Courses

Uncertainty is ubiquitous and information about that uncertainty plays a key role in economic
decision-making and exchange. In this course, we will first consider how individuals and society
can manage uncertainty. We will then focus on how economic relationships may suffer from
some parties not having all the information that is relevant to their decision-making. We will see
how these kinds of information asymmetries invite lying and cheating. We will also study how
parties can structure their agreements to address the problems that such information asymmetries
create.

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213. This course examines labor markets through the lens of economics. In broad terms, labor economics is the study of the exchange of labor services for wages—a category that takes in a wide range of topics. Our objective in this course is to lay the foundations for explaining labor market phenomena within an economic framework and subsequently apply this knowledge-structure to a select set of questions. Throughout this process we will discuss empirical research, which will highlight the power (as well as the limitations) of employing economic models to real-world problems. By the end of this course we will have the tools/intuition to adequately formulate and critically contest arguments concerning labor markets.

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213. Equivalent to ECON UN4500. The theory of international trade, comparative advantage and the factor endowments explanation of trade, analysis of the theory and practice of commercial policy, economic integration. International mobility of capital and labor, the North-South debate.

An introduction to the enormous diversity of life on Earth. From bacteria to mammals, this course will survey species diversity, with an emphasis on ecological interactions and conservation. The course will also use basics of genetics and evolutionary biology to explore how diversity is generated and maintained. No previous knowledge of science is assumed. Fulfills a science requirement for most Columbia and GS undergraduates.

The course examines the modern atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and other components of the Earth’s climate system, and considers how they have changed in the past. Topics include global energy balance, greenhouse gases, thermodynamics of the atmosphere, moisture and clouds, ocean biology, chemistry and physics. The general circulation of the atmosphere as well as the surface and deep ocean will be considered from first principles and modern observations. Multiple intervals of Earth’s past will be considered, including substantially warmer and colder periods than the modern, as well as the repeated oscillations between glaciations and interglacial episodes of the past two million years. Some emphasis will be place on relatively rapid climate changes that have occurred naturally in the past, and the course will conclude with a consideration of recent trends and future projections.

This course will introduce some of the most fascinating texts of the first eight hundred years of English literature, from the period of Anglo-Saxon rule through the Hundred Years’ War and beyond—roughly, 700–1500 CE. We’ll hit on some texts you’ve heard of – Beowulf and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – while leaving time for some you may not have encountered – Marie de France’s Lais and Margery of Kempe’s Book. Along the way, we’ll also hone skills of reading, writing, and oral expression crucial to appreciating and discussing literature in nuanced, supple ways. 

If you take this course, you’ll discover how medieval literature is both a mirror and a foil to modern literature. You’ll explore the plurilingual and cross-cultural nature of medieval literary production and improve (or acquire!) your knowledge of Middle English. Plus, you’ll flex your writing muscles with two papers.

Who were the crime stoppers of the nineteenth century, a century marked by the establishment of the police force? In 1829, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police, giving rise to the slang nicknames “Bobbies” for constables in England and “Peelers” in Ireland, terms that are still recognized today. In this course we move from the seemingly absent institutionalized justice system in representations of crime in fiction (Oliver Twist) to its codification in the press (The Illustrated Police News, Penny Dreadfuls, and the infamous case of Jack the Ripper). This leads us to look in depth at the rise of detective fiction, sensation fiction, and the gothic in the long 19th century. From medicine, psychology, criminology to phrenology, mesmerism, and studies on hysteria, we examine scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses that framed and questioned the nature of crime, morality, policing, and the boundaries of good and evil. We consider how Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle pioneered the detective genre, but also how crime appeared, not just as theft or murder, but as (proto-)crimes against humanity (The Island of Doctor Moreau and the question of vivisection) or the denunciations of the crimes of the British empire (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). We also examine gothic and sensational reactions to crime alongside the rise of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and questions of gender and sexuality. Throughout, the course asks students to consider moral, ethical, and cultural questions in Victorian literature: how do literature and science construct notions of good and evil? How are race, gender, class, empire, and sexuality implicated in ideas of crime and criminality? Why were the Victorians and why are we still drawn to stories of transgression and detection?

In contemporary American culture, legal practice and literary studies share a commitment to careful use of language, rigorous interpretation, and a deep and imaginative engagement with meaning. Scholars and practitioners have been debating for decades how the two practices can reinforce each other, improve each other, critique each other, and refute each other. (As this debate shows, both communities also love to argue.) In this course, we will read and discuss a classic set of literary texts that speak to certain preoccupations within the legal tradition. We will also look at certain debates and controversies within legal discourse to see how the tools and insights of literary and cultural analysis can change our perspective. We won’t be focusing on literary history nor legal doctrine – no previous knowledge of either is required. Instead, we will look at texts where shared concerns – about interpretation, about evidence, about empathy, and about justice and fairness – allow us to use both literary and legal thinking to advance our own understanding of these ongoing debates.

How should we write the literary history of the 1990s—the decade in which history briefly died, the Internet arrived, and everything became “global”? The central gamble of this class is that the 1990s are now far enough away from us in time that a new sort of cultural and historical perspective is becoming possible. What kind of critical judgments can we make about the literature of the 1990s and how confident can we be about our objectivity? Can we identify trends that emerged, or ended, in the period? What body of texts, or group of authors or forms, should we use in writing the literary history of the 1990s – and what criteria should we use for their selection?

Our class meetings will feature extended discussion of significant literary works published in Britain and the US during the 1990s. Authors include major poets and novelists from the period: Thom Gunn, Harryette Mullen, Cormac McCarthy, Hanif Kureishi, Toni Morrison, W. G. Sebald, and Anne Carson. Literary discussion will be mixed with readings from criticism (academic and popular), literary theory, and literary sociology. Students will complete a variety of assignment types, including book reviews, short in-class essays, bibliographic projects, and creative options.

Long before Aristotle’s Rhetoric and far from Athens and Rome, rhetoricians were teaching people how to communicate powerfully in politics, the law, and the street. This course surveys the ancient rhetorics of Egypt, China, the Americas, and the Arab world. We will examine a body of primary texts from 2,300 B.C.E. to 1,500 C.E. that teach people to wield language effectively.

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of [American] art in the last couple of decades."  The Wire combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city.  On a more macro level The Wire humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.

The Wire, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know.  But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end.  That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos.  Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order): The Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood; Madmen; and Breaking Bad.

In the second decade of the 21st century there is more critical attention than ever before on the essay as a literary genre and a cultural practice that crosses media, registers, disciplines, and contexts. The concept of “essayism” was redefined by Robert Musil in his unfinished modernist novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930) from a style of literature to a form of thinking in writing: “For an essay is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favourable occasion be elevated to the status of truth or that might just as easily be recognized as error … ; an essay is the unique and unalterable form that a man’s inner life takes in a decisive thought.”  In this course will explore how essays can increase readers’ and writers’ tolerance for the existential tension and uncertainty we experience both within ourselves as well as in the worlds we inhabit. As Cheryl Wall argues, essays also give their practitioners meaningful work to do with their private musings and public concerns in a form that thrives on intellectual as well as formal experimentation. The course is organized to examine how practitioners across media have enacted essayism in their own work and how theorists have continued to explore its aesthetic effects and ethical power.