Concepts of ethnicity and race – deeply complex and often fraught – are catalyzing forces in modern society. This seminar explores the changing definitions and resonances of these categories in ancient contexts. Course readings will cover a variety of societies but return repeatedly to Egypt and Nubia as a touchstone. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how Nubians and Egyptians viewed one another as well as how both Egyptians and Nubians experienced and were experienced by immigrants, colonizers, and travelers. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean, as we’ll see, self-definitions and cultural boundaries shifted radically according to changing power dynamics both within groups and between them.
In seminar discussions, we’ll pose the following questions: How and when did groups who saw themselves as distinct from one another cooperate and intermarry? Define themselves in opposition to other groups or actively blur boundaries? Mobilize concepts of ethnicity or race to justify oppression? Engage in competition or resistance? Where, we will ask, did societies fracture and/or integrate? And what role did bicultural individuals play in cultural conversations and mediations? We will also seek to understand how our conceptions of ethnicity and race in the past are influenced not only by the biases of the present but by the methodologies we employ. In our discussions and investigations this semester we will learn a great deal about Northeast Africa in antiquity – but, so too, about ethnicity, concepts of race, and power throughout the ancient Mediterranean.
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.
Required of all majors. Introduces theories of culture particularly related to the Middle East, South Asia. and Africa. Theoretical debates on the nature and function of culture as a symbolic reading of human collectivities. Examines critical cultural studies of the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Enables students to articulate their emerging knowledge of Middle East, South Asian, and African cultures in a theoretically informed language.
Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Required for all sociology majors. Prerequisite: at least one sociology course of the instructor's permission. Theoretical accounts of the rise and transformations of modern society in the19th and 20th centuries. Theories studied include those of Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Max Weber, Roberto Michels. Selected topics: individual, society, and polity; economy, class, and status: organization and ideology; religion and society; moral and instrumental action.
This undergraduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the nonfiction work of the renowned African-American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, whose archives are at Barnard College, her alma mater. Through readings, discussion, and visits to her archives, students will probe this lesser-examined aspect of Shange's oeuvre, including her essays on her life, the arts, food, and other artists and creators. This course invites participants to engage critically with Shange's essays and personal writings while delving into her archive.
Students will identify key themes and literary techniques in Shange's nonfiction and the historical and cultural context in which she wrote these works. We will examine how Shange's nonfiction contributes to her broader work and her perspectives on history, gender, feminism, and race as they intersect in her life as a Black woman artist. Students will develop critical thinking skills through close reading, analysis, and discussion of Shange's nonfiction and will improve their writing skills by composing reflections and essays on Shange's works. They will develop research skills and gain insights into Shange's creative process through firsthand engagement with Shange's archive at Barnard.
Black Speculative Fiction encompasses a whole range of Black subgenres from Science Fiction and Fantasy to Horror and Afrofuturism. For the duration of this course, we will attempt to begin the work of extrapolating the function of Blackness within these various genres—interrogating which syntactical elements are required to label a piece of fiction “Black” and how Blackness informs genre. Through formal analysis of texts and the application of various theories presented in class, we’ll begin to understand how Blackness moves through genre to understand its relationship to the world and in some cases, to the artform itself. We will look at various texts: Film, Television, Prose, and Music. By looking across genres, we will be able to honor the inherent intertextuality of Black work and the constant inter-discursive work done across genre, text, and time. Whether a critique of structural anti-Blackness writ large, an expression of the complexity of the positionality of Black persons, or a statement of the function of Blackness, these texts make a case for the theoretical rigor and provocative discourses that lies at the heart of Black Speculative Fiction.
This course provides an in-depth examination of the physiological bases of behavior and the development, organization, and function of the nervous system. Specific topics include methods used in behavioral neuroscience, development of the nervous system, sensory and motor systems, homeostasis, sexual differentiation, biological rhythms, stress, learning and memory, psychopathology, and neurological disorders.
Prerequisites: the departments permission. Required for all thesis writers.
Corequisites: Course either taken before or after GERM V3001. Intensive practice in oral and written German. Discussions, oral reports, and weekly written assignments, based on material of topical and stylistic variety taken from German press and from literary sources.
In this course, you will conduct independent projects in photography in a structured setting under faculty supervision. You are responsible for arranging for your photographic equipment in consultation with the instructor.
This course will afford you a framework in which to intensively develop a coherent body of photographs, critique this work with your classmates, and correlate your goals with recent issues in contemporary photography.
Students are required to enroll in an additional fifteen contact hours of instruction at the International Center for Photography. Courses range from one-day workshops to full-semester courses.
Permission of instructor only. The class will be limited to 20 students.
