An exploration of choreography that employs text, song, vocal work, narrative and principles of artistic direction in solo and group contexts.
Investigates the multicultural perspectives of dance in major areas of culture, including African, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, Middle Eastern, as well as dance history of the Americas through reading, writing, viewing, and discussion of a wide range of resources. These include film, original documents, demonstration, and performance.
Study of the cultural roots and historical contexts of specific communities using New York Citys dance scene as a laboratory. Students observe the social environments in which various modes of dance works are created while researching the history of dance in New York City. Course includes attendance at weekly events, lecture-demonstrations, and performances.
This course offers an introduction to jazz improvisation for instrumentalists. Through recordings, transcriptions, daily performance and selected readings, students will actively engage the history of jazz through their instruments and intellect. The idea of improvisation will be explored in an historical context, both as a musical phenomenon with its attendant theory and mechanics, and as a trope of American history and aesthetics. This class is for instrumentalists who wish to deepen their understanding of the theory, history and practice of jazz improvisation. The history of jazz will be used as a prism through which to view approaches to improvisation, from the cadences of the early Blues through the abstractions of Free Jazz and beyond. The student will be exposed to the theory and vocabularies of various jazz idioms, which they will also learn to place in their social and historical contexts.
Why do countries go to war? What conditions foster international cooperation? How do alliances between countries function? How are countries affected by global trade and investment, and in turn how does the political economy of individual countries shape international conflict and cooperation? How do ideas and culture (including both positive ideas like human rights and negative ideas like racism) affect international politics? What role do individuals and groups play in shaping international politics? What explains the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Why isn’t there significant cooperation on climate change, and can a new global cooperation emerge? What issues have garnered international attention, and how has that shaped the countries’ cooperation? What causes terrorism? Is the proliferation of nuclear (or cyber) weapons a threat to peace, and if so, how should the world response? Does UN peacekeeping work?
In this course we will begin to grapple with these questions. We will use theories developed by philosophers, political scientists and policy analysts, and we will examine the historical roots of today’s problems, in order to explain and predict the patterns of international politics and the possibilities for change. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to choose and develop their own theories to explain events.
Learning Objectives:
By the end of the semester, students will accomplish the following:
Demonstrate broad factual and causal knowledge of important current and historical issues in international relations.
Apply contending theories from the political science literature and the policy world to analyze, compare, and evaluate events and trends in international relations.
Assess the value of competing theories in explaining events.
Synthesize facts and arguments across cases in order to reason critically and argue creatively, through both oral discussions in section and written essays.
Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts.
This is a second-year (fall and spring semesters) course.
Students practice reading and writing in Devanagari and continue to improve their proficiency in Hindi to:
• Successfully handle most uncomplicated communicative tasks and social situations.
• Initiate, sustain, and close a general conversation.
• Write letters and short compositions and read consistently, fully understanding simple connected texts dealing with personal and social needs.
• Get the main ideas and information from texts, including description and narration.
To achieve these goals, students are introduced to a variety of materials, including literature, newspapers, folk tales, jokes, magazine articles, films, songs, commercials, and other kinds of audiovisual materials. These texts relate to language functions in daily personal and social life situations.
Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.
For those whose knowledge is equivalent to a student whos completed the First Year course. The course focuses on the further development of their skills in using the language to engage with practical topics and situations, such as seeing a doctor, reading news, writing letters, and listening to music.
Discussion section for POLS UN2601
This lecture course, with two weekly lectures and additional section meetings, surveys the broad outlines of the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, introducing key concepts, such as multiplicity, impermanence, and transmediality, through a diversity of forms of visual expression in painting, sculpture, bronze, ceramics, lacquer, and architecture. The weekly lectures and discussions will explore interregional relations and influence in order to discover not only the features that make each geographical tradition distinct, but also closely interconnected. Among the key themes to be examined are the archaeology of ancient East Asia, the development of Buddhist art, the arts of landscape and narrative painting, woodblock prints, and finally East Asia after modernity.
Required discussion section for students enrolled in AHIS UN2622
Study of behavior in organizational and business-related settings. Examination of such topics as employee motivation and satisfaction, communication patterns, effective leadership strategies, and organization development.
Prerequisite: An introductory psychology course.
An introduction to basic concepts in moral psychology. Topics include controversies around the definition of morality, foundations of moral thought and behavior, and connections between morality and other areas of life, among other subjects.
This course will survey a number of topics at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the language of thought.
