, we’ll examine how modern narrative designers craft stories across media that invite audience participation. Through history, analysis, and workshops, we’ll explore how creators design for interaction while preserving tone and themes, turning audiences into active participants.
For the final assignment, students will develop a 12-15 minute pitch presentation for an original story concept, adapting it into an interactive format that balances strong authorial vision with audience agency.
WRIT3043OC:
What is Creative Writing For? Prose Writing in Paris
, 3 credits.
Instructor:
Nellie Hermann
, Adjunct Associate Professor, Barnard College; Core Faculty, Narrative Medicine; Creative Director, Columbia Narrative Medicine; Course Director, Narrative Medicine Certificate.
This course will plot a journey through a series of themes designed to examine what creative writing might be
for
as an applied practice (not only as an art): how can the tools of creative work connect us more deeply to the world around us, and therefore potentially transform any other endeavor we take on? Throughout the month, we will write and read – each week will feature a few different texts (all of them by French writers or by writers who lived in Paris) which will form the background of the week’s work, and a particular piece of prose writing will be due at the end of that week. We will rely heavily on the city of Paris to be our teacher and guide in these various themes, and will involve the city in our explorations. In addition to the reading and generative exercises through each week, students will share one longer-form piece of writing with the group, and we will spend at least four class sessions workshopping these pieces as a group, with formal workshop letters due from students to underscore the attention they are giving to each other’s work.
This course counts toward the Medical Humanities Major at Columbia University.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer Creative Writing in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships
available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Sessions Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start a
Criticism is an important skill to have, to appreciate and understand film more. But criticism isn’t black and white, and most importantly, it can help inform us of how to shape, tell, and develop a story that resonates with the audience.
This course will begin by exploring the basics of film criticism and film appreciation, as students develop their skills in analyzing and identifying components that make a film work (or fall short). As they approach the second half of the course, students will transform their skills in critiquing into productive feedback and use what they’ve learned to form and develop stories of their own, write a 1-2 page treatment, and finally pitch their story ideas in front of the class.
Everyone is interested in telling a story, but through the lens of film criticism, students will appreciate the creative process and learn how it is empowered by what we watch and most importantly, how we watch. Students will use this summer course to identify and prepare for areas of focus that they might be interested in pursuing (screenwriting, directing, producing) in their academic career.
WRIT3045OC:
Writing Through Art: Poetry in Paris
, 3 credits.
Instructor:
Dorothea Lasky
, Director of MFA in Poetry Program; Associate Professor of Writing, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
At least since the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos called "painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks," creative writing has existed in conversation with a variety of other art forms, particularly visual art. In this class, we will explore creative writing as an interdisciplinary practice, with an emphasis on the work of artists who create in both the visual and textual fields. Among other key critical questions, we will consider:
1. How has an intersection with visual art been important to creative writing historically?
2. How does visual experience relate to particular aspects of creative writing?
3. How can we use visual art towards our own creative process in the future, either by using visual art in writing or by incorporating illustration in the presentation of our written work?
A mix of texts—classic and contemporary poetry and prose, illuminated manuscripts, children’s picturebooks, literature that we might consider
visually-driven
, and related scholarship––form the basis for our investigations, discussions, and creative work.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer Creative Writing in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships
available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Sessions Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia Summer Creative Writing in Paris program. Please email
uge@columbia.edu
with a
This course looks at the narrative and the historical context for an extraordinary event: the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander III of Macedonia, conventionally known as “Alexander the Great”. We will explore the different worlds Alexander grew out of, confronted, and affected: the old Greek world, the Persian empire, the ancient near-east (Egypt, Levant, Babylonia, Iran), and the worlds beyond, namely pre-Islamic (and pre-Silk Road) Central Asia, the Afghan borderlands, and the Indus valley. The first part of the course will establish context, before laying out a narrative framework; the second part of the course will explore a series of themes, especially the tension between military conquest, political negotiation, and social interactions. Overall, the course will serve as an exercise in historical methodology (with particular attention to ancient sources and to interpretation), an introduction to the geography and the history of the ancient world (classical and near-eastern), and the exploration of a complex testcase located at the contact point between several worlds, and at a watershed of world history.
In 1930 Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by the 21st century because he expected we would be at the foothills of the "economic promised land." He was more than right about technological progress and staggering productivity growth –– but dead wrong about the role work would play in our lives. Here we are, working 40+ hour weeks in mostly drab jobs, often under precarious employment conditions.
This course is centered on the concept of "work." The broad objectives of the course are: first, to facilitate a critical understanding of the meaning and significance of work for human life; second, to develop a set of theoretical and analytical tools to dissect and analyze specific work arrangements that we in fact encounter in the real world; and third, and perhaps more importantly, to imagine alternative arrangements of work life that might be better suited for human flourishing.
We begin with some of the central ideas in modern labor economics, including definition of work, labor supply and demand, market mechanisms of wage determination, human capital theory and incentive-based management. We then assess the underlying assumptions implied in this body of knowledge –– for example, from labor as input in production to profit maximization and utility maximization based on stable consumer preferences over material goods and services and leisure time. The springboard for this critical analysis is a set of alternative viewpoints on what constitutes "work activity" from various other academic disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. These readings, with their origins in different historical and intellectual settings and founded on different conceptions of human nature, stand in sharp contrast to this neoclassical economic view of "man" and "work.”
The course will have a two-part structure. The first half of the course will consist of a series of lectures on modern labor economic models emphasizing the assumptions, theories and labor market “facts” that these models are designed to explain. The second half of the course will shift to a more discussion-based format that is better suited to a close "exegesis" of the required texts as critique of this neoclassical paradigm of work.
In 1930 Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by the 21st century because he expected we would be at the foothills of the "economic promised land." He was more than right about technological progress and staggering productivity growth –– but dead wrong about the role work would play in our lives. Here we are, working 40+ hour weeks in mostly drab jobs, often under precarious employment conditions.
This course is centered on the concept of "work." The broad objectives of the course are: first, to facilitate a critical understanding of the meaning and significance of work for human life; second, to develop a set of theoretical and analytical tools to dissect and analyze specific work arrangements that we in fact encounter in the real world; and third, and perhaps more importantly, to imagine alternative arrangements of work life that might be better suited for human flourishing.
We begin with some of the central ideas in modern labor economics, including definition of work, labor supply and demand, market mechanisms of wage determination, human capital theory and incentive-based management. We then assess the underlying assumptions implied in this body of knowledge –– for example, from labor as input in production to profit maximization and utility maximization based on stable consumer preferences over material goods and services and leisure time. The springboard for this critical analysis is a set of alternative viewpoints on what constitutes "work activity" from various other academic disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. These readings, with their origins in different historical and intellectual settings and founded on different conceptions of human nature, stand in sharp contrast to this neoclassical economic view of "man" and "work.”
The course will have a two-part structure. The first half of the course will consist of a series of lectures on modern labor economic models emphasizing the assumptions, theories and labor market “facts” that these models are designed to explain. The second half of the course will shift to a more discussion-based format that is better suited to a close "exegesis" of the required texts as critique of this neoclassical paradigm of work.
This course examines the conception and spatialization of religious experience in ancient Greece through brief chronological surveys and thematic case studies. Definitions of “sacred,” “ritual,” and “divine” will frame lectures and class discussions on cult locations and religious architecture in mainland Greece and western Asia Minor from the Archaic (8th century BCE) to the Early Roman Imperial (2nd century CE) periods.
The architectural articulation of sanctuaries will be observed in relation to socio-political, historical, and artistic conditions in which these spaces were formed and existed. Case studies will involve both conventional (e.g., athletic) and idiosyncratic (e.g., healing, mystery performances) cult practices.
The second half of the summer session will focus on the materiality of the sacred through smallscale dedications and will make use of the vast collections of the Metropolitan Museum. Finally, we will observe NYC’s urban fabric in walking tours where we consider Greek Revival architecture and phenomena such as continuity, transformation, de-sacralization, and secularization.
The goal of this course is to provide students with an overview of constitutive debates over the theory and practice of democracy along three major lines: democracy as a word (with a time-honored ancestry and a tortuous trajectory across the centuries); democracy as a constellation of principles and values; and democracy as an array of institutions and procedures that instantiate the word and pursue the foundational principles of popular sovereignty and democratic self-rule. In doing so, we will read the work of major representatives of historical and contemporary political thought who assessed democracy’s shortcomings and potential, examined the relationship between its theory and its practice, and offered prominent resources for thinking about democracy’s future in our present.
Capitalism shapes every aspect of our daily lives. Thinkers on both the left and the right of the political spectrum agree that capitalism structures our economic, social, and political relationships. Yet, there is little agreement as to the definition of capitalism and its normative implications. The definition and interpretation of capitalism differs across time and space, always evolving in response to challenges, crises, and contradictions. The aim of this course is to provide students with analytical tools to think critically and historically about the concept of capitalism. By studying how philosophers, economists, and political theorists have defined and described the concept of capitalism throughout its history (from the early seventeenth century to the present), students will be provided with a set of terminologies and analytical frameworks that enable them to interrogate the various dimensions of capitalism. The readings in the course are selected to illustrate the fact that capitalism has always been controversial. We will read texts authored by both proponents and critics of capitalism. We will explore how various canonical figures have thought about private property, markets, money, economic growth, injustice, inequality, alienation, and socialism.
Data types and structures: arrays, stacks, singly and doubly linked lists, queues, trees, sets, and graphs. Programming techniques for processing such structures: sorting and searching, hashing, garbage collection. Storage management. Rudiments of the analysis of algorithms. Taught in Java. Note: Due to significant overlap, students may receive credit for only one of the following three courses: COMS W3134, COMS W3136, COMS W3137.
HIST3136OC. France and the African Diaspora, 3 points.
Insructor: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
Taught in English. This course also counts as a
Global Core Requirement a
t Columbia University.
This course explores France’s complex racialized colonial history by encouraging students to examine the ways the country helped constitute a racialized colonial empire and the ways it created the conditions the conditions to challenge it. The course encourages students to contemplate how France has figured into the creation of the African Diaspora and how diasporic movements for freedom have shaped France. The course will build upon the concept of vernacular landscapes to encourage students to examine how these histories are memorialized, or not, in France today. Topics to be explored will include: the impact of slavery on France, including its port cities including Nantes; the intertwined character of the French and Haitian Revolutions; the convergence of anti-colonial movements in Paris during the interwar period and beyond, and the experiences of Black expatriates in the country during the twentieth century. The course’s location at Reid Hall in Paris will give students ample opportunities to students to examine the reciprocal impact between France and decolonization and freedom movements.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.