Prerequisites: general physics, and differential and integral calculus. Newtonian mechanics, oscillations and resonance, conservative forces and potential energy, central forces, non-inertial frames of reference, rigid body motion, an introduction to Lagranges formulation of mechanics, coupled oscillators, and normal modes.
This lecture course in political theory examines pressing questions related to borders, migration, exile, and displacement: Why do we have borders, and how are they constructed and governed? How do borders relate to political membership and rights? What can borders teach us about modern sovereign power? Are there any limits to state coercion and violence in border enforcement? In what ways do borders manifest racial hierarchies and divides within the global order? How do we rethink political responsibility in response to problems of rightlessness generated by borders? In addressing these questions, the course prioritizes borders as crucial sites for understanding and interrogating key political concepts such as sovereignty, membership, rights, and violence.
This course will introduce students to
Black geographies
as a spatial expression of Black studies. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. In this course, we will think about space, place, landscape, and ecology through a Black geographic framework, paying attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation. The questions that animate this course are: what are Black geographies? What is the future of Black geographies outside of academia? How can centering a “Black sense of place” in turn transform the way we think about space, place, and power? How does Black Studies account for and understand Black spatial condition, experience, and imaginaries?
The course will begin with an engagement of key works on Black geographies. We will come to see institutional Black geographies as concerned with the Black spatial imaginaries formed in the aftermath of enslavement and colonialism in the Western hemisphere. As such, our readings will center experiences in the United States. We will cover such topics as Black method(s), racial capitalism, regional geographies, carceral geographies, and Black home and infrastructure.
Ultimately, students will be introduced to central themes, concepts and approaches that highlight the spatialization of race and the racialization of space through various technologies that signify places according to new rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, we will examine historical and contemporary macro-community and micro- sub-community (e.g., neighborhood) issues shaping the social, economic and political lives of Black people.
How have artists been informed and influenced by the natural world? This course will examine how photographic artists have responded to nature, ecology, and the environment. Augmented by literary texts by artists, scientists, poets, and ecologists, we will explore how close-looking might inform an artist’s practice regarding the living environment - its bounty - and its degradation. Readings include texts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Masanobu Fukuoka, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Akira Hasegawa, and others. Calling on a canon of photographic works from around the globe, students will study book-length photographic essays whose makers have seen art as a form of praise of the natural world and those who investigate the relationship between art and environmental activism. Susan Derges; Meghann Riepenhoff; Masahisa Fukashe; Pedro David; Stephen Gill; Ron Jude; Dornith Doherty; David Maisel, Zhao Renhui; Mandy Barker; Pablo Lopez Luz are some of the artists studied. The course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past two centuries to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how artists have depicted shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why they might question human centrality in the sentient world. Students will produce a semester-long photographic project on an ecological theme. This course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past century to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how contemporary photographers are depicting shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why some artists are beginning to question human centrality in the sentient world.
Third Year Chinese II, CHNS3004UN, 5 points. You are required to take Third Year Chinese I, CHNS3003UN, 5 points with this course.
Instructor
:
Zhirong Wang
Prerequisites
: Two (2) years of college-level Chinese or the equivalent
Texts
: Jingua Chinese (Columbia University staff, published by Peking University Press; simplified characters)
Introduces Chinese social values and attitudes, focusing on the rapid changes now taking place in China. Uses materials from Chinese newspapers and modern short stories to teach essential elements of semi-formal and formal writing. Reading and writing are routine tasks, and oral discussion and debate are important components of the class, allowing students to integrate and improve their communication skills in Chinese.
To enroll in this course, you must apply to the
Virtual Columbia Summer Chinese Language
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 Term A & B dates.
Introduction to: (a) the infrastructure systems that support urban socioeconomic activities and (b) fundamental system design and analysis methods. Coverage of water supply, transportation, buildings, and energy infrastructure, as well as their interdependencies. Emphasis upon the process that these systems serve, the factors that influence their performance, the basic mechanisms that govern their design and operation, and the impacts that they have regionally and globally. Student teams complete a design/analysis project on a large-scale urban development site in New York City with equal emphasis given to water resources/environmental engineering, geotechnical engineering, and construction engineering and management topics.
Prerequisite: Open to all Barnard and Columbia undergraduates. Permission of Instructor required; students admitted from Waiting List. Course develops physical, vocal, and imaginative range and skills needed to approach the text of a play: text analysis, speech exercises, non-verbal behavior, improvisation designed to enhance embodiment, movement, and projection.
Gateway course to advanced courses; transfer students who have previous college-level course may be exempted with approval of Chair
.
May be retaken for full credit.
