The Office of Global Programs has announced three new summer study abroad programs:

Art Humanities and Music Humanities in Paris will be offered as a single program during the summer of 2015, allowing students to complete both courses together in six weeks in Paris through a special opportunity to take the part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum pertaining to the arts in a city particularly suited to artistic investigation. Both courses will be taught in English and, while they will meet separately, there will be many points of overlap and shared excursions. The syllabi will emphasize the musical and visual cultures of Paris, and productive exchanges between the two classes will be fostered through shared topics and class trips, including concerts and museum visits. Day trips to important sites in the region, such as Chartres and Giverny, will complement the excursions to monuments and performances within Paris. Art Humanities will be taught by Robert E. Harrist, Jr., the Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art, and Music Humanities will be taught by Susan Boynton, professor of music and chair of the Department of Music.

The Columbia Global Seminar in Seoul: Visual Cultures at Yonsei University will examine the ways in which visual culture plays a central role in shaping the modern experience in Korea under both Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) and in divided Korea. The program will explore the multilayered relations between ways of seeing across disciplines, looking for example, at architecture, urban planning, art, film, new media and literature. Focusing on the ways in which Korean filmmakers and artists negotiate the shifting relations between people and place, the course will attempt to locate representations of Korea, Koreans and non-Koreans in a global context, one that moves beyond the history of the nation-state. The program will pay particular attention to connections between visual culture and the urban space, with a focus on the modern history of Seoul as a site of the local and the global. Film screenings and readings will include diverse materials such as colonial-period films dealing with new forms of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, performance art and installations grappling with the issue of national division and secondary works on migrants and immigrants to Korea. This program was developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is the second summer program of three to be funded by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures’ Mellon grant; the first program, Japanese Film Studies at Waseda University, was held in Tokyo in Summer 2014.

The Columbia Global Seminar in Tunis and  Istanbul: Democracy and Constitutional Engineering will take place in Turkey and Tunisia, two countries facing different histories and challenges with democracy. The program will place Columbia students alongside students from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey to examine a range of substantive and cultural perspectives on democracy, democratic transitions and democratic engineering. Taught by John Huber, professor of political science, the two courses offered will be integrated intellectually so that the topics discussed in the constitutional engineering course will be informed by the data and analysis from the empirical methods course. This integration of substance with method can help students understand the possibilities and value of posing testable arguments about democracy, as well as provide them with tools for assessing their own ideas about democratic institutions. The courses are Comparative Democratic Politics, which will focus on the comparative study of democratic political processes and in particular on the role that formal institutional arrangements play in shaping strategic political behaviors, and Data Analysis & Statistics for Political Science Research, which will examine the basic methods of data analysis and statistics that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. This program is the result of a collaboration between Columbia Global Centers | Middle East in Amman, Columbia Global Centers | Turkey in Istanbul, and the Office of Global Programs.