Please email uge@columbia.edu with any questions you may have.
C programming language and Unix systems programming. Also covers Git, Make, TCP/IP networking basics, C++ fundamentals.
Logic and formal proofs, sequences and summation, mathematical induction, binomial coefficients, elements of finite probability, recurrence relations, equivalence relations and partial orderings, and topics in graph theory (including isomorphism, traversability, planarity, and colorings).
This political science course provides an introduction to the politics of judges, courts, and law in the United States. We will evaluate law and courts as political institutions and judges as political actors and policy-makers.
The topics we will study include what courts do; how different legal systems function; the operation of legal norms; the U.S. judicial system; the power of courts; constraints on judicial power; judicial review; the origin of judicial institutions; how and why Supreme Court justices make the decisions they do; case selection; conflict between the Court and the other branches of government; decision making and conflict within the judicial hierarchy; the place of courts in American political history; and judicial appointments.
We will explore some common but not necessarily true claims about how judges make decisions and the role of courts. One set of myths sees judges as unbiased appliers of neutral law, finding law and never making it, with ideology, biography, and politics left at the courthouse door. Another set of myths sees the judiciary as the “least dangerous branch,” making law, not policy, without real power or influence.
Our thematic questions will be: How much power and discretion do judges have in the U.S? What drives their decision-making?
This is an intensive, six-week class moving from the basics of paint materials, techniques, issues of color, light, narrative and most of all representation. Students will begin working from still life set-ups in the studio and gradually move towards more ambitious approaches including figure painting from a model. Towards the end of the class students will be encouraged to work on a project or projects that more closely reflect their personal ideas.
Prerequisites: MATH UN1101 and ECON UN1105 or the equivalent; one term of calculus. Corequisites: MATH UN1201. This course covers the determination of output, employment, inflation and interest rates. Topics include economic growth, business cycles, monetary and fiscal policy, consumption and savings and national income accounting.
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.
This course will introduce students to writing about visual art. We will take our models from art history and contemporary art discourse, and students will be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. The modes of art writing we will encounter include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which describe or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as John Ashbery, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others who for periods of their life held positions as art critics while composing poetry and works of fiction; writers such as Etel Adnan, Susan Howe, and Renee Gladman who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers such as Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, Gregg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, and Hannah Black, and consider both the visual qualities of writing and the ways that visual artists have used writing in their work. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of visual artists, such as those associated with the New York School and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course students will produce original works and complete a final writing project that enriches, complicates, and departs from their own interests and preoccupations.
This course is an introduction to American constitutional law. We examine key historical debates surrounding the constitution’s framing, ratification, and subsequent amendments, and study several major court decisions that have elaborated the constitution’s meaning over time. We will explore competing theories of how the constitution should be interpreted, how the constitution distributes and limits the power of different branches of government, and which fundamental political and civil rights the constitution guarantees (see the schedule of readings for specific topics). Students will regularly discuss, debate, and write about these issues.
A major learning goal of the course is to practice the skills needed to understand a legal argument and to articulate our own. Students will learn how to identify the different elements of a legal opinion, how to formulate a legal opinion, and how to conduct basic legal research.
This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare through a combination of reading his plays and viewing them in performance. On the one hand, we approach each play as a written, published text: our in-class conversation consist primarily in close analysis of key passages, and, in one class period, we visit Rare Books to examine the earliest printed versions of the plays in light of English Renaissance print technology. On the other hand, we view performances of each assigned play, including the attendance as a group of at least one Shakespeare production on an NYC stage. Our semester’s through line is to trace, from his earliest plays to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s remarkable development of the techniques of characterization that have made generations of both playgoers and readers feel that his dramatis personae are so modern, real, human. We will also devote attention to exploring the value of each play in our present moment and on our local stages. We read 8 plays in all, including Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.
Culinary practices are intricate to how urban spaces are experienced in everyday life. This course explores the nuanced ways food practices transform global cities worldwide. It investigates how personal preferences of food shape social, cultural, and spatial boundaries. Throughout the course, students will analyze urban spaces in global cities from an intersectionality theory of capitalism lens to consider how power structures shape culinary practices in terms of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, class, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, ability, and diet. For instance, immigrant cooking and eating practices help define ethnic enclaves. And gourmet food trucks for the middle-class can become tropes for spurring gentrification. Analyzing global North and South cities, course themes focus on the politics of street food, food trucks, restaurants, markets, farmers’ markets, food deserts, food assistance programs, urban farming and agriculture, gastronomic gentrification, and food delivery services. This course comprises a mixture of active teaching strategies, short lectures, a film, and several field trips throughout New York City. By the end of the course, students will garner a deep understanding of how food and societies influence, and are shaped by, contemporary global cities.
Culinary practices are intricate to how urban spaces are experienced in everyday life. This course explores the nuanced ways food practices transform global cities worldwide. It investigates how personal preferences of food shape social, cultural, and spatial boundaries. Throughout the course, students will analyze urban spaces in global cities from an intersectionality theory of capitalism lens to consider how power structures shape culinary practices in terms of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, class, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, ability, and diet. For instance, immigrant cooking and eating practices help define ethnic enclaves. And gourmet food trucks for the middle-class can become tropes for spurring gentrification. Analyzing global North and South cities, course themes focus on the politics of street food, food trucks, restaurants, markets, farmers’ markets, food deserts, food assistance programs, urban farming and agriculture, gastronomic gentrification, and food delivery services. This course comprises a mixture of active teaching strategies, short lectures, a film, and several field trips throughout New York City. By the end of the course, students will garner a deep understanding of how food and societies influence, and are shaped by, contemporary global cities.
Regular languages: deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata, regular expressions. Context-free languages: context-free grammars, push-down automata. Turing machines, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the Church-Turing thesis. Introduction to Complexity Theory and NP-Completeness.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 or the equivalent. Introduction to the principles of money and banking. The intermediary institutions of the American economy and their historical developments, current issues in monetary and financial reform.
Walt Whitman was not the first to write about New York. But he was the first of many to let New York write him. By age 43, Whitman had composed most of his best poetry, published three editions of Leaves of Grass, and left New York only twice. How did the second son of an unsuccessful farmer, a grammar school dropout and hack writer become America’s greatest poet? This course offers a response to this perennial mystery of literary scholarship by proposing that “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” was indeed a product of his environment. Coming of age as a writer at the same time the city was emerging as a great metropolis, he received his education and inspiration from New York itself. Course time is equally divided between discussions of Whitman’s antebellum poetry, journalism, and prose (including the newly recovered Life and Adventures of Jack Engle) in their cultural and geographical contexts, and on-site explorations that retread Whitman’s footsteps through Brooklyn and his beloved Mannahatta. Experiential learning is further encouraged through assignments based in archives, museums, and at historic sites throughout the city.
This course explores causes and effects of political behavior in the United States. “Political behavior” is a broad concept, and can include many areas of engagement with civic life. As we consider “behavior,” we must also take on its foundations: Public opinion, ideology, and partisanship. We will focus primarily on mass politics—beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of ordinary citizens rather than of activists or elites—in the United States. However, we will also explore some effects of elite behavior on mass behavior. We will also focus on the interconnections between social structure, culture, and politics. In short, this course will focus on developing an understanding of the mechanisms that drive voting and other political behaviors in the United States.
This course is for students with at least two years of college-level Chinese, aiming to enhance their oral and written proficiency. It covers key issues China faces, such as balancing historic preservation with local needs, integrating traditional and foreign cultures, and improving education in underdeveloped areas. Additionally, the course includes popular topics related to Chinese college students and their lifestyles.
Indigenous people in Ecuador, which represent about 7% of the Ecuadorian population (United Nations, 2015), are disproportionately poor compared with the rest of the population. In 2008 the country embarked on an effort to improve their situation by creating and approving a new constitution. Despite all of these efforts, indigenous people continue to struggle in Ecuador. For indigenous women specially the battle goes beyond the economic hardship, as they face domestic violence and abuse in a daily basis.
The proposed course is designed to provide students with a unique one-to-one interaction with Spanish native speakers in three different sites: the Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest Reservation of Papallacta, the Reservation of Mandaripanga, and the Runatupari Community in the Andean Region of Ecuador. It aims to:
1. Explore, learn and document the work some indigenous groups have been doing since the new constitution was approved back in 2008.
2. Provide students with a service-learning opportunity working hand in hand when possible with women community leaders at the different sites.
3. Learn about how their communities work to preserve their resources and maintain a sustainable culture.
4. Immerse themselves in the Spanish language and culture by interacting, sharing, and living with native Spanish speakers.
5. Have student produce a focused final essay linking the key concepts from the readings and their lived experiences in the communities visited.
Introduction to and analysis of major myths in classical literature. Topics include the changing attitudes and applications of myth from Greek epic to tragedy, as well as modern approaches to myth. Readings include Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. All readings in English.
In her 1975 essay
The Laughter of Medusa
, Hélène Cixous compared women’s writing—in French, “écriture féminine”—to the unexplored African continent. To date, literary criticism has been grappling with the distinct qualities of literary works, crafted by women. This course offers a survey of main autofictional works and memoirs, written originally in the Russian language within the last 100 years. We will start our journey with the tumults of the WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, through the WW2, the Soviet dissident movement, the emigration waves into Israel and the United States, the advent of a post-socialist Russia in 1991—in order to arrive at the two plus decades of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. We will consider the ways in which each author transposes and conveys her own—and others’ memories—through the medium of autofiction, defined by Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term in French, as “the adventure of the language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel.” All selected works, with very few exceptions, are available in English; no reading knowledge of Russian is required. No prerequisites.
A topical approach to the concepts and practices of music in relation to other arts in the development of Asian civilizations.
This course is a topical (not comprehensive) survey of some of the musical traditions of South and West Asia, and of their diasporas. Each tradition will be described locally, connecting it to critical themes that the course aims to explore. The purpose of the course is to introduce you to a range of indigenous and diasporic “Asian” musical styles, ideas, traditions, and artists through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of music as culture. No previous background in music is required.
This course is a topical (not comprehensive) survey of some of the musical traditions of South and West Asia, and of their diasporas. Each tradition will be described locally, connecting it to critical themes that the course aims to explore. The purpose of the course is to introduce you to a range of indigenous and diasporic “Asian” musical styles, ideas, traditions, and artists through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of music as culture. No previous background in music is required.
This upper-level lecture course provides an in-depth analysis of neuroscience at the molecular and cellular levels. Topics include: the structure and function of neuronal membranes, the ionic basis of the membrane potential and action potential, synaptic transmission, synaptic plasticity, and sensory transduction.
This upper-level lecture course provides an in-depth analysis of neuroscience at the molecular and cellular levels. Topics include: the structure and function of neuronal membranes, the ionic basis of the membrane potential and action potential, synaptic transmission, synaptic plasticity, and sensory transduction.
Studio course exploring designing costumes for the stage. Students become familiar with textual and character analysis, research, sketching and rendering, swatching and introductory costume history.
Application Instructions for full semester fall and spring courses: E-mail the instructor with the title of the course in the subject line. 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. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list, from which the instructor will admit them as spaces become available.
For summer courses: Application not required. Register directly for the course.
Advanced introduction to classical sentential and predicate logic. No previous acquaintance with logic is required; nonetheless a willingness to master technicalities and to work at a certain level of abstraction is desirable.
Introduction to the fundamentals of silkscreen techniques. Students gain familiarity with the technical processes of silkscreen and are encouraged to use the processes to develop their visual language. Students are involved in a great deal of drawing for assigned projects. Portfolio required at end.
Prerequisites: STAT UN1201 Intro to Stats w/Calculus, MATH UN1201 Calculus III, and either intermediate micro or macro (UN3211 or UN3213). Equivalent to ECON UN3412. Modern econometric methods, the general linear statistical model and its extensions, simultaneous equations and the identification problem, time series problems, forecasting methods, extensive practice with the analysis of different types of data.
Coming on the heels of the MoMA's blockbuster exhibit, this seminar will trace the rise and fall of Abstract Expressionism, from its pre-World War II precipitates in Europe (Surrealism) and in America (Regionalism), to the crucial moment when, as scholar Serge Guilbaut has argued, New York 'stole' the idea of modern art, and finally, through the decade when Pop Art rendered Abstract Expressionism obsolete. Although special emphasis will be given to Jackson Pollock, whose persona and work reside at the literal and figurative center of the movement, we will also look closely at works by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem DeKooning, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. Class lectures and presentations will be supplemented with trips to New York's world-renowned museums.
This course will focus on the reception and influence of medieval European architecture in New York City through the buildings and monuments that revive, replicate, and preserve it. We will examine the architectural as well as the social, historical, and political environment of nineteenth and twentieth century New York City, in which medieval architecture came to symbolize not only religion but also erudition, exoticism, heritage, education, civic pride, and even hygiene. Alongside Gothic Revival churches, skyscrapers, campuses, and parks, this course will consider other forms of medieval architectural revivalism (including Moorish Revival synagogues and Romanesque Revival rowhouses) as well as projects that physically relocated medieval buildings to New York City both for private collections and public display. We will combine regular field trips to sites around the city with readings and discussions and will make use of the archives of several prominent revivalist architects in Avery Library’s collections.
This lecture examines how the American presidency evolved into the most important job on earth. It examines how major events in US and world history shaped the presidency. How changes in technology and media augmented the power of the president and how the individuals who served in the office left their marks on the presidency. Each class will make connections between past presidents and the current events involving today's Commander-in-Chief. Some topics to be discussed: Presidency in the Age of Jackson; Teddy Roosevelt and Presidential Image Making; Presidency in the Roaring ‘20s; FDR and the New Deal; Kennedy and the Television Age; The Great Society and the Rise of the New Right; 1968: Apocalyptic Election; The Strange Career of Richard Nixon; Reagan's Post Modern Presidency; From Monica to The War on Terror.
AHIS3431 Contemporary Art and Architecture at the Venice Biennale. 3 points
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: TBD
This course introduces the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the Venice Biennale. The Biennale has become one of the most important international contemporary art and architecture fairs. This course will expose students to the historical, political, and cultural developments linked to the biennale from its inception in 1895 to present day. In addition to regular class meetings with slide lectures and seminar-style discussion in the classroom, students will visit exhibition spaces located in the historical pavilions of the giardini (fair gardens), the arsenale (a 16th century warehouse space now used to host sections of this contemporary art installations), and other temporary venues located throughout the city as we investigate not only the art, but also the unique spaces in which we encounter it. Beyond a focus on the history of the Venice Biennale, the course will introduce some of the key concepts of contemporary art as they have developed in the past three or so decades.
Counts toward the Art History Major/Concentration at Columbia.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia in Venice
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarship
available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Sessions Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Venice program.