Prerequisites: One year of biology, BIOL UN3004 or instructors permission in case the student hasn't take it. This course is the capstone course for the Neurobiology and Behavior undergraduate major at Columbia University. It is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Knowledge of Cellular Neuroscience (how an action potential is generated and how a synapse works) will be assumed. It is recommended that students take BIOL UN3004 Neurobiology I: Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, or a similar course, or obtain instructors permission. Website for BIOLUN3005:
https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/rmy5/files/2022/01/syllabus.UN3005.2022.v4-lab.pdf
Prerequisite: Open to all Barnard and Columbia undergraduates. Permission of Instructor required; students admitted from Waiting List. Students must have taken Acting I or equivalent to be eligible for Acting II sections. Acting II will offer several different sections, focusing on a specific range of conceptual, embodiment, and physical acting skills. Please check with the Theatre Department website forspecific offerings and audition information. May be retaken for full credit. All sections of Acting II fullfull the “Arts and Humanities” Foundations requirement at Barnard College.
Prerequisite: Open to all Barnard and Columbia undergraduates. Permission of Instructor required; students admitted from Waiting List. Students must have taken Acting I or equivalent to be eligible for Acting II sections. Acting II will offer several different sections, focusing on a specific range of conceptual, embodiment, and physical acting skills. Please check with the Theatre Department website forspecific offerings and audition information. May be retaken for full credit. All sections of Acting II fullfull the “Arts and Humanities” Foundations requirement at Barnard College.
Prerequisite: Open to all Barnard and Columbia undergraduates. Permission of Instructor required; students admitted from Waiting List. Students must have taken Acting I or equivalent to be eligible for Acting II sections. Acting II will offer several different sections, focusing on a specific range of conceptual, embodiment, and physical acting skills. Please check with the Theatre Department website forspecific offerings and audition information. May be retaken for full credit. All sections of Acting II fullfull the “Arts and Humanities” Foundations requirement at Barnard College.
Prerequisite: Open to all Barnard and Columbia undergraduates. Permission of Instructor required; students admitted from Waiting List. Students must have taken Acting I or equivalent to be eligible for Acting II sections. Acting II will offer several different sections, focusing on a specific range of conceptual, embodiment, and physical acting skills. Please check with the Theatre Department website forspecific offerings and audition information. May be retaken for full credit. All sections of Acting II fullfull the “Arts and Humanities” Foundations requirement at Barnard College.
In this primarily human physiology course, we will discuss how the major organ systems function, with an emphasis on cellular, molecular, and physical mechanisms. Organ systems covered include musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, urinary, and digestive systems. Traditional lectures focus primarily on the normal functioning of organ systems, while pathophysiology is introduced through five case studies during the semester. After this course, students should be able to 1) describe the basic functioning of the major organ systems and how they contribute to homeostasis and health, 2) apply key concepts in physics and chemistry, such as flow, pressure/volume relationships, and mass action, to physiological systems, 3) use key concepts in molecular and cell biology to gain a mechanistic understanding of physiological processes, explain how organ systems work in an integrated way to achieve homeostasis and health, and 4) predict changes in organ function upon drug treatment, genetic mutation, or disease conditions.
Prerequisites: CHNS W4005 or the equivalent. Admission after Chinese placement exam and an oral proficiency interview with the instructor. Especially designed for students who possess good speaking ability and who wish to acquire practical writing skills as well as business-related vocabulary and speech patterns. Introduction to semiformal and formal Chinese used in everyday writing and social or business-related occasions. Simplified characters are introduced.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Discussions on contemporary issues and oral presentations. Creative writing assignments designed to improve writing skills and vocabulary development. FREN BC1204: French Intermediate II or the equivalent level is required.
Prerequisites: JPNS W4005 or the equivalent. Readings in authentic/semi-authentic texts, videos, and class discussions.
Prerequisites: KORN W1202 or the equivalent and consultation with instructor. (See Entrance to Language Courses Beyond the Elementary Level in the main bulletin under Department of Instruction -- East Asian Languages and Cultures.) Readings in modern Korean. Selections from modern Korean writings in literature, history, social sciences, culture, and videos and class discussions.
Prerequisites: BC3001 or C2601 or the equivalent. Wave-particle duality and the Uncertainty Principle. The Schrodinger equation. Basic principles of the quantum theory. Energy levels in one-dimensional potential wells. The harmonic oscillator, photons, and phonons. Reflection and transmission by one-dimensional potential barriers. Applications to atomic, molecular, and nuclear physics.
Prerequisites: MATH UN1202 An elementary course in functions of a complex variable. Fundamental properties of the complex numbers, differentiability, Cauchy-Riemann equations. Cauchy integral theorem. Taylor and Laurent series, poles, and essential singularities. Residue theorem and conformal mapping.(SC)
The reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus (27bce-14ce), has been seen as a Roman revolution, both political and cultural. Rome had for centuries been governed as a Republic, but a series of increasingly divisive civil wars allowed Augustus to create a new political system in which he exercised sole rule as the ‘first citizen’ within a ‘Restored Republic’. Augustus’ reign lasted more than 40 years, and established a model of autocratic rule that would last for four centuries. During this time there were profound changes in the political, social, and cultural structures of Rome. In this course, you will examine the nature of these changes, Augustus’ political strategies, military activities, and religious initiatives through his own writing, the accounts of (often hostile) historians and a range of literary and archaeological sources, including Roman poetry. Ultimately, we will address the question: how did Augustus achieve the seemingly paradoxical feat of becoming a monarch within a republican system?
Prerequisites: PHYS UN3008 Maxwells equations and electromagnetic potentials, the wave equation, propagation of plane waves, reflection and refraction, geometrical optics, transmission lines, wave guides, resonant cavities, radiation, interference of waves, and diffraction.
This course aims to explore performing Greek tragedy on the modern stage. It will include an introduction to original performance practices in ancient Greece (space, masking, choral performance, costume, acting techniques) and an examination of how artists from different contemporary theatrical traditions have adapted ancient texts in modern performances and new versions of the plays. The bulk of the course will be focused on the problems of acting, interpreting, and reinterpreting parts of three plays on the stage, Sophocles’
Antigone
, Euripides’
Medea
, and Sophocles’
Ajax
along with a new version by Ellen McLaughlin, who teaches playwriting at Barnard,
Ajax in Iraq
. Students will view all or parts of particularly interesting recent productions from various theatrical traditions, which will help them to tackle challenging issues such as choral performance and choral rhythms, masking, character work, dialogues and presenting formal political debates.
For contemporary actors training in Greek tragedy offers a unique opportunity to improve their performance on stage through ensemble work and representing character through speech. It enhances dramaturgical capacities that a contemporary theater practitioner must exercise in exploring theory in practice and vice versa.
This class is directed to students particularly interested in dramaturgy, directing, designing, translation, and Greek tragedy as well as acting.
The centerpiece of this course is a geological field trip during Spring Break in Barbados. The class will meet weekly before the trip to prepare for it and after the trip to synthesize what was learned and to create a field guide. Subjects to be covered: plate tectonics, convergent plate margins and accretionary prisms, local Barbados geology; ice ages, Milankovitch cycles, sea level; introduction to coral reefs and fossil coral reef geology; Barbados terrestrial ecology; limestone caves, hydrology; dating methods; overview of Barbados history, economy, culture. In order to observe the modern-day coral reef (the modern day live analog to the fossil coral reefs we will see) the class will go snorkeling. In order to observe the effects of cave formation and water flow in limestone terrains the class will participate in an extensive visit to a cave. The class will also participate in an exercise in geological mapping of a series of coral reef terraces.
Priority: Priority is given to junior and senior majors and concentrators in Earth Science or Environmental Science at Columbia College and the School of General Studies, and Barnard College Environmental Science majors and minors. Others (non-DEES majors and non-Barnard Environmental Science students) may also be allowed to enroll if space permits. All students need permission of the instructor. Students who sign up will be put on a waitlist and will be considered after contacting the instructor.
Prerequisites: SOCI UN1000 The Social World or Instructor Permission Required for all Sociology majors. Introductory course in social scientific research methods. Provides a general overview of the ways sociologists collect information about social phenomena, focusing on how to collect data that are reliable and applicable to our research questions.
Prerequisites: (VIAR UN1000) (Formerly R3515) This course approaches drawing as an experimental and expressive tool. Students will explore the boundaries between drawing and sculpture and will be encouraged to push the parameters of drawing. Collage, assemblage and photomontage will be used in combination with more traditional approaches to drawing. The class will explore the role of the imagination, improvisation, 3-dimensional forms, observation, memory, language, mapping, and text. Field trips to artists’ studios as well as critiques will play an important role in the course. The course will culminate in a final project in which each student will choose one or more of the themes explored during the semester and create a series of artworks. This course is often taught under the nomenclature Drawing II - Mixed Media.
