The Columbia College curriculum and its academic policies are determined by the following faculty committees:
Committee on Instruction
The Committee on Instruction (COI) is responsible for approving proposals for new majors and other academic programs, new courses, and policy changes. The COI also provides leadership on a range of academic matters, consulting with a broad range of faculty, students, and administrators where relevant. The COI is a joint Columbia College and School of General Studies committee. Questions? Contact cc-gs-courses@columbia.edu.
Committee on Instruction Members: 2018-2019
- Co-Chair: Dean James J. Valentini, Dean of Columbia College
- Co-Chair: Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch, Dean of the School of General Studies
- Professor Yinon Cohen, Department of Sociology
- Professor Michael Como, Department of Religion
- Professor Zoë Crossland, Department of Anthropology
- Professor Steve Goldstein, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Professor Saskia Hamilton, Barnard College
- Professor Robert Hymes, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
- Associate Professor Kimuli Kasara, Department of Political Science
- Professor Laura Kaufman, Department of Chemistry
- Professor Elizabeth Ladenson, Department of French and Romance Philogy
- Assistant Professor Dorothea Lasky, School of the Arts
- Professor Szabolcs Marka, Department of Physics
- Professor Barclay Morrison, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Vice Dean of Undergraduate Programs, School of Engineering and Applied Science
- Professor Dustin Rubenstein, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
- Professor Mark Van De Mieroop, Department of History
- Professor Katja Vogt, Department of Philosophy
Student Representatives:
- Nicole Leon Elvir CC'20
- Neel Puri CC'20
- Alexander Chang GS'19
- Anne Whitney GS'19
Ex-Officio:
- Lisa Hollibaugh, Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia College
- Ivonne Rojas, Acting Dean of Studies, School of General Studies
- Andrew Plaa, Dean of Advising for Columbia College and Columbia Engineering
- Victoria Rosner, Dean of Academic Affairs, School of General Studies
New Approved Courses
The following new courses have been approved for the Spring semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. As new courses are added to the list frequently, please visit this site for updates. Additional courses and major/concentration requirements may be found in the Columbia College Bulletin.
Last updated January 10, 2019.
Spring 2019
| DEPARTMENT/PROGRAM | COURSE NO. & DESIGNATOR | TITLE |
|---|---|---|
| African American Studies | AFAS UN3940 | Senior Thesis Seminar |
| Anthropology | ANTH UN3602 | Stockholm Syndrome: Terror, Sympathy, Love |
| Art History and Archaeology | AHIS UN2612 | A History of China in 27 Objects |
| Art History and Archaeology | AHIS UN2702 | Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture |
| Art History and Archaeology | AHIS UN3319 | The Architect’s Library-Laboratory |
| Art History and Archaeology | AHIS UN3610 | Visualizing Japanese Buddhism |
| Art History and Archaeology | AHIS GU4584 | Critical Approaches to Persianate Painting |
| Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race | CSER GU4002 | Conflict Urbanism: Puerto Rico Now |
| Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race | CSER UN3219 | Native Food Sovereignty |
| Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race | CSER UN3022 | History of Deportation to Latin America |
| Chemistry | CHEM GU4104 | Structural Methods in Inorganic Chemistry |
| Chemistry | CHEM GU4111 | Applications of NMR Spectroscopy to Inorganic Chemistry |
| Earth and Environmental Sciences | EESC GU4235 | Sea Level Change |
| Earth Institute | SDEV GU4250 | Climate Change: Resilience and Adaptation |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | EAAS UN3123 | Women in Early Modern China and Japan |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | EAAS UN3207 | Lights, Camera, Action: The Visual Culture of K-Pop |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | EAAS UN3710 | Fiction, Film, and the Making of Modern Vietnams |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | EAAS UN3971 | Technology and Power in Modern China |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | HSEA GU4221 | Many Belts, Many Roads: China and the Islamist World, c.600AD - Present |
| East Asian Languages and Cultures | HSEA GU4813 | Early Tibetan History and Its Relations with China |
| Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology | EEEB GU4055 | Principles and Applications of Modern DNA Sequencing |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3342 | Narratives of Law: Witches, Colonial Subjects, Police Detectives, and Other Criminals |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4308 | Explaining the Supernatural |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4558 | Writing About Disability |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4912 | Experimental Poetry in Middle English and Contemporary Poetry |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3889 | History of the English Language |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENTA UN3788 | Women Playwrights |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4407 | Victorian Literature |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3928 | Renaissance Comedy |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3254 | Bad Research and the Victorian Novel |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3287 | Hauntings: American Poetry in the 1980s |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3895 | Fantasy in Medieval Romance |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3227 | James Joyce |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3228 | Aldous Huxley |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3252 | After Nature: Victorian Literature and the Environment |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4597 | Literature of Colonial America |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENTA GU4733 | Theaters of the Real |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN GU4727 | Comparative Modernisms |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3626 | Great Short Works of American Prose |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL GU4445 | Late 20th C Ethnic American Literature |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3397 | The Athlete in the American Imagination |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3636 | Collections: Contemporary American Short Stories |
| English and Comparative Literature | ENGL UN3348 | Sympathy and the Rhetoric of the British Revolution |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN GU4741 | Cultural Appropriation and World Literature |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN GU4742 | World Fiction Since 1965 |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN GU4820 | Comparative Romanticisms |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN UN3944 | The Big Ambitious Novel |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN GU4409 | Country and City in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel |
| English and Comparative Literature | CLEN UN3323 | Medical Fictions, Romantic to Modern |
| Film | FILM UN3960 | Intro to Experimental Film and Video |
| Film | FILM UN3010, sec.002 | Kieslowski and Has |
| Film | FILM UN2910, sec.003 | Topics in American Cinema- Comedy |
| French | FREN UN3622 | Emotions and the Body in the XVII and XVIII Centuries |
| French | ENFR GU4819 | Images of the French Revolution |
| French | FREN OC3719 (Reid Hall) | Violence By and Against Women |
| Germanic Languages | GERM GU4735 | Theory and Practice of prose (in German) |
| Germanic Languages | CLGR GU4121 | Fairy Tales and the Practices of Adaptation (in English) |
| Germanic Languages | CLGR GU4280 | 21st-Century Transnational Cinema |
| History | HIST UN1037 | Introduction to History of Ukraine |
| History | HIST UN3756 | Political Animals: Humans, Animals, and Nature in Modern European History |
| History | HIST UN3011 | The Second World War |
| History | HIST UN3012 | Uganda in the Mission Archive: African Voices and Colonial Documents |
| History | HIST UN3017 | Sexuality and the City |
| History | HIST UN3018 | Early American Autobiography as History: Testimony, Adventure, Confession |
| History | HIST UN3030 | Immigration and Citizenship in American History |
| History | HIST UN3009 | Cities and Slavery in the Atlantic World |
| History | HIST UN3436 | Stalinist Civilization |
| History | HIST GU4039 | The Iranian Revolution |
| History | HIST GU4012 | History of the City in Latin America |
| History | HIST GU4028 | Postwars and Reconstructions: The U.S. Civil War in Comparative Perspective |
| History | HIST GU4038 | The Black Radical Tradition in America |
| History | HIST GU4029 | Europe’s Commercial Revolution, ca 1100-1800: Economic, Social, and Cultural Exchange |
| History | HIST GU4031 | Transforming Texts: Textual Analysis, Literary Modeling, and Visualization |
| History | HIST GU4036 | Displacement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe |
| History | HIST GU4037 | Russian History on Trial |
| History | HIST GU4041 | Between the Second World War and the Cold War: Europe 1943-1950 |
| History | HIST GU4231 | Eastern Europe’s Cold War |
| History | HIST GU4717 | History of Feminism in Mexico |
| History | HIST GU4801 | Gender and Women in Islam: South Asia and Middle East |
| History | HIST GU4925 | The Body in Global Histories of Medicine |
| Human Rights | HRTS GU4185 | Human Rights and Global Economic Justice |
| Human Rights | HRTS GU4340 | Human Rights Accountability and Remedies |
| Inst. Comparative Literature and Society | CLPS GU4520 | Thinking Mothers- Philosophical, Psychoanalytic, and Literary Speculations |
| Inst. Comparative Literature and Society | CPLS GU4720 | The Gothic: From the Sublime to the Uncanny in Literature and Architecture |
| Inst. for Jewish and Israeli Studies | JWST UN2610 | Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought |
| Inst. for Jewish and Israeli Studies | JWST GU4145 | Topics in Israeli Cinema |
| Inst. for Jewish and Israeli Studies | JWST GU4537 | Modernism, Nationalism, Revival: Readings in Modern Hebrew Literature |
| Latin American and Iberian Cultures | SPAN GU4010 | Language Crossing in Latinx Caribbean Cultural Production |
| Latin American and Iberian Cultures | SPAN GU4011 | Conversation in Spanish: Practice and Analysis |
| Linguistics | LING GU4021 | Russian Linguistics, Habit &Activity |
| MESAAS | CLME GU4271 | Wanderlust: Readings in Arabic Writing |
| MESAAS | MDES GU4264 | Rumi: The Poet, the Mystic, the Muslim |
| MESAAS | MDES UN3045 | Critical Theories of Religion in Modern South Asia |
| MESAAS | MDES UN3251 | The Ancient Sciences in Medieval Islamic World |
| MESAAS | MDES GU4152 | Rethinking Freedom in Africa |
| MESAAS | MDES GU4263 | Colonial Encounters: Thinking Through Time and Space |
| Music | MUSI UN3342 | Beyond Boundaries: Radical Black Experimental Music |
| Music | MUSI GU4800 | Intro to Sound Studies |
| Political Science | POLS GU4420 | Political Activism and Social Movements |
