Courses

Practices like veiling, gendered forms of segregation, and the honor code that are central to Western images of Muslim women are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. This course examines debates about gender, sexuality, and morality and explores the interplay of political, social, and economic factors in shaping the lives of men and women across the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Europe. The perspective will be primarily anthropological, although special attention will be paid to historical processes associated with colonialism and nation-building that are crucial to understanding present gender politics. We will focus on the sexual politics of everyday life in specific locales and explore the extent to which these are shaped by these histories and the power of representations mobilized in a global world in the present and international political interventions. In addition to reading ethnographic works about particular communities, we read memoirs and critical analyses of the local and transnational activist movements that have emerged to address various aspects of gender politics and rights.

This seminar seeks to engage with materials that question personhood. Drawing on both fictional and non-fictional accounts, we will be involved with textual and visual documents as well institutional contexts in order to revisit such notion under contemporary capitalism. We will cover topics like rites of passage and life cycle, the role of the nation state and local communities in defining a person, the relation between self and non-self, between the living and the dead. We will likewise address vicarious forms of personhood through the prosthetic, the avatar or the heteronomous. But we will also look into forms of dissipation and/or enhancement of personhood through bodybuilding, guinea-piging and pharmo-toxicities. As a whole, the course will bring to light how the question of personhood cross-culturally relates to language, performativity, religion, technology, law, gender, race, class, care, life and death.

Prerequisites: Recommended preparation: a working knowledge of high school algebra. May be counted toward the science requirement for most Columbia University undergraduate students. The overall architecture of the solar system. Motions of the celestial sphere. Time and the calendar. Major planets, the earth-moon system, minor planets, comets. Life in the solar system and beyond.

Students will be introduced to the fundamental financial issues of the modern corporation. By the end of this course, students will understand the basic concepts of financial planning, managing growth; debt and equity sources of financing and valuation; capital budgeting methods; and risk analysis, cost of capital, and the process of securities issuance.

Students will gain an overview of major concepts of management and organization theory, concentrating on understanding human behavior in organizational contexts, with heavy emphasis on the application of concepts to solve managerial problems. By the end of this course students will have developed the skills to motivate employees, establish professional interpersonal relationships, take a leadership role, and conduct performance appraisal.

Prerequisites: BUSI PS5001 Intro to Finance and BUSI PS5003 Corporate Finance or Professor Approval required. If you have not taken PS5001 or PS5003 at Columbia University, please contact the course instructor for approval. Students will learn about the valuation of publicly traded equity securities. By the end of the semester students will be able to perform fundamental analysis (bottoms-up, firm-level, business and financial analysis), prepare pro forma financial statements, estimate free cash flows and apply valuation models.

Prerequisites: High school algebra or the instructor's permission. Recommended: high school physics and chemistry. This course is preparation for CHEM UN1403 General Chemistry I Lecture or the equivalent, as well as for other science courses. It is intended for students who have not attended school for sometime or who do not have a firm grasp of high school chemistry. Topics include inorganic nomenclature, chemical reactions, chemical bonding and its relation to molecular structure, stoichiometry, periodic properties of elements, chemical equilibrium, gas laws, acids and bases, and electrochemistry. Please note that students must attend a recitation section.

Prerequisites: high school chemistry and algebra, CHEM S0001, or the department's permission. Topics include stoichiometry, states of matter, nuclear properties, electronic structures of atoms, periodic properties, chemical bonding, molecular geometry, introduction to quantum mechanics and atomic theory, introduction to organic, biological chemistry and inorganic coordination chemistry. Topical subjects may include spectroscopy, solid state and materials science, polymer science and macromolecular structures. The order of presentation of topics may differ from the order presented here. Students are required to attend the separate daily morning recitations which accompany the lectures (total time block: MTWR 9:30-12:20). Registering for CHEM S1403D will automatically register students for the recitation section. Students who wish to take the full sequence of General Chemistry Lectures and General Chemistry Laboratory should also register for CHEM S1404Q and CHEM S1500 (see below). This course is equivalent to CHEM W1403 General Chemistry I Lecture.

Prerequisites: (CHEM UN1403) Introduction to basic experimental techniques in chemistry, including quantitative procedures, chemical analysis, and descriptive chemistry. To be enrolled in CHEM S1500X you must also register for CHEM S1501 Lab Lecture.

Prerequisites: CHEM S1403 General Chemistry I Lecture, CHEM S1404 General Chemistry II Lecture and CHEM S1500 General Chemistry Lab or their equivalents taken within the previous five years. Principles of organic chemistry. The structure and reactivity of organic molecules from the standpoint of modern theories of chemistry. Stereochemistry, reactions of organic molecules, mechanisms of organic reactions, syntheses and degradations of organic molecules, spectroscopic techniques of structure determination. Please note that students must attend a recitation for this class. Students who wish to take the full organic chemistry lecture sequence and laboratory should also register for CHEM S2444Q Organic Chemistry II Lecture and CHEM S2543Q Organic Chemistry Lab (see below). This course is equivalent to CHEM UN2443 Organic Chemistry I Lecture.

Prerequisites: CHEM UN1500 General Chemistry Lab, CHEM UN2443 Organic Chemistry I - Lecture. Techniques of experimental organic chemistry, with emphasis on understanding fundamental principles underlying the experiments in methodology of solving laboratory problems involving organic molecules. Attendance at the first laboratory session is mandatory. Please note that you must complete CHEM UN2443 Organic Chemistry I Lecture or the equivalent to register for this lab course. This course is equivalent to CHEM UN2543 Organic Chemistry Laboratory.

This course looks at the narrative and the historical context for an extraordinary event: the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander III of Macedonia, conventionally known as “Alexander the Great”. We will explore the different worlds Alexander grew out of, confronted, and affected: the old Greek world, the Persian empire, the ancient near-east (Egypt, Levant, Babylonia, Iran), and the worlds beyond, namely pre-Islamic (and pre-Silk Road) Central Asia, the Afghan borderlands, and the Indus valley. The first part of the course will establish context, before laying out a narrative framework; the second part of the course will explore a series of themes, especially the tension between military conquest, political negotiation, and social interactions. Overall, the course will serve as an exercise in historical methodology (with particular attention to ancient sources and to interpretation), an introduction to the geography and the history of the ancient world (classical and near-eastern), and the exploration of a complex testcase located at the contact point between several worlds, and at a watershed of world history.