Examines the gendered roles of women and men in Latin American society from the colonial period to the present. Explores a number of themes, including the intersection of social class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the nature of patriarchy; masculinity; gender and the state; and the gendered nature of political mobilization.
This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II.
This course is intended to offer a survey of the history of a complex and vast region through two centuries. In order to balance the specificity of particular histories and larger processes common to Latin America, units will often start with a general presentation of the main questions and will be followed by lectures devoted to specific countries, regions, or themes. We will look closely at the formation of class and ethnic identities, the struggle around state formation, and the links between Latin America and other regions of the world. We will stress the local dimension of these processes: the specific actors, institutions and experiences that shaped the diversity and commonalities of Latin American societies. The assignments, discussion sections, and lectures are intended to introduce students to the key conceptual problems and the most innovative historical research on the region and to encourage their own critical reading of Latin American history.
Prerequisites: MDES W1701-MDES W1702 or the equivalent. A general review of the essentials of grammar; practice in spoken and written Persian; Arabic elements in Persian; selected readings emphasizing Iranian life and culture; materials from Tajikistan and Afghanistan, Indari. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Advanced analog photography & darkroom printing. Students will work with analog cameras and learn how to refine black-and-white printing techniques, produce larger prints, etc. Emphasis will be placed on the editing, sequencing, and display of images while cultivating a theoretical and historical context to situate the work. Students will engage with an array of photographic practices through presentations, critiques, guest artist lectures and printing assignments. This course will explore critical issues in contemporary photography and advanced camera and production techniques through regular shooting assignments, demonstrations, critique, lectures, readings, and field trips. Prerequisites:
Intro Darkroom Photography
(Columbia) or equivalent experience
This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire. It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “Medieval Middle East” lecture (HIST 2709)
This course will focus on helping students gain greater profiency in reading Tibetan Buddhist philosophical and religious historical texts.
“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism.
“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “The Ottoman Empire and the West in the 19th Century” lecture (HIST 2717)
There are over 800 distinct Native American nations currently within the borders of the United States. This course offers a broad introduction to the diversity of American Indian religious systems and their larger functions in communities and in history. We will explore general themes in the study of Native American religious traditions as well as look at some specific examples of practices, ideas, and beliefs. Of particular importance are the history and effects of colonialism and missionization on Native peoples, their continuing struggles for religious freedom and cultural and linguistic survival, and the ways in which American Indians engage with religion and spirituality, both past and present, to respond to social, cultural, political, and geographical change.
Prerequisites: PHYS UN2801 This accelerated two-semester sequence covers the subject matter of PHYS UN1601, PHYS UN1602 and PHYS UN2601, and is intended for those students who have an exceptionally strong background in both physics and mathematics. The course is preparatory for advanced work in physics and related fields. There is no accompanying laboratory; however, students are encouraged to take the intermediate laboratory, PHYS UN3081, in the following year.
This course provides a political and social history of India from the 16th-19th century, focusing on the Mughal empire. Two central concerns: first, the Mughal regnal politics towards their rival imperial concerns within India and West Asia (the Maratha, the Rajput, the Safavid, the Ottoman); and second, the foreign gaze onto the Mughals (via the presence of Portuguese, English, and French travelers, merchants, and diplomats in India). These interlocked practices (how Mughals saw the world and how the world saw the Mughals) will allow us develop a nuanced knowledge of universally acknowledged power of the early modern world. Partially fulfills Global Core Requirement.
This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “A History of the Indian Ocean, 19th Century to the Present” lecture (HIST 2820)
This course approaches modernism as the varied literary responses to the cultural, technological, and political conditions of modernity in the United States. The historical period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II forms a backdrop for consideration of such authors as Getrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes. Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, and contemporary essays.
This course approaches modernism as the varied literary responses to the cultural, technological, and political conditions of modernity in the United States. The historical period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II forms a backdrop for consideration of such authors as Getrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes. Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, and contemporary essays.
Prerequisites: () Enrollment is limited to 16; must attend first lab to hold place. Studies of the structure, ecology, and evolution of plants. Laboratory exercises include field problems, laboratory experiments, plant collections and identification, and examination of the morphology of plant groups.
Why do certain mental illnesses only appear in specific regions of the world? What processes of translation, adaption, and “indigenization” take place when psychiatric diagnostic categories, pharmaceutical regimens, and psychodynamic treatments developed in the West travel to China, Japan and South Korea? How do contemporary East Asian therapeutic modalities destabilize biomedical assumptions about the origins and treatment of mental illness?