Prerequisites: No Prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Flash fiction, micro-naratives and the short-short have become exciting areas of exploration for contemporary writers. This course will examine how these literary fragments have captured the imagination of writers internationally and at home. The larger question the class seeks to answer, both on a collective and individual level, is: How can we craft a working definition of those elements endemic to short prose as a genre? Does the form exceed classification? What aspects of both crafts -- prose and poetry -- does this genre inhabit, expand upon, reinvent, reject, subvert? Short Prose Forms incorporates aspects of both literary seminar and the creative workshop. Class-time will be devoted alternatingly to examinations of published pieces and modified discussions of student work. Our reading chart the course from the genres emergence, examining the prose poem in 19th-century France through the works of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Max Jacob and Rimbaud. Well examine aspects of poetry -- the attention to the lyrical, the use of compression, musicality, sonic resonances and wit -- and attempt to understand how these writers took, as Russell Edson describes, experience and made it into an artifact with the logic of a dream. The class will conclude with a portfolio at the end of the term, in which students will submit a compendium of final drafts of three of four short prose pieces, samples of several exercises, selescted responses to readings, and a short personal manifesto on the short prose form.
This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources.
Prerequisites: VIAR R1000. (Formerly R4005) Students will connect with the very heart of the Western Art tradition, engaging in this critical activity that was the pillar of draftsmanship training from the Renaissance on through the early Modern Era. This pursuit is the common thread that links artists from Michelangelo and Rubens to Van Gogh and Picasso. Rigorous studies will be executed from plaster casts of antique sculptures, and pedagogical engravings. Students will confront foundational issues of academic training; assessing proportion and tonal value, structure and form. Hours will be spent on a single drawing pushing to the highest degree of accuracy in order develop a means for looking at nature. There is a focus on precision and gaining a thorough understanding of the interaction between light and a surface. This approach emphasizes drawing by understanding the subject and the physical world that defines it. While this training has allowed great representational artists of the past to unlock the poetry from the world around them and continues to inspire a surging new realist movement, it can also serve as a new way of seeing and a launching point for achieving creative goals. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.
Prerequisites: One college level science course or permission of the instructor. Anyone who has taken EESC BC1002 Introduction to Environmental Science cannot take this course. Brownfields considers interconnections between groundwater contamination, toxics, human health, government, economics, and law using the award-winning interactive learning simulation Brownfield Action, Through a semester-long, laboratory exploration of a simulated brownfield, students engage in an environmental site assessment and development of a plan for remediation and revitalization.
Metallographic sample preparation, optical microscopy, quantitative metallography, hardness and tensile testing, plastic deformation, annealing, phase diagrams, brittle fracture of glass, temperature and strain-rate dependent deformation of polymers; written and oral reports. This is the second of a two-semester sequence materials laboratory course.
Discussion/recitation section for BIOL UN3005 Neurobiology II
Prerequisites: At least one French course after completion of FREN BC1204: Intermediate II or permission of the instructor. Oral presentations and discussions of French films aimed at increasing fluency, acquiring vocabulary, and perfecting pronunciation skills.
Prerequisites: One year of college science or EESC V2100 or permission of the instructor. Acquisition, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of environmental data, assessment of spatial and temporal variability. Focus on water quality issues and storm surges. Uses existing and student-generated data sets. Basic principles of statistics and GIS, uses standard software packages including EXCEL and ArcGIS. Includes a half-day field trip on a Saturday or Sunday. General Education Requirement: Quantitative and Deductive Reasoning (QUA).
Prerequisites: ECON BC3033 or ECON BC3035, and ECON BC2411 or STAT W1111 or STAT W1211, or permission of the instructor. Specification, estimation and evaluation of economic relationships using economic theory, data, and statistical inference; testable implications of economic theories; econometric analysis of topics such as consumption, investment, wages and unemployment, and financial markets.
Various concepts within the field of biomedical engineering, foundational knowledge of engineering methodology applied to biological and/or medical problems through modules in biomechanics, bioinstrumentation, and biomedical imaging.
Advance chemical-engineering problem-solving skills through the use of computational tools (primarily developed in Excel or Python). Examples are drawn from thermodynamics, transport phenomena, and chemical kinetics. The course is project based, emphasizing data analysis and report writing. Unstructured collaboration with peers is highly encouraged. Requisite numerical methods and Chemical Engineering concepts introduced.
Course Overview/Short Description
This course will consider various ways that changing environmental conditions put stress on humans and our societies and political systems, with an emphasis on conditions in the Global South. Among other topics it will consider influences of climate change on violent conflict migration and impacts of heat and air pollution on human health and wellbeing. Students will develop data analysis skills to explore these relationships and complete projects on environmental security cases and questions of their own choosing.