| Political Science | POLS GU4762 | Politics in the Lab |
| Political Science | POLS GU4415 | Politics of Identity- Nationalism and Democracy in Comp Perspective and the Israeli Case |
| Psychology | PSYC UN3691 | Interpersonal Cognition Seminar: Close Relationships, Identity, and Memory |
| Psychology | PSYC GU4289 | The Games People Play: The Psychology of Strategy Decision Making |
| Psychology | PSYC GU4674 | Psychology and Law |
| Psychology | PSYC UN1910 | Research Ethics in Psychology |
| Psychology | PSYC UN3623 | Topics in Clinical Psychology |
| Psychology | PSYC GU4244 | Language and Mind |
| Psychology | PSYC GU4686 | Barriers and Levers for Behavior Change |
| Religion | RELI GU4516 | The Politics of Freud in the Postcolony |
| Religion | RELI GU4228 | South Asia and the Secular |
| Religion | RELI GU4418 | On African Theory: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology |
| Religion | RELI UN3521 | Muslim Masculinities |
| Religion | RELI UN2670 | Magic and Modernity |
| Religion | RELI GU4562 | Wittgenstein and Religion |
| Slavic Languages | CLSL UN3305 | Red Planet: Science Fiction and Fictions of the Eastern Bloc |
| Slavic Languages | RUSS GU4453 | Women and Resistance in Russia |
| Slavic Languages | CLSS GU4101 | Balkan as a Metaphor |
| Slavic Languages | RUSS UN3105 | Real World Russian |
| Sociology | SOCI GU4059 | Contemporary Sociological Theory |
| Visual Arts | VIAR UN3413 | Printmaking: Print Into Motion |
| Women’s and Gender Studies | WMST GU4275 | Medea Goes to Court |
| Writing | WRIT UN3220 | Style as Character: Writing About People |
| Writing | WRIT UN3319 | Poetics of Place: American Landscapes, Voices, and Inheritance |
Committee on the Core
The Committee on the Core (COC) is responsible for all matters regarding the Core Curriculum. Questions? Contact Toni Gunthrope-Hardee: tg2030@columbia.edu.
Committee on the Core Members: 2018-2019
- James J. Valentini, Dean of Columbia College
- Professor Giuseppe Gerbino, Department of Music, Chair of Music Humanities
- Professor Patricia Grieve, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Chair of the Committee on the Global Core
- Professor David Helfand, Department Astronomy, Chair of Frontiers of Science
- Professor Noam Elcott, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Chair of Art Humanities
- Professor Emmanuelle Saada, Departments of French and History, Chair of Contemporary Civilization
- Professor Joanna Stalnaker, Department of French, Chair of Literature Humanities
- Professor Nicole Wallack, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program
Student Representatives:
- Brigid Connelly GS'20
- Alice Hu CC'19
- Zachary Marcone CC'19
- Mohamad Ali Saadeddine CC'20
Ex-Officio:
- Lisa Rosen-Metsch, Dean of The School of General Studies
- Lisa Hollibaugh, Dean of Academic Affairs
- Ivana N. Hughes, Director, Frontiers of Science
- Victoria P. Rosner, Dean of Academic Affairs, School of General Studies
- Toni Gunthrope-Hardee, Associate Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum
Committee on Science Instruction
The Committee on Science Instruction (COSI) is responsible for all matters relating to the science requirement and providing leadership on matters related to undergraduate science education. Questions? Contact Amy Kohn: ask130@columbia.edu
Committee on Science Instruction Members: 2018-2019
- Professor Tulle Hazelrigg, Department of Biological Sciences
- Professor David Helfand, Department of Astronomy
- Professor Jae Woo Lee, Department of Computer Science
- Professor Shaw-Hwa Lo, Department of Statistics
- Professor Jerry McManus, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Professor Caroline Marvin, Department of Psychology
- Professor John Parsons, Department of Physics
- Professor Mary Putman, Department of Astronomy
- Professor David Reichman, Department of Chemistry
- Professor Ovidiu Savin, Department of Mathematics
- Professor Shahid Naeem, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Student Representatives:
- Noah Goss CC'19
- Thomas Li CC'20
- Yvette Schutt GS'19
Ex-Officio:
- James J. Valentini, Dean of Columbia College
- Lisa Rosen-Metsch, Dean of The School of General Studies
- Lisa Hollibaugh, Dean of Academic Affairs
- Ivana Hughes, Department of Chemistry, Director of Frontiers of Science
- Victoria Rosner, Dean of Academic Affairs, School of General Studies
- Amy Kohn, Associate Director of Academic Affairs
Committee on the Global Core
The Committee on the Global Core (CGC) is responsible for all matters relating to the Global Core requirement, including determining the list of courses approved for the requirement. Questions? Contact globalcore@columbia.edu.
Faculty interested in proposing new courses for the Global Core requirement can view information regarding the process.
Committee on Global Core Members: 2018-2019
- Chair: Professor Patricia Grieve, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures
- Professor Courtney Bender, Department of Religion
- Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Department of French and Romance Philology
- Professor Madeleine Dobie, Department of French and Romance Philology
- Professor David Lurie, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
- Professor Avinoam Shalem, Department of Art History and Archaeology
Student Representative:
- Rachel Rodney GS'19
- Sam Aldridge CC'19
Ex-Officio:
- James J. Valentini, Dean of Columbia College
- Lisa Rosen-Metsch, Dean of The School of General Studies
- Victoria P. Rosner, Dean of Academic Affairs, School of General Studies
- Lisa Hollibaugh, Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia College