Prerequisites: SPAN UN1101 or a score of 280-379 on the department’s Spanish as a Second Language Placement exam. An intensive introduction to Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on basic oral interaction, reading, writing and cultural knowledge as a continuation of SPAN UN1101. The principal objectives are to understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of immediate relevance; communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a direct exchange of information on familiar matters; describe in simple terms aspects of our background and personal history; understand the main point, the basic content, and the plot of filmic as well as short written texts. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
This course is a continuation of the introductory Swedish 101 course. It will introduce you to the Swedish language as it is used in Sweden today. You will also learn about aspects of contemporary Swedish culture, main events and figures in Swedens history, and Swedish traditions. Upon the completion of the course, students who have attended class regularly, have submitted all assignments and taken all tests and quizzes should be able to: talk about themselves, families, interests, likes and dislikes, daily activities, education, professional interests and future plans in some detail; understand and participate in a simple conversation on everyday topics such as educational choices, subjects, plans for the weekend and the holidays, places to live, transportation, etc read and fully comprehend edited texts on familiar topics understand the main ideas and identify the underlying themes in original texts such as literary fiction, film, and newspaper articles write short essays on a familiar topic using the relevant vocabulary understand and utilize the information in a variety of authentic texts (e.g. menus, signs, train schedules, websites) carry out simple linguistic tasks that require speaking on the phone (e.g. setting up an appointment, asking questions about an announcement, talking to a friend) fill in forms requesting information, write letters, e-mails, notes, post cards, or messages providing simple information; provide basic information about Sweden including: Swedens geography, its political system and political parties, educational system, etc. discuss and debate familiar topics recognize significant figures from Swedens history and literary history use and understand basic vocabulary related to important aspects of contemporary Swedish culture and Swedish traditions and contemporary lifestyles in Sweden. pronounce Swedish well enough and produce Swedish with enough grammatical accuracy to be comprehensible to a Swedish speaker with experience in speaking with non-natives. Methodology The class will be taught in a communicative way. It will be conducted primarily, but not exclusively in Swedish. In-class activities and homework assignments will focus on developing speaking, reading, writing, listening skills and a basic understanding of Swedish culture through interaction. Authentic materials will be used whenever possible.
Essentials of grammar, basic vocabulary, practice in speaking and reading Swahili the most widely used indigenous language of East Africa. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings.
Prerequisites: () VIET 1101 or equivalent This course introduces students to the linguistic and grammatical structures of Vietnamese, a major language of South East Asia. Language skills include listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students will also be introduced to some aspects of Vietnamese life and culture.
Introduction to the basic grammatical structures of Wolof, a major language of West Africa spoken in Senegal and Gambia. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
This course offers an introduction to the language that has been spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews for more than a millennium, and an opportunity to discover a fabulous world of Yiddish literature, language and culture in a fun way. Using games, new media, and music, we will learn how to speak, read, listen and write in a language that is considered one of the richest languages in the world (in some aspects of vocabulary). We will also venture outside the classroom to explore the Yiddish world today: through field trips to Yiddish theater, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods, Yiddish organizations, such as YIVO or Yiddish farm, and so on. We will also have Yiddish-speaking guests and do a few digital projects. At the end of the two-semester course, you will be able to converse in Yiddish on a variety of everyday topics and read most Yiddish literary and non-literary texts. Welcome to Yiddishland!
This course is designed to bring students with no background to a point where they can perform most basic linguistic functions in Yoruba, including greetings, likes/dislikes, telling about yourself, describing places and situations, all in appropriate time frames. The class uses a highly interactive classroom style, supplemented by extensive use of video – both prepared and student-produced – and other computer-assisted tools. Please note this course is offered by videoconferencing from Cornell as part of the Shared Course Initiative.
Prerequisites: ZULU W1201-W1202 or the instructors permission. Introduces students to the basic structures of Zulu, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa, especially in the Zululand area of KwaZulu/Natal province.
In this course we will read texts by feminist and queer authors that complicate and subvert mainstream and dominant scripts about gender, sexuality, race, nation, and class. What kinds of narratives do mainstream ideas regarding these categories leave out? How have authors resisted erasure through queering and subverting mainstream categories? How might we, as readers and critical thinkers, queer the script through our scholarly practice? Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship that calls for a radical restructuring of the ways we see and shape our worlds, we will consider how authors push back against dominant ideologies through literary, scholarly and cinematic works.
Texts are subject to change, but will likely include a selection from the following list: works by Nella Larsen, Carmen Maria Machado, Safia Elhillo, Celine Sciamma and Cheryl Dunye, and critical theory by Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, and Judith Butler. Required course texts will not exceed $10; in addition, all course texts are available as links and e-reserves through the library.
Corequisites: ECON UN1155 How a market economy determines the relative prices of goods, factors of production, and the allocation of resources and the circumstances under which it does it efficiently. Why such an economy has fluctuations and how they may becontrolled.
This course is designed to teach students the process of identifying, setting, and achieving a specific health behavior change goal within the Wheel of Health. The course will consist of short lectures, discussions, and individual health coaching sessions. Action steps towards the health goal will be expected each week outside of class meeting times.
In this course, we will study the way culture influences how we make sense of what we see. We will examine how power is exercised by making people feel as though they are always being seen, how this surveillance polices the way gender, race, class, and sexuality are expressed, and how people perform their identities to reinforce or push back against this policing. Literary texts will include
Passing
by Nella Larsen, "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado,
Fantomina
by Eliza Haywood, and the films
Paris is Burning
and
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
. Secondary texts will include John Berger, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jack Halberstam, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Laura Mulvey.
Prerequisites: Scoring at this level on the department’s Spanish as a Heritage Language Placement test (https://columbia-barnard.vega-labs.com).
The principal aim of SPAN UN1108 is to build upon and further develop the informal knowledge of Spanish that heritage learners bring to the classroom—usually from family and neighborhood exposure to the language—and cultivate formal speaking, listening, reading, and writing abilities. Students are not expected to have any academic training in written Spanish prior to enrolling in this course.
Spanish heritage language courses at Columbia/Barnard focus on the development of communicative abilities and literacy from sociolinguistic and sociocultural approaches. Throughout the semester, students will be reviewing spelling patterns, building vocabulary, acquiring and effectively using learning strategies, and strengthening composition skills in Spanish. Cultural projects and readings reinforce learners’ understanding of the multiple issues related to Hispanic cultures in the United States and in other Spanish-speaking societies.
This is a course designed for the students enrolled in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program. It should be taken fall and spring semesters of a student's third and fourth years at the college (for a total of 6 course credits total over the two years). The goal of this course is to become familiar with academic research and writing, as well as the culture of colleges/ universities in order to prepare students to apply to graduate school and earn the PhD.. The program hones academic writing skills (research papers, project and grant proposals, academic reflections designed to facilitate intentional goal setting and planning), teaches skills related to scholarly presentations (oral and written), as well as familiarizes students with academic culture in particular diversity, equity and inclusion issues and concerns in the academy. Students are expected to attend all the events and meetings associated with the program.
This is a course designed for the students enrolled in the Barbara Silver Horowitz ’55 Scholars of Distinction program. It should be taken fall and spring semesters of a students first and second years at the college (for a total of 4 course credits total over the two years). Each month is organized around an outing (or several outings) with readings and guest speakers to complement the outing. Students are expected to attend all the events and meetings. Each student will also produce a blog post connected to or inspired by each event. These posts will appear on the Barnard College website dedicated to the program. Blog posts do not have to cover the event per se, they might, for example, attend to ancillary issues raised by the event or topics raised by the accompanying readings.
The course is specially designed for students of Chinese heritage and advanced beginners with good speaking skills. It aims to develop the students basic skills to read and write modern colloquial Chinese. Pinyin system is introduced; standard Chinese pronunciation, and traditional characters. Classes will be conducted mostly in Chinese. Open to students with Mandarin speaking ability in Chinese only. CC GS EN CE
In this First-Year Writing course, we’ll examine a series of questions centered on bodies and desires. How is the body both constructed and policed through narratives of gender, race, class, and sexuality? How are bodies and desire mediated through and represented in language? We’ll consider how bodies become not just sites of objectification or of power but also of pleasure. We’ll think about the politics of respectability, in questioning who can be a subject, rather than object, of desire. In our analyses, we’ll work to challenge fixed or binary understandings of gender and power. Readings are subject to change but may include: Nella Larsen's
Passing
, Eliza Haywood's
Fantomina
, short stories by Luisa Valenzuela, Carmen Maria Machado and/or ir'ene lara Silva, poems by Sally Wen Mao and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and conversation texts by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, John Berger, and/or Judith Butler.