Longer Description/Purpose/Intention of the Course
Variation and shifts in environmental conditions have challenged societies throughout human history. Today, climatic variability and change, along with resource extraction, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation, influence society in myriad ways, through water resources and agriculture, storms, sea level rise, and direct impacts of heat on living things, among others. Moreover, different human populations, across race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, occupation and other lines face different levels of exposure and vulnerability to climatic and other environmental stressors and tend to experience them inequitably. Students will consider the influence and disparate impacts of environmental conditions on human security, through pathways such as human health, food and water security and education; various sectors of the economy from agriculture to mining to manufacturing; governance and social capacities; and broader social and political conditions like conflict, leadership change and migration. We will also consider the various approaches humans are taking to adapt to these stressors, mitigate their harms and build resilience. Throughout, emphasis will be placed on how natural and social scientists studying these phenomena engage in the research process to learn about and detect these impacts and the disparities among them.
This is a highly collaborative and project-based course that aims to offer students the power to choose the resources they want to use and the topics and cases they want to study. There will be no exams, outside of possible brief quizzes to determine whether students are engaging with the course material. Instead, in the first portion of the course, the instructor will guide students through the study of a collection of key topics and cases in environmental security AND the development of key skill sets for gathering and proce
Prerequisites: one year of calculus. Prerequisite: One year of Calculus. Congruences. Primitive roots. Quadratic residues. Contemporary applications.
Designed to provide students with an understanding of the fundamental marketing concepts and their application by business and non-business organizations. The goal is to expose students to these concepts as they are used in a wide variety of settings, including consumer goods firms, manufacturing and service industries, and small and large businesses. The course gives an overview of marketing strategy issues, elements of a market (company, customers, and competition), as well as the fundamental elements of the marketing mix (product, price, placement/distribution, and promotion).
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. One year of college-level science. Primarily for Environmental Majors, Concentrators and Minors. Lecture, laboratory and field study of regional forest types from upland to coast and from urban to rural, forest ecosystem services, impacts of land-use and climate change on forests, reconstruction of past forests, forest pests, forest fires and forest conservation (corridors). Field trip sites for data collection may include: maritime, pine barrens, eastern deciduous and NYC urban forests. Format: lecture, student presentations, short labs, data collection/analysis and field trips (some on a weekend day in April in place of the week day meeting).
This course explores the history and the present of African American political theory and practice, through an analysis of theoretical texts, pamphlets/manifestos, and popular culture from the periods of the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, civil rights, late 20th century Black feminist thought, and contemporary Black politics and culture. This course emphasizes the way that Black activists, scholars, and/or artists have responded to eternal questions in political thought about freedom, oppression, resistance, citizenship, democracy, etc., from the standpoint of Blackness in the United States. Moreover, the course is not just African-American Political Thought, it is also American Political Thought, insofar as Black theorizations and experiences of America provides a vital framework for interrogating the American experiment, citizenship and non-citizenship, American slavery and its afterlives, inclusion and exclusion, liberation and domination, and ultimately what “America” is and what it does (and perhaps could) mean to be American.
Prerequisites: FREN BC3021 may be taken for credit without completion of FREN BC3022. The Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Symbolism. FREN BC1204: French Intermediate II or the equivalent level is required.
This course courses engages the interdisciplinary study of religion online and provides practical training to students on developing digital humanities projects, in partnership with the Digital Humanities Center and the Empirical Reasoning Center, and will incorporate analysis and critical reflection into their research on religious communities. The first portion of the course focuses on understanding methodologies in studying digital religion and exploring religious communities online. Case studies focus on ascriptive and affirmative identifications of religious communities, including how religious communities use online space to redefine their public
perceptions. The latter part of the course utilizes tools of digital humanities to develop projects responsive to student interests and that allows them to analyze digital expressions of religion.
Prerequisites: (Econ BC 3035) or (Econ BC 3033) This course examines a wide variety of topics about migration and its relationship to economic development, globalization, and social and economic mobility. At its core, this course reflects a key reality: that the movement of people--within regions, within countries, and across borders--is both the result of and impetus for economic change.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and STAT UN1201 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.
This seminar engages students in an exploration of how schools prepare students to be literate across multiple subject areas. Engaging students with theory and practice, we will look at how students learn to read and write, considering approaches for literacy instruction from early childhood through adolescence. Understanding that schools are required to meet the needs of diverse learners, we will explore literacy instruction for K-12 students with special needs, multilingual learners, and students from diverse cultural backgrounds. This course requires 60 hours of clinical experience (fieldwork).
What is the relationship between religion and medicine in the United States? How have ideas about bodies and bodily difference shaped American public life? This course takes a historical approach to these questions from the colonial era to the present day. Working at the intersection of religious studies and the history of medicine, we will explore critical shifts in the medical thought and practice alongside changing ideas about bodies and bodily difference (both real and perceived), spanning gender, race, disability, age, sickness and health, and sex, sexuality, and reproduction.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. One year of college-level science. Primarily for Environmental Majors, Concentrators and Minors. This class looks at the response of wildlife (birds and plants) to climate change and land-use issues from the end of the last glaciation to the present. Case study topics are: (1) land-use and climate change over time: a paleoenvironmental perspective, (2) environmental transformations: impact of invasive plants and birds and pathogens on local environments and (3) migration of Neotropical songbirds between their wintering and breeding grounds: land-use, crisis and conservation. We visit wildlife refuges along a rural-suburban-urban gradient in order to observe and measure the role refuges play in conservation. Format: lecture, student presentations, short labs, data collection/analysis and field trips (some on a weekend day in April in place of the week day meeting).