This course employs anthropological analysis to explore the paradoxes of “culture-bound syndromes”, examine how biomedical psychiatric practices have been received and transformed, and discuss the ways in which shamanistic rituals and Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical encounters understand their objects of intervention. Focusing on East Asia with a particular emphasis on China, we will employ interpretive and political economic anthropological analyses to explore experiences of people struggling with illness, the practices of health practitioners who treat them, and the broader social and historical contexts that shape these interactions.
The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, marriage and vocation. It is a form marked by conflicts and tensions: between the individual and society, between idealism and realism, rebellion and compromise, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action.
The reading list spans works from Europe and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works, with historical events, and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Lectures will address: What fosters human development and what thwarts it? What is a self and what is a life course? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? And how has this literary genre itself changed and developed over time?
This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~200 pages per week, and doing the assignments.
The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, marriage and vocation. It is a form marked by conflicts and tensions: between the individual and society, between idealism and realism, rebellion and compromise, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action.
The reading list spans works from Europe and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works, with historical events, and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Lectures will address: What fosters human development and what thwarts it? What is a self and what is a life course? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? And how has this literary genre itself changed and developed over time?
This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~200 pages per week, and doing the assignments.
Focusing on South America, this course examines contemporary art produced in the region known as Latin America and its diasporas, roughly since mid-1940s to the present. The first half of the class attends to two tendencies of the 1940s–1970s, abstraction and conceptualism, lionized through a slew of acclaimed group and solo exhibitions organized across the hemisphere in the last twenty years. We will analyze these two tendencies in the distinct social, political, and economic contexts of their emergence in various “centers” of the continent paying special attention to the ideologies of modernization, progress, and economic development; political upheavals including violent dictatorships and other crises; artists’ relationship to Western European and U.S. cultural centers, and transnational circulation networks; and the role of art institutions. To this end, we will pay special attention to how these trends have been historicized to date, and to what ends. The second half of the class will examine practices since the mid-1970s to the present in a comparative perspective: one, through the lens of identity politics and, two, analyzing the dynamics of the increased global dissemination of works from Latin America and by Latin-American descendants. Several visits to art institutions in NYC will be required as a part of the course.
A continuation of the study of the written and spoken language of Turkey, with readings of literary, historical, and other texts. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
This course is an introduction to the interplay between science, technology, and society. Unsettling Science invites students to: ask big questions about science and technology, interrupt preconceived ideas about what sicience is and who does it, and engage deeply with troubling social implications. By offering historical and contemporary perspectives, this course equips students with critical and methodological skills essential to exploring not only longstanding questions about the world but also urgent issues of our time. To do so, the course focuses on a series of fundamental and foundational questions (e.g., what is knowledge? what is prog that underpin the study of science, technology, and society from a variety of interdisicplinary perspectives.
Economic inequality characterizes virtually every human society, informing deep social dynamics. And yet scholars and lay people alike hold vastly differing opinions about the effects that inequality has on the social fabric, and the need to combat it. The question of how wealth and income are distributed among the members of a national community as well as among nations has acquired center stage in analyses about fundamental issues such as the causes of the progress and decline of societies and the dynamics of globalization. Inequality issues are at the heart of discussions about international economic relations, transnational phenomena such as migrations and the domestic economic platforms of political parties.
This course will provide students with the critical instruments with which to analyze the main interpretations of economic inequality from the eighteenth century to the present. We will read and discuss authors who have addressed the question of inequality and distribution: how did they frame the issue? What visions of society emerged from their analyses? We will see how the concept of inequality has changed historically, how different dimensions (e.g., national and international) have appeared and disappeared, and how visions of national, international and global inequality inform debates about the foundational elements of the social compact.
Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.
The goal of this course is to gain an understanding of the chemical principles that govern biological systems. We will look at the structure and function of biomolecules (proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and lipids), with an emphasis on interactions between them, enzyme kinetics, and metabolic pathways. Key topics will include protein folding and function, enzyme mechanisms, bioenergetics, and the regulation of key metabolic cycles. In addition to lecture we will spend time examining case studies and selected articles from primary literature, and engaging in group discussions.
Basic scientific and engineering principles used for the design of buildings, bridges, and other parts of the built infrastructure. Application of principles to analysis and design of actual large-scale structures. Coverage of the history of major structural design innovations and of the engineers who introduced them. Critical examination of the unique aesthetic/artistic perspectives inherent in structural design. Consideration of management, socioeconomic, and ethical issues involved in design and construction of large-scale structures. Introduction to recent developments in sustainable engineering, including green building design and adaptable structural systems.
