Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performa
This visual arts seminar explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP. This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments.
- Department: Art History @Barnard
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Janina P Marshall
Info - 4 points
OUT OF PLACE
Literature has always attracted the outsider, and literature itself seems to demand from its writers to momentarily step out of the fray in order to hope to observe it. The modern age has offered different examples of this. When Bernard Levin described V.S. Naipaul as an ‘inquiline’ author — meaning, a guest or a lodger, an animal that lives in another's nest — Naipaul responded:
‘When I see the sun set here at Stonehenge, there is a way that it is somebody else’s sun, somebody else’s landscape, it has somebody’s else's history connected with it. I can't avoid that: that's the way I think.’
When Virginia Woolf received news of the death of Joseph Conrad, she sat down and penned an admiring obituary that opens with what might be read as a presumptuously arrogant statement:
‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’
Despite Woolf’s English snobbishness, her words reveal something true about Conrad’s situation, and about the place of many other writers who were, for one reason or another, obliged to operate in foreign lands, inside other languages or states of being, authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Ovid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Waguih Ghali and David Malouf.
Through the close analysis of a narrow selection of works, this class will chart the ways in which such works reveal the nature and imaginative location of the artist out of place. We will be interested in the question of to what extent is writing a process of mapping an intellectual, aesthetic, psychic or geographical territory. We will be motivated by close reading, interpretation, and the adventure of comparing different portraits of being an outsider-insider.
We may refer to fragments by travellers and explorers such as Leo Africanus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Ibn Battuta, or look at the work of artists who crossed boundaries, such as the 15th century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and the impact of his visit to Mehmed II’s court in 1479, or the influence of the Arabesque on the music of Claude Debussy.
We will explore what it is about literature and, in particular, the novel that has made it so well-suited for por
- Department: English @Barnard
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Hisham Matar
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Introduction to Fashion Studies
Intro to Fashion Studies
This seminar examines the many meanings of fashion, design, and style; how values underlying fashion are selected, preserved, denied, reinvented or rethought; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production and consumption of fashion goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand fashion through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how fashion can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary society, and in relation to a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course. In English.
- Department: Italian
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Barbara Faedda
Info - 3 points
Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Inter
Photo as Material:A Studi
Images today can feel increasingly unstable, untethered to physical and interpersonal experience, and also unstoppable, generating and proliferating at accelerating speeds. What do we do with all this material? What are the global consequences of the mass circulation of images? And how do artists specifically make sense of the contemporary state of photography? This course invites students into a non-conventional, interdisciplinary approach to making, reading, critiquing, and relating to images. We begin with the fundamentally physical elements of photography—space, light, and lens—and end with the embedded histories, social relations, and personal narratives that photographs can trace or carry. We discuss case studies and readings by and about artists and theorists who research and make work across international contexts, exploring, for example, how early colonial histories of photography prefigure its contemporary conditions, and how images can echo or challenge patterns of displacement and resistance. We create artworks informed by this research, exploring how to physically manipulate, present, and disseminate images in hands-on thematic projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.
- Department: Art History @Barnard
- R 10:10 a.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Mira Dayal
Info - 3 points
Tokyo
This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.
- Department: Art History @Barnard
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jonathan Reynolds
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS
This course will review and analyze the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. It will examine Beijing's relations with the Soviet Union, the United States, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Third World during the Cold War, and will discuss Chinese foreign policy in light of the end of the Cold War, changes in the Chinese economy in the reform era, the post-Tiananmen legitimacy crisis in Beijing, and the continuing rise of Chinese power and influence in Asia and beyond.
This lecture course will analyze the causes and consequences of Beijing’s foreign policies from 1949 to the present.
Students must register for a mandatory discussion section.
- Department: Political Science
- TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
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Instructor:
Thomas J Christensen
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II
Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.
- Department: Anthropology @Barnard
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- 4 points
CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS-DISC
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3871.
- Department: Political Science
- M 9:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
- F 9:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
- F 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- F 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- T 11:10 a.m.-noon
- T 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
- T 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
- T 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Gilbert Lai
Info - 0 points
LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND
LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND
We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions. From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects. How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?
- Department: Anthropology
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
John Pemberton
CULPA: 15
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
The Book Review: History, Theory, Practi
What is criticism? And what (or who) is a critic? How does a critic write
now
? This seminar is an approach to these questions through an investigation of the common currency of literary-intellectual life: the book review. It is intended for young writers interested in the world of reviewing— and criticism, literary journalism, the magazine— and is three things at once: a history of 20th and 21st century criticism (exploring the work of major critics past and present); a theoretical exploration of how the literary field has been, and is now, structured; and a practicum in review-writing. Our focus will primarily be the quickly mutating life of public literary criticism in American magazines from WWII to the present. We will read figures such as Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and others, but most of our time will be spent reading significant critics of the past 5-10 years; we will also read three novelistic treatments of the lives of critics and writers; and some time will be devoted to in-person discussions with current editors and writers in NYC about the conditions of their work.