The course is an introduction to the economic developments that gave rise to capitalist economies and economic globalization from 1500 to the 20th century. We apply economic and empirical reasoning to examine many transformations that have shaped the economies of the modern era—demographic, technological, and institutional changes. We compare the rise of Europe and other Eurasian civilizations, especially China. We examine the role of slavery and imperialism in global economic integration. We examine how the rise of modern capitalism influenced human material well-being and conflict and has led to the convergence and divergence of nations in the global economy.
Prerequisites: (MATH UN2010 and MATH UN2030) or the equivalent introduction to partial differential equations. First-order equations. Linear second-order equations; separation of variables, solution by series expansions. Boundary value problems.
Experiments in engineering and physical phenomena: aerofoil lift and drag in wind tunnels, laser Doppler anemometry in immersed fluidic channels, supersonic flow and shock waves, Rankine thermodynamical cycle for power generation, and structural truss mechanics and analysis.
Operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theater, visual arts and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored.
Prerequisites: BIOL UN2005 and BIOL UN2006. General genetics course focused on basic principles of transmission genetics and the application of genetic approaches to the study of biological function. Principles will be illustrated using classical and contemporary examples from prokaryote and eukaryote organisms, and the experimental discoveries at their foundation will be featured. Applications will include genetic approaches to studying animal development and human diseases. SPS and TC students must obtain the written permission from the instructor, by filling out a Registration Adjustment Form (Add/Drop form). https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/reg-adjustment.pdf
Worlding Otherwise is a studio course exploring how artists use game engines to craft speculative and ecological narratives. Using tools like Unreal Engine and Blender, students will visualize alternate futures, mythologies, and socio-political realities through creating immersive virtual environments. Key questions include: How might the game environment lend itself to storytelling? How can speculative fiction act as a method of critique? What can we learn from artists who blend technology with mythology and alternative futures? The semester culminates in a final project: a short cinematic piece, interactive environment, or hybrid installation created within a game engine.
Contemporary Issues in Education explores the critical and controversial issues confronting education today, including student well being, diversity, equity, access, technology, teaching methods, the teaching profession, and the future of education. In this course we will identify, explore, discuss, and debate these issues through ongoing, interactive dialogue and film-based activities drawing upon various educational theories, current research, and personal perspectives and experiences. This course is designed for students who intend to work as educators or in related fields; students interested in studying the dialectical relationship between education and major social, political, and/or historical trends; and students in film and media studies who want to explore the documentary film genre, including analysis, critique and production aspects.
The course will combine a seminar that centers documentary films about education as core texts for analysis and study with a workshop in film techniques to support the production of novel film projects. Students will learn how to read and critique documentary films selected to represent and foster multiple perspectives through their narratives, evidence, arguments, and technical elements. Additional readings will provide a contemporary context for the films and offer additional perspectives. With that said, the goal is not to be exhaustive of the range of perspectives on each issue, rather, they represent a starting point for class discussion and dialogue, and a launch pad for students to make their own short documentary films.
Prerequisites: An introductory course in economics and a functioning knowledge of high school algebra and analytical geometry or permission of the instructor. Systematic exposition of current macroeconomic theories of unemployment, inflation, and international financial adjustments.
Prerequisites: An introductory course in microeconomics or a combined macro/micro principles course (ECON BC1003 or ECON W1105, or the equivalent) and one semester of calculus or ECON BC1007, or permission of the instructor. Preferences and demand; production, cost, and supply; behavior of markets in partial equilibrium; resource allocation in general equilibrium; pricing of goods and services under alternative market structures; implications of individual decision-making for labor supply; income distribution, welfare, and public policy. Emphasis on problem solving.
Prerequisites: FREN BC3021, BC3022, BC3023, BC3024, or the equivalent. Readings of novels and novellas by Prevost, Rousseau, Diderot, Charriere, Laclos, and Sade, with a particular focus on issues of selfhood, gender, sexuality, authority, and freedom. FREN BC1204: French Intermediate II or the equivalent level is required.