This course will introduce students to the history of museums and display practices through New York collections. The birth of the museum as a constitutive element of modernity coincides with the establishment of European nation states. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, museums were founded in major European and American cities to classify objects, natural and manmade, from plants and fossils to sculpture and clothing. This course presents the alternate art history that can be charted through an examination of the foundation and development of museums from cabinets of curiosity to the collection-less new museums currently being built in the Middle East and beyond. We will consider broad thematic issues such as nationalism, colonialism, canon formation, the overlapping methods of anthropology and art history, and the notion of 'framing' from the architectural superstructure to exhibition design. We will visit a wide variety of museums from the American Museum of Natural History to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum as in-depth case studies of more general concepts. Students will have the opportunity to meet museum educators, conservators and curators through on site teaching in a variety of institutions.
This course will introduce students to the history of museums and display practices through New York collections. The birth of the museum as a constitutive element of modernity coincides with the establishment of European nation states. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, museums were founded in major European and American cities to classify objects, natural and manmade, from plants and fossils to sculpture and clothing. This course presents the alternate art history that can be charted through an examination of the foundation and development of museums from cabinets of curiosity to the collection-less new museums currently being built in the Middle East and beyond. We will consider broad thematic issues such as nationalism, colonialism, canon formation, the overlapping methods of anthropology and art history, and the notion of 'framing' from the architectural superstructure to exhibition design. We will visit a wide variety of museums from the American Museum of Natural History to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum as in-depth case studies of more general concepts. Students will have the opportunity to meet museum educators, conservators and curators through on site teaching in a variety of institutions.
Through an examination of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography. fashion and visual culture of the United States from 1750 to 1914, the course will explore how American artists responded to and operated within the wider world, while grappling with issues of identity at home. Addressing themes shared in common across national boundaries, the class will consider how American art participated in the revolutions and reforms of the "long" nineteenth century, and how events of the period continue to impact our country today. The period witnessed the emergence of new technologies for creating, using and circulating images and objects, the expansion and transformation of exhibition and viewing practices, and the rise of new artistic institutions, as well as the metamorphosis of the United States from its colonial origins to that of a world power, including the radical changes that occurred during the Civil War. With many sessions taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the class will investigate how American art engaged with international movements while constructing national identity during a period of radical transformation both at home and abroad.
The use of artificial intelligence—propelled by deep learning techniques—to analyze, curate, and generate digital images is having a profound influence on visual culture, one that well exceeds Jacques Derrida's anticipations of the effects of technology on society as he described them in Archive Fever. While regulation around emerging technologies such as AI is being formulated across the globe with much urgency, a problematic concept of “tech ethics” is being espoused by the leading technology companies that imposes a simplistic moralistic framework on potential policies. Through examination of the creative applications of AI, the aim of this seminar is to foster a nuanced critical discourse on AI art that places the ethics of emerging technologies at center stage. This course provides students with an introduction to the history of AI art and explores the challenges and opportunities that this burgeoning field faces, especially in regard to the regulation of technology. Class visits to Mercer Labs, Artechouse, MoMA, and the Whitney will allow students to directly engage with the core concepts of the seminar.
The course begins with reflection on Adorno’s prescient statement that technical rationality is “the rationality of domination,” and challenges both the cynicism and optimism around emerging technologies and their effect on visual culture. We will question the accountability that art history and other fields of study have, if any, to steer the ethics debates spurred by today’s “culture industry” of digital images, and ask what the custodianship of this space entails by examining its structures of power, conveyed visually or through automated processes enabled by computer vision science. By interrogating the socio-cultural effects of the use of machine learning on images—such as algorithmic biases that lend to discrimination, or surveillance and privacy concerns in regard to facial recognition technologies—new and diverse perspectives on visual culture are investigated. Although the mechanisms that enable technology to develop may be lending to the commodification and homogenization of visual culture, the seemingly democratic promises that big tech touts keep us captivated yet surprisingly uncritical. If the transformative role of AI on our visual culture is constituting a new type of archaeology of knowledge, how do we critically lend to its discourse through the theories, methods, and experiments surrounding art and AI?
This course charts the expansion of U.S. military power from a band of colonists to a globe-girdling colossus with over 2.1 million personnel, some 750 bases around the world, and an annual budget of approximately $754 billion — almost half of federal discretionary spending, and more than the next nine nations combined. It introduces students to the history of American military power; the economic, political, and technological rise of the military-industrial complex and national security state; the role of the armed services in international humanitarian work; and the changing role of the military in domestic and international politics. A three-point semester-long course, compressed into six weeks; visit
bobneer.com
for a complete syllabus.
Instructor
Bruno Bosteels
, Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Taught in English.
"1968" remains a watershed year in the history of worldwide struggles for liberation and emancipation. For many the last gasp of the revolutionary era, for others the beginning of a new regime of flexible control. The hypothesis for this seminar holds that "1968" matters for a thinking of the event in two essential ways: not only may we ask what happened but we also should ask how we can talk of the happening of an event in the first place. Alternating theoretical and fictional, historical and artistic, filmic and political materials, students will be expected to develop an original take on one aspect of the paradigm shift that affects the thinking of the events of “1968” during that exceptional month of May in Paris, while keeping a close eye on the national and international contexts behind the global sixties.
This summer edition of the course will meet three times per week for two hours each, plus a weekly showing and discussion of a movie related to May 1968 in France and around the globe. In addition, the class will include day trips with a guided tour to the Quartier Latin in relation to May ’68 as well as the National Archives. To be confirmed are visits by contemporary theorists and philosophers such as Jacques Rancière or Alain Badiou, for whom May 1968 always was and remains a major touchstone event for their view of emancipatory politics.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.