- Department: English and Comparative Literature
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nicholas Dames
CULPA: 35
Info
- 4 points
The Afro-Feminist Novel
What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms?
The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision.
The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937); Ann Petry’s
The Narrows
(1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s
The Salt Eaters
(1980); Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
(1987); and Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
(2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
(1899) and Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
(1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice.
- Department: English and Comparative Literature
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Zoe L Henry
Info - 4 points
THE MONGOLS IN HISTORY
Study of the role of the Mongols in Eurasian history, focusing on the era of the Great Mongol Empire. The roles of Chinggis and Khubilai Khan and the modern fate of the Mongols to be considered.
- Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Morris Rossabi
CULPA: 12 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Arabs and the West: The Andalusian Symbi
The Andalusian Symbiosis
This interdisciplinary seminar deals with the rich culture of Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal) during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory—from the eighth to the fifteenth century. This theme course is significant in its approach to the study of Andalusia for a number of reasons: it grounds the study of Muslim Spain in the larger context of the history of Islam and of Arabic culture outside of Spain; it embraces many aspects of the hybrid Andalusian legacy: history, language, literature, philosophy, music, art, architecture, and sciences, among others; and, while the course includes materials from Christian writers, the textual materials focus more on Arabic writings and the viewpoint of Muslim Spaniards. The course closely examines the cultural symbiosis between Arab Muslims and Christian Europeans during the eight centuries of their coexistence in Andalusia. Through a critical reading of an appropriately chosen set of texts translated into English from Arabic, Latin, Spanish and other Iberian dialects, students will study the historical, literary, linguistic, religious, artistic, architectural, and technological products that were created by the remarkable symbiosis that took place in Andalusia. With its multiethnic and multilingual forms the Andalusian legacy bears direct resemblance to our contemporary multicultural world and provides students with a rare opportunity to integrate knowledge of different sources and viewpoints. In the third and final weeks, we compare how two contemporary historical novels, by Tariq Ali (of Pakistani extraction) and Arab writer Radwa Ashour, treat the fall of Granada in 1492. Class discussion and readings in English. Counts towards Global Core requirement.
- Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Patricia E Grieve
CULPA: 15 Info - 4 points
Research Training
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
- Department: Biomedical Engineering
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Instructor:
Gerard A Ateshian
Info -
Instructor:
Tal Danino
Wikipedia h-index: 18 Info -
Instructor:
X. Edward Guo
CULPA: 2 h-index: 70 Info -
Instructor:
Henry Hess
CULPA: 1 h-index: 45 Info -
Instructor:
Clark T Hung
CULPA: 5 h-index: 65 Info -
Instructor:
Lance Kam
CULPA: 7
h-index: 38
Info
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Instructor:
Elisa Konofagou
Wikipedia h-index: 71 Info -
Instructor:
Andrew Laine
Wikipedia h-index: 43 Info -
Instructor:
Kam W Leong
h-index: 126 Info -
Instructor:
Helen Lu
CULPA: 1 h-index: 54 Info -
Instructor:
Barclay Morrison
CULPA: 9 h-index: 42 Info -
Instructor:
Elizabeth Olson
h-index: 28 Info -
Instructor:
Paul Sajda
CULPA: 3 h-index: 47 Info -
Instructor:
Kenneth Shepard
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia h-index: 64 Info -
Instructor:
Shunichi Homma
h-index: 88 Info -
Instructor:
Samuel Sia
CULPA: 1 h-index: 39 Info -
Instructor:
Milan N Stojanovic
Info -
Instructor:
Stavros Thomopoulos
h-index: 63 Info -
Instructor:
John T Vaughan
Info -
Instructor:
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
Wikipedia h-index: 132 Info -
Instructor:
Qi Wang
h-index: 24 Info -
Instructor:
Nandan L Nerurkar
Info -
Instructor:
Stephen H Tsang
Wikipedia h-index: 58 Info -
Instructor:
Elham Azizi
h-index: 10 Info -
Instructor:
Jose McFaline-Figueroa
Info -
Instructor:
Treena L Arinzeh
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Sanja Vickovic
Info -
Instructor:
Santiago Correa
Info -
Instructor:
Kaveri A Thakoor
Info -
Instructor:
Yvon Woappi
Info -
Instructor:
Yasmine El-Shamayleh
Info -
Instructor:
Kaveri A Thakoor
Info -
Instructor:
Lauren N Heckelman
Info -
Instructor:
Grace McIlvain
Info - 0 points
Research Training
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
- Department: Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
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Instructor:
Xuan Di
h-index: 15 Info - 0 points