This course explores the intersections of identity and power in the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on how race and ethnicity were constructed in the art, literature, and material culture of Greece and Rome. We will consider a broad range of texts including epic, ethnographies, medical texts, dramas, novels, and material evidence to examine how ancient Mediterranean peoples articulated and conceived of foreignness and difference. In our considerations of these texts we will discuss ancient theories of ethnic and racial superiority, narratives of belonging and exclusion and how these intersected with political and social control, as well as linguistic, religious and cultural differentiation as a basis for ethnic differentiation. We will also analyze ancient racism through the prism of a variety of social processes in antiquity, such as slavery, trade and colonization, migrations, imperialism, assimilation, and native revolts. By the end of the course, students will have gained a richer understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean world and will be able to engage in discussions of identity construction in a comparative manner.
This course explores the photographic essay as a distinct visual language. We will examine how photographic artists and photojournalists use sequences of images to construct narratives that communicate complex ideas about the past. In an age when nearly everyone carries a camera to capture the present, many photographers have turned their lenses toward the past to illuminate personal histories and collective memories. Through weekly seminars, we will explore how contemporary photographers around the world challenge national narratives and reimagine history. We will consider how photography—often seen as the medium most bound to the present—can evoke what is absent or lost. Focusing on artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East, we will explore how their work engages collective memory in relation to dictatorship, state violence, and contested histories. Finally, we will investigate how artists have used re-enactment, commemoration, re-imaging, and inclusive archiving to engage with history and memory through visual practice.
This course explores how dance and other forms of embodied performance adapt literature, as well as how dance serves as inspiration for the written word. What is retained, what is lost, and what is enhanced when moving bodies enliven literature, or when literature seeks to capture the motions of dance? How does choreography transform the constituent parts of literature, from characters and plot to the rhythms of language? How do words and movement collaborate to tell the stories of such disparate figures as lovers, monsters, migrants, and robots, and in modes that range from the pastoral to the autobiographical to the comic? To answer these and other questions, we will read short fiction, plays, and poems, focused largely on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and watch numerous genres of dance, including ballet, experimental dance, dance-theater, musical theater, hip hop, silent film, and puppetry. To explore the conceptual relationship of body and text, students will gain introductory exposure to theories of narrative, performance, adaptation, and more. "Page to Stage" welcomes, and is geared toward, students from any disciplinary background.
Prerequisites: declared major in Earth and environmental sciences and the departments permission. Students with particular interest in one of the many components of the Earth and environmental sciences should approach a director of undergraduate studies during the registration period so that tutorial-level exposure to the subject can be arranged. Each point requires two hours each week of readings, discussion, and research work under the close supervision of a member of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, American Museum of Natural History, or Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In consultation with the supervisor, the student selects a topic for intensive study and the time and place of the tutorial discussion sessions. May be repeated for credit up to a maximum of 12 points, with a maximum of 6 points with each staff member.
“Political friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration.” – Danielle Allen,
Talking to Strangers
What does it take to build community on a campus made up of diverse sets of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives? What sorts of communities are possible under the conditions of pluralism where we cannot take for granted that people in our community share similar interests or are making the same assumptions about political, social, or cultural goods? Is it possible to build something we would call friendship among people who experience social and political complexities differently, especially given the welter of feelings--rage and compassion, joy, fear, and sorrow--that course through us all?
To claim, taking cues from the above quote from Danielle Allen, that building community requires learning practices or habits of engagement frames these questions in a particular way. It insists that communities are forged through embodied efforts and actions. What are the sorts of social practices and social habits--the doings--that help build communities marked by pluralistic cross-pressures? How does one learn these practices and habits? What traditions and examples can we call on?
In this class, we will through the explicit and implicit norms that qualitatively shape community, norms such as:
To what degree and how should the pain of others be recognized?
How important is a “hermeneutics of generosity” in community building, which begins with trying to understand the other’s intentions before judging or criticizing them?
How does self-criticism and criticism of others function in community?
How important is dialogue, and of what sorts, to building forms of political friendship? Exchange of ideas--dialogue--may be necessary, but our focus on practice and habits also casts a skeptical eye on the notion that community rests solely or primarily on evaluating the soundness of propositions. History is replete with other social practices--story-telling, song, listening, dance--that carry and convey real discursive value.
Informed by selected readings rooted in the themes of the Core Curriculum, students will envision and develop projects that appeal to their interests, which they will bring to fruiti