Please email ug
AHIS3472OC:
Museums for Paris, 1793-Today
, 3 credits
Instructor
Barthélemy Glama
, Senior Advisor to the President-Director of the Louvre Museum
This course explores the evolving role of museums in Paris from the transformative era of the French Revolution to the present day. Through a combination of in-class discussions and weekly site visits,
Museums for Paris, 1793–Today
traces how museums in the French capital have served as dynamic spaces for nation- and city-building. Each week addresses different museum types – from the revolutionary Louvre to the most recent Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection – providing insight into the impulses behind collecting, the narratives constructed around the display of objects, and the emergence of Paris as a political, cultural, and global (or imperial) center.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer Art History in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.
Please email uge@columbia.edu with any questions you may have.
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.
Prerequisites: POLS V1501 or the equivalent. Admission by application through the Barnard department only. Enrollment limited to 16 students. Barnard syllabus. Comparative political economy course which addresses some important questions concerning corruption and its control: the concept, causes, patterns, consequences, and control of corruption. Introduces students to and engages them in several key social science debates on the causes and effects of political corruption.
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.
In the late seventeenth century, a new genre appears across Europe: the novel. It told the stories – not of the princes and princesses – but of ordinary people on extraordinary voyages, from villages to the Metropolis, from England to Africa and the Americas. In their travels, they encountered not the dragons or giants of romance, but the people and things that made up everyday life in the eighteenth century – country houses and whorehouses, aristocrats and the merchants, pirates and slaves, and a vast array of enticing goods (shoes and coats, silks and ribbons, coffee and opium) produced in early capitalism.
Why does the novel appear? What role does it play, in personal psychology as well as society? Can we account for its increasing popularity as well as its transformations across the eighteenth century? To puzzle these questions, we will place the development of the novel within the history of art, philosophy and science, as well as psychology and literary theory. Writers include Mme. de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Heywood, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, William Godwin, and Jane Austen. Critical readings include selections from Benjamin, Adorno,
Foucault, Elias, Moretti, and others. Note: we will read primarily novellas (short novels) or selections from longer novels in this course.
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.
This course will survey topics in contemporary metaphysics. We will focus on material objects, time, modality, causation, properties, and natural kinds. We will begin by considering what objects there are in general (ontology) and what to say about certain puzzling entities (such as holes). Then we will turn to debates about material objects and puzzles about composite objects and the notion of parthood. Next is the issue of how material objects persist over time and survive change in their parts. We shall consider two important views on persistence. We then turn to two issues related to persistence: personal identity over time, and puzzles about time travel. This will lead us into the next part of the course on modality and causation, which concerns the notions of possibility, necessity, laws of nature, and causation. We will consider different views about 'possible worlds'. We will then consider the nature of laws and causation and then turn to the problem of free will. We will look at debates in the metaphysics of properties between realists and nominalists about properties. Then we'll consider causal powers, dispositions, and natural kinds. The section will conclude with problems about the metaphysics of socially constructed kinds such as race or gender.
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.
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.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. Main objective is to gain a familiarity with and understanding of recording, editing, mixing, and mastering of recorded music and sounds using Pro Tools software. Discusses the history of recorded production, microphone technique, and the idea of using the studio as an instrument for the production and manipulation of sound.
FREN3632OC: Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Twenty-First Century French and Francophone Literature and Film, 3 credits. Taught in French.
Intructor:
Laurence Marie, Lecturer in French, Columbia University.
In this course, students will explore the representations of inequality and identity in French and Francophone literature and films realeased in the last decade. Drawing from specificites of French history and cuslutre, they will analyze structures of oppression and forms of agency depicted in the stories of individuals confronted by discrimination. Students will have the opportunity to meet several of the authors studied. Writers include David Diop, Abdellah Taja, Kaoutar Harchi, Djaili Amadou Amal, Edouard Louis, Constance Debre, Camille Laurens, and Virginie Despentes. Film directors include Alice Diop, Ladj Ly, Celine Sciamma, Houda Benyamina and Sebastien Lifshitz.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.
Please email uge@columbia.edu with any questions you may have.
In 2013, Alice Munro was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature. Munro’s award was seen as a literary landmark: the first time that the prize was awarded to a writer whose exclusive form was the short story. The award was seen as fitting recognition, not only for this writer in particular, but also more broadly as moment of recognition for the short story’s importance as a genre, especially in a publishing industry that has long been dominated by the novel.
In this course, we will focus on the contemporary North American short story authors featured on our syllabus: Chimamanda Adichie, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Carmen Machado, Leanne Simpson, Anthony Veasna So. Some of the writers on this list are veterans of the short story form. Others are authors who recently published debut collections. As we work through our reading list, we will attempt to analyze not only individual short stories, but also what marks these books as collections. What might hold these texts together? What disrupts the unifying principles of a collection? And most importantly, what do short stories offer—in terms of representations of American life and culture and itscomplexity—that other forms do not?
This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought.
AHIS3682OC. Issues in Nineteenth Century Art.
3 points.
