Courses
Start building your summer today by selecting from hundreds of Columbia courses from various topics of interest. Courses for Summer 2026 are now available, with new offerings being added throughout the winter into early spring.
Please note: listing your desired courses in your visiting application does not automatically register you for those courses, nor does it guarantee seat availability.
Key to Course Listings | Course Requirements
Course Options
The goal of this course is to provide students with an overview of constitutive debates over the theory and practice of democracy along three major lines: democracy as a word (with a time-honored ancestry and a tortuous trajectory across the centuries); democracy as a constellation of principles and values; and democracy as an array of institutions and procedures that instantiate the word and pursue the foundational principles of popular sovereignty and democratic self-rule. In doing so, we will read the work of major representatives of historical and contemporary political thought who assessed democracy’s shortcomings and potential, examined the relationship between its theory and its practice, and offered prominent resources for thinking about democracy’s future in our present.
Instructor
David Ragazzoni
Modality
On-Line Only
Enrollment
0 of 30
Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures
Visiting students can take this course as part of a Focus Area.
The Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures Focus Area is designed for students who are interested in the fast-paced world of the public sector and current events. Students enhance their academic experience through specialized co-curricular activities exclusive to the city and earn a Certification of Participation.
This political science course provides an introduction to the politics of judges, courts, and law in the United States. We will evaluate law and courts as political institutions and judges as political actors and policy-makers.
The topics we will study include what courts do; how different legal systems function; the operation of legal norms; the U.S. judicial system; the power of courts; constraints on judicial power; judicial review; the origin of judicial institutions; how and why Supreme Court justices make the decisions they do; case selection; conflict between the Court and the other branches of government; decision making and conflict within the judicial hierarchy; the place of courts in American political history; and judicial appointments.
We will explore some common but not necessarily true claims about how judges make decisions and the role of courts. One set of myths sees judges as unbiased appliers of neutral law, finding law and never making it, with ideology, biography, and politics left at the courthouse door. Another set of myths sees the judiciary as the “least dangerous branch,” making law, not policy, without real power or influence.
Our thematic questions will be: How much power and discretion do judges have in the U.S? What drives their decision-making?
Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures
Visiting students can take this course as part of a Focus Area.
The Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures Focus Area is designed for students who are interested in the fast-paced world of the public sector and current events. Students enhance their academic experience through specialized co-curricular activities exclusive to the city and earn a Certification of Participation.
This course explores causes and effects of political behavior in the United States. “Political behavior” is a broad concept, and can include many areas of engagement with civic life. As we consider “behavior,” we must also take on its foundations: Public opinion, ideology, and partisanship. We will focus primarily on mass politics—beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of ordinary citizens rather than of activists or elites—in the United States. However, we will also explore some effects of elite behavior on mass behavior. We will also focus on the interconnections between social structure, culture, and politics. In short, this course will focus on developing an understanding of the mechanisms that drive voting and other political behaviors in the United States.
This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.
This course examines questions in international political economy, asking what we know and how we know it. It addresses questions such as: Why do some countries promote globalization while others resist it? What do IOs do in international politics? Who runs our system of global governance? We will explore these questions and others by focusing on topics such as international trade, foreign aid, investment, and the environment. For each topic, we will use a variety of theoretical lenses and then investigate the evidence in favor of each. More generally, the course will consider the challenges of drawing casual inferences in the field of international political economy. There are no prerequisites for this course but an introductory economy course would be helpful. Students will write a short reading response each week and produce a research proposal for studying a topic related to international political economy, though they do not need to actually conduct this research.
Instructor
Sharyn O'Halloran
Modality
In-Person
Enrollment
0 of 30
Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures
Visiting students can take this course as part of a Focus Area.
The Public Affairs and Sustainable Futures Focus Area is designed for students who are interested in the fast-paced world of the public sector and current events. Students enhance their academic experience through specialized co-curricular activities exclusive to the city and earn a Certification of Participation.