Research Training
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
- Department: Chemical Engineering
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Instructor:
Scott Banta
CULPA: 1 h-index: 36 Info -
Instructor:
Kyle Bishop
h-index: 42 Info -
Instructor:
Christopher M Boyce
h-index: 17 Info -
Instructor:
Juliana Silva Alves Carneiro
Info -
Instructor:
Jingguang Chen
Wikipedia h-index: 89 Info -
Instructor:
Christopher J Durning
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Daniel Esposito
h-index: 22 Info -
Instructor:
Oleg Gang
h-index: 45 Info -
Instructor:
Jingyue Ju
h-index: 77 Info -
Instructor:
Sanat Kumar
CULPA: 4 h-index: 79 Info -
Instructor:
Lauren E Marbella
Info -
Instructor:
Vivian F McNeill
Info -
Instructor:
Allie Obermeyer
h-index: 16 Info -
Instructor:
Ben O'Shaughnessy
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Neil D Dolinski
Info -
Instructor:
Mijo Simunovic
CULPA: 1 h-index: 17 Info -
Instructor:
Dan Steingart
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia h-index: 36 Info -
Instructor:
Alexander Urban
h-index: 24 Info -
Instructor:
Venkat Venkatasubramanian
h-index: 58 Info -
Instructor:
Alan West
CULPA: 3 h-index: 48 Info -
Instructor:
Asher Williams
Info - 0 points
Research Training
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
- Department: Mechanical Engineering
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Instructor:
Matei T Ciocarlie
Info -
Instructor:
Bianca N Howard
Info -
Instructor:
Chaoqun Dong
Info - 0 points
The Art of the Question in Latin America
The Question in Latin Ame
This course investigates the role of the question as a central artistic, political, and epistemological device in Latin American art from the early twentieth century to the present. We will explore how artists have deployed questions not merely as rhetorical devices or titles, but as strategies that shape form, content, and spectatorship—provoking reflection, resistance, and transformation.
Through case studies ranging from Oswald de Andrade’s provocative “Tupy or not Tupy?” (1928) and Marta Minujín’s playful “What types of materials turn you on?” (1968) to Alfredo Jaar’s public survey ¿Es usted feliz? (1981) and Clemencia Lucena’s feminist intervention ¿Qué hacen ellas mientras ellos trabajan? (1970), students will examine the diverse functions of questioning in visual art, performance, literature, and other media. Class discussions will focus on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic implications of questions in art: How do these works shape audience engagement? In what ways do they resist resolution? How do they generate critique, knowledge, or political action? We will also consider transnational and diasporic contexts, exploring how Latin American artists navigate questions across cultural and geographic boundaries.
The course is structured around five modules—Questioning Identity, Questioning the Patriarchy, Questioning Dictatorship, Questioning Spectatorship, and Questioning the Real—that highlight key moments in modern and contemporary Latin American art to uncover how uncertainty and questioning have shaped aesthetic and political imagination.
- Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jeronimo Duarte Riascos
Info - 3 points
UNDERGRAD RES IN APPLIED MATH
This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied mathematics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
- Department: Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
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Instructor:
Curtiss Lyman
Info -
Instructor:
Marc W Spiegelman
CULPA: 15
Info
- 0-4 points
UNDERGRAD RESRCH-APPLD PHYSICS
This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied physics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
- Department: Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
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Instructor:
Sherry Zhang
Info -
Instructor:
Elizabeth Paul
Info -
Instructor:
Carlos Paz Soldan
h-index: 28 Info -
Instructor:
Michele Simoncelli
Info -
Instructor:
Nanfang Yu
h-index: 48 Info - 0-4 points
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECT
Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation of some problem in chemical engineering or applied chemistry or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Up to 6 points may be counted toward the technical elective content requirement. (Note that if more than 3 points of research are pursued, an undergraduate thesis is required.)
- Department: Chemical Engineering
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Instructor:
Scott Banta
CULPA: 1 h-index: 36 Info -
Instructor:
Kyle Bishop
h-index: 42 Info -
Instructor:
Christopher M Boyce
h-index: 17 Info -
Instructor:
Juliana Silva Alves Carneiro
Info -
Instructor:
Jingguang Chen
Wikipedia h-index: 89 Info -
Instructor:
Christopher J Durning
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Daniel Esposito
h-index: 22 Info -
Instructor:
Oleg Gang
h-index: 45 Info -
Instructor:
Jingyue Ju
h-index: 77 Info -
Instructor:
Sanat Kumar
CULPA: 4 h-index: 79 Info -
Instructor:
Lauren E Marbella
Info -
Instructor:
Vivian F McNeill
Info -
Instructor:
Allie Obermeyer
h-index: 16 Info - 0-6 points