Taught in English.
Instructor Nicolas Baudouin, Instructor in Art History.
We will focus on a key artistic period that is full of upheavals. We will particularly consider the affirmation of the individuality of the artist in relation to the institutions and great pictorial movements that have marked the history of French painting of that time.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Columbia Summer in Paris
program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).
Global Learning Scholarships available.
Tuition
charges apply.
Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the
UGE
website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.
Please email uge@columbia.edu with any questions you may have.
In this seminar, we will study “Sally Rooney.” In so doing, we will talk about the real author of that name: a thirty-year old Irishwoman whose three novels, each set in Ireland and concerning the social and erotic lives of attractive young people of European descent, have achieved remarkable commercial and critical success. We will talk about the pleasures of those texts, as well as their formal and generic features, their language and their relation to literary history. But we will also discuss the idea and institution named “Sally Rooney,” considering it as what Michel Foucault called an “author function,” or what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed a “space of possibilities” within the literary field.
Our inquiry into “Sally Rooney” will, therefore, also be an inquiry into the meaning of literary authorship in the twenty-first century. Through secondary readings in criticism and theory, we will engage longstanding arguments about the relation between critical interpretation and authorial intention, as well as between social and historical “context” and authorial and aesthetic autonomy. We will examine how patterns of social exclusion — in this case, race — define the digitally-mediated literary field of the present. And we will ask how the rise of social media and online retail have altered ideas and institutions of authorship, audience, and literariness.
Greater New York—the municipality that consolidated the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—was officially established on New Year’s day in 1898. While the change had been supported by a large majority of the boroughs’ residents in an 1894 referendum, there remained considerable controversy about the enterprise, even by its sponsors. The city has managed to stave off succession movements since then; however, the boroughs remain resistant to economic, legislative, and cultural consolidation. In this course we will study depictions New York life, from the middle of the 20th century--a time of significant social and political turmoil in many boroughs, particularly around issues of race and religion--and into the 21st. How do New York’s boroughs themselves become tropes in the fiction and film and television about them? What characterizes the nostalgia and anxiety about city life in these representations? Finally, what can an examination of these questions tell us about the ways New York has changed as a locus for imaginative work in the 21st century?
Projects for this course will include short critical responses to course materials, a guided walking tour of a micro-neighborhood in NY (5 blocks or less), and a research essay on a film, play, or TV show made and set New York.
PLEASE NOTE: All digital materials will be available through Courseworks.
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 course will explore contemporary anthropological approaches to the issue of violence with an exploration of three particular themes. Our main focus will be on the idea of representation, ethnographically and theoretically, of the concept of violence. First, we will look at how violence has been situated as an object of study within anthropology, as a theoretical concept as well as in practice. We will then look at the issue of terrorism and how anthropology as a discipline contributes to understanding this particular form of violence. Finally, we will consider gender-based violence with close attention to the colonial/post-colonial settings where Islam is a salient factor. Gender based violence is one of the main forces producing and reproducing gender inequality. We will pay particular attention to the concept of the 'Muslim woman' in both the colonial and colonized imagination.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
This seminar seeks to engage with materials that question personhood. Drawing on both fictional and non-fictional accounts, we will be involved with textual and visual documents as well institutional contexts in order to revisit such notion under contemporary capitalism. We will cover topics like rites of passage and life cycle, the role of the nation state and local communities in defining a person, the relation between self and non-self, between the living and the dead. We will likewise address vicarious forms of personhood through the prosthetic, the avatar or the heteronomous. But we will also look into forms of dissipation and/or enhancement of personhood through bodybuilding, guinea-piging and pharmo-toxicities. As a whole, the course will bring to light how the question of personhood cross-culturally relates to language, performativity, religion, technology, law, gender, race, class, care, life and death.
Six major concepts of political philosophy including authority, rights, equality, justice, liberty and democracy are examined in three different ways. First the conceptual issues are analyzed through contemporary essays on these topics by authors like Peters, Hart, Williams, Berlin, Rawls and Schumpeter. Second the classical sources on these topics are discussed through readings from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Plato, Mill and Rousseau. Third some attention is paid to relevant contexts of application of these concepts in political society, including such political movements as anarchism, international human rights, conservative, liberal, and Marxist economic policies as well as competing models of democracy.
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?”
Global capitalism inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read three early novels – Behn’s
Orinooko
, Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
, Austen’s
Persuasion
alongside Marxist theory, and then examine a cluster of twentieth century global novels in English. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labor; classes; and ideology. Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.
The course tracks how key Marxist concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, David Harvey, and Melinda Cooper.
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.
How did European-Christians justify the colonization of the Americas? Did these justifications vary between different European empires, and between the Protestant and Catholic faiths, and if so, how? Do these justifications remain in effect in modern jurisprudence and ministries? This class explores these questions by introducing students to the Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine of Discovery is the defining legal rationale for European Colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine has its origins in a body of ecclesiastic, legal, and philosophical texts dating to the late-fifteenth century, and was summarized by Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court, in the final, unanimous decision the judiciary issued on the 1823 case
Johnson v. M’Intosh.
Students will be introduced to the major, primary texts that make up the Doctrine, as well as contemporary critical studies of these texts and the Doctrine in general.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.