Long before humans walked the earth; before dinosaurs were wiped out; before any sign of sentient life on earth; volcanoes were a feature of our planet. With the power to help create life, as well as wreak devastation and destruction, volcanoes inspire awe and terror in equal measure. This seminar will explore the science behind volcanoes, their impact on the environment and societies, as well as our enduring fascination with them through the lenses of history, arts, mythology and religion. Where and why do volcanoes erupt? How do they affect nature, climate and society? How has our understanding of these amazing natural phenomena evolved over time? Why do people stay in close proximity to volcanoes, despite the dangers? Can we predict when the next catastrophic eruption will occur? Can we harness the power of volcanic activity as alternative energy source? These are some of the many questions that students will seek to answer and will serve as a starting point for our deeper investigation into the subject throughout the semester. Students will study historical texts, case studies, current data and methods of analysis, as well as depictions of volcanoes in art and film. Group discussion, independent study and individual and group presentations. Students will research case studies and present their finding to the class.
"The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.
"All that is solid melts into air." So wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, registering the astonishing pace with which daily life was being transformed around them. For them, and for many of their contemporaries, the central feature of the modern world was its ceaseless change. Under the pressure of political, scientific, and economic revolutions, traditional ways of living and thinking might disappear almost overnight, to be replaced not by a new order but instead with an unending experience of instability and dislocation.
This course reads a set of writers who both respond to and participate in that process of constant transformation – in what we have learned to call modernity. Should culture try to protect timeless values from the shock effects of modernization? Or should it find, in change, an opportunity for new forms of life and new styles of expression? If – as Marx and Engels did – we imagine modernity as a distinctively European event, how might writers outside of Europe make use of and respond to a modernity that excludes them? Is modernity something that happened, and is over – or are we today still swept up in it?
Readings may include: literature from Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Douglass, Woolf, Kincaid; philosophy and criticism from Montaigne, Kant, Marx, Weber, Du Bois, Kracauer, Chakrabarty.
This course cuts across borders between North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, in a search for the ways in which literature illuminates different aspects of American identity--especially gender, class, ecological, racial and ethnic identities. Since modernity, in the sense of freedom from tradition, first developed in the Americas, the literatures of the Americas involve diversity and innovation from their beginning. After examining the roots of Modernism in North and South America at the end of the 19th century, we will look at the development of modernism, post-modernism and post-colonialism in the 20th and early 21st centuries through the study of key novels, short stories, and poetry from North and South America and the Caribbean, including works by Martí, Lorde, Anzaldúa, DuBois, Hurston, Hughes, Eliot, Neruda, Césaire, García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Valenzuela, Kincaid, Danticat, Lahiri and Valeria Luiselli. Considering these works in their historical, political and aesthetic contexts helps us to grapple with the multiple formations of American identities.
An extensive introduction to the Catalan language with an emphasis on oral communication as well as the reading and writing practice that will allow the student to function comfortably in a Catalan environment.
Intensive, fast-paced elementary Spanish course for
multilingual learners who have had little to no formal education in Spanish
. Replaces the sequence SPAN UN1101-SPAN UN1102.
Prerequisites
:
Take the Department's
Language Placement Examination
. (It is only for diagnostic purposes, to assess your language learning skills, not your knowledge of Spanish).
If you score approximately 330 OR MORE, you may qualify for this course if:
-
you have had little to no formal education in Spanish
, AND
- you identify with ONE of the following language learner profiles:
Learners of Spanish as a 3rd language
: fluent in a language other than English
Informal learners of Spanish
: English speakers who have “picked up” Spanish by interacting with Spanish speakers in informal settings
“Receptive” Spanish heritage learners
: English dominant, but you understand Spanish spoken by family and community members
(The exam is only an initial assessment for diagnostic purposes. Your score might be high, even if you have never studied Spanish in a formal setting).
You do not need my permission to register*. I will further assess your level during the Change of Program period. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you are unsure about your placement in this course.
*Students who do not have the necessary proficiency level may not remain in this course. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Covers all of Greek grammar and syntax in one term. Prepares the student to enter second-year Greek (GREK UN2101 or GREK UN2102).
Discussion and analysis of the artistic qualities and significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Parthenon in Athens to works of the 20th century.