Despite low literacy rates in the ancient world, engagement with writing concerned all socioeconomic groups across the Roman Empire, from public documents and tax receipts to personal letters and magical spells. The Roman government placed considerable importance on the written word, a vital component to political, social, religious, economic, and cultural life, both at the center of the empire in Rome and in the provinces. Between Roman authorities and provincials, writing was used by ruler and ruled in various ways as a tool of power to exploit, secure social mobility, resist, maintain ideological power, protect, legitimize, empower, and communicate. This interdisciplinary course explores the theme of writing and power in the Roman Empire during the period of the High Empire (30 BCE to 235 CE), taking both macro and microhistorical approaches. Through close analysis of papyrus documents, inscriptions, archaeological sources, ancient histories, and coins, we will consider how power and control were exercised through and over writing, the various groups interested in the power of writing and to what ends, the elaborate system of archives imposed and maintained across the empire, Roman censorship practices, and the value of studying writing and power to the history of imperialism, provincial resistance, administration, literacy, social mobility, personal and civic identity, and culture in the Roman Empire. In addition to the capital city of Rome, we will study four eastern provinces (Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria) and two western provinces (Britain and Gaul), allowing us to consider certain power structures in both the center and periphery. We will have opportunities to visit papyrus documents at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in Butler as well as Greek, Roman, and Egyptian artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Process-oriented introduction to the law and its use in environmental policy and decision-making. Origins and structure of the U.S. legal system. Emphasis on litigation process and specific cases that elucidate the common law and toxic torts, environmental administrative law, and environmental regulation through application and testing of statutory law in the courts. Emphasis also on the development of legal literacy, research skills, and writing.
Prerequisites: An introductory course in economics or permission of the instructor. Intellectual origins of the main schools of thought in political economy. Study of the founding texts in classical political economy, Marxian economics, neoclassicism, and Keynesianism.
Broadly, this course explores the relationship between gender, sexuality, and schooling across national contexts. We begin by considering theoretical perspectives, exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality have been studied and understood in the interdisciplinary field of education. Next, we consider the ways in which the subjective experience of gender and sexuality in schools is often overlooked or inadequately theorized. Exploring the ways that race, class, citizenship, religion and other categories of identity intersect with gender and sexuality, we give primacy to the contention that subjectivity is historically complex, and does not adhere to the analytically distinct identity categories we might try to impose on it.
The seminar will look at the structure of the novel, its plan, with special attention paid to ‘The Odyssey’, but also to the variations in tone in the book, the parodies and elaborate games becoming more complex as the book proceeds. We will examine a number of Irish texts that are relevant to the making of ‘Ulysses’, including Robert Emmett’s speech from the dock, Yeats’s ‘The Countess Cathleen’ and Lady Gregory translations from Irish folk-tales.
The History of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism through the current peace process between the state of Israel and the Arab states and the Palestinian national movement. Provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Summer and
Semester version:
Making Change: Activism, Social Movements and Education will look at the ways people power has pushed for change in the United States educational landscape. We will study historical and current social political education movements to answer questions such as: What does education/teacher activism look like? Who engages in educational social activism, and why? What do different models for organizing look like, past to present? We will learn from the examples of the Freedom Schools, the Chicago Teachers Union, the Tucson Unified School District fight for ethnics studies, BLM at Schools, Teacher Activist Groups and more. We will engage in readings, watch documentaries and hear from education activist guest lecturers.
Learning Outcomes:
You will explore the historical relationships between and across social movements in education and its social contexts.
You will reflect on major educational justice movements from across the country and analyze its impact and importance.
You will evaluate the changing role of education and schools in our society and propose actions that could be taken to improve education and schools in the future.
Required discussion section for MDES UN3042: Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society
Close reading and occasional screening of major plays associated with the Theater of the Absurd. Philosophical and literary origins of the concept of the absurd; social and political context of its emergence; theatrical conventions of early performances; popular and critical reception. Authors include: Adamov, Artaud, Beckett, Camus, Ionesco, Jarry, Maeterlinck.
In this course, we start from the premise that a failure to understand what social class is and how social class matters in daily life stops us from having conversations about the possibilities and limitations of schooling and, as such, prevents us from doing what we can to improve the schooling experiences of poor and working-class students. Throughout the semester, we will work to “complicate class”, reconsidering what class is, why class matters, and how we can best think about the relationship between social class and schooling. You will develop a language for talking about class, considering the affordances and constraints of various conceptions of class. You will also leave with critical questions about the possibilities and limitations of relying on schools as a solution to social problems. Recognizing restraints, we will conclude by reflecting on how we might work toward creating more equitable learning environments for poor and working-class students.
This course reviews the assumption of rationality in microeconomic theory and presents evidence (primarily from experimental psychology and economics) of how judgement and decision-making systematically deviate from what rationality predicts.