Ethnicity and Race Studies

Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race420 Hamilton; 212-854-0510

Program Director: Fred Harris (fh2170@adcu.columbia.edu)

Associate Director: Bahia Munem (bmm2194@columbia.edu) | 425 Hamilton | 

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Prof. Bahia Munem, 425 Hamilton | 212-854-2564 | DUS Office Hours Online Appointment Scheduling | bmm2194@columbia.edu

Assistant Director: Carmen Nieves |424 Hamilton Hall |212-854-0510 | cmn2126@columbia.edu

Program Coordinator: Ileana Guerrero  |423 Hamilton Hall |212-854-0507 | ig2380@columbia.edu

Founded in 1999, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) is an interdisciplinary intellectual space whose mission is to advance the most innovative teaching, research, and public discussion about race and ethnicity. To promote its mission, the Center organizes conferences, seminars, exhibits, film screenings, and lectures that bring together faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students with diverse interests and backgrounds. Moreover, CSER partners with departments, centers, and institutes at Columbia, as well as with colleagues and organizations on and off campus, in order to reach new audiences and facilitate an exchange of knowledge.

Programs of Study

Ethnicity and Race Studies major and concentration encompass a variety of fields and interdisciplinary approaches to the critical study of ethnicity and race. What makes CSER unique is its attention to the comparative study of racial and ethnic categories in the production of social identities, power relations, and forms of knowledge in a multiplicity of contexts including the arts, social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. In addition to the major, CSER also offers a concentration in ethnicity and race studies.

In both the major and concentration, students have the opportunity to select from the following areas of specialization:

  • Asian American studies
  • Comparative ethnic studies
  • Latino/a studies
  • Native American/Indigenous studies
  • Individualized courses of study

Faculty and students find this field exciting and important because it opens up new ways of thinking about two fundamental aspects of human social existence: race and ethnicity. Although various traditional disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and literature, among others, offer valuable knowledge on race and ethnicity, ethnicity and race studies provides a flexible interdisciplinary and comparative space to bring the insights of various conceptual frameworks and disciplines together in critical dialogue.

Overall, this program introduces students to the study of ethnicity and race, and the deep implications of the subject matter for thinking about human bodies, identity, culture, social hierarchy, and the formation of political communities. The major encourages students to consider the repercussions of racial and ethnic identifications to local and global politics, and how race and ethnicity relates to gender, sexuality, and social class, among other forms of hierarchical difference.

Students majoring in ethnicity and race studies may focus their work on specific groups, such as Asian Americans, Latino/a, or Native Americans/Indigenous; or a comparative study of how race and ethnicity are formed and how conceptions of race and ethnicity transform and change over time and place. Students also have the option of designing an individualized course of study, which may encompass a wide variety of themes. Among the most studied are those involving the relationship between race, ethnicity and law; health; human rights; urban spaces; cultural production; visual culture; and the environment.

Due to its rigorous curriculum, which trains students in theory, history, and a wide range of modes of inquiry, the major enables students to follow multiple directions after graduation. According to our internal surveys, nearly half of CSER students continue to Ph.D. programs in history, anthropology, and ethnic studies, among other areas. A second significant number of students continue on to professions most notably related to law, public policy, medicine, human rights, community organizing, journalism, and the environment.

Study Abroad

Students are encouraged to participate in study abroad programs, as they represent an exciting opportunity to learn new languages and live in countries that are germane to their areas of study. In addition, traveling abroad can enrich every student's intellectual experience by providing an opportunity to learn about other perspectives on ethnicity and race.

In summer 2017 CSER, together with Columbia's Office of Global Programs (OGP) launched a pilot summer program in Mexico City in collaboration with the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economicas--CIDE, a leading institution of higher education with a focus in the social sciences.  The program consists of an intensive 5-week CSER core course, "Colonization-Decolonization," visits to various historical colonial sites and a field trip to Oaxaca.  Professors Claudio Lomnitz and Manan Ahmed jointly taught the class.  Eleven Columbia students participated in this exchange.  For more information about the CSER 2018 Global Program in Mexico, please contact cser@columbia.edu

In the past, students have also participated in study abroad programs in Australia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and South Africa. To ensure that study abroad complements the major and integrates effectively with the requirements of the major, students are encouraged to consult with CSER's undergraduate adviser as early in their academic program as possible. The director of undergraduate studies can advise students on what may be exciting programs for their areas.

Departmental Honors

CSER majors may choose to write and/or produce an honors project. The senior thesis gives undergraduate majors the opportunity to engage in rigorous, independent, and original research on a specific topic of their choosing. If a monograph, the honors thesis is expected to be 35-50 pages in length. Honors projects can also take other forms, such as video or websitesThese projects also require a written component, but of a shorter length than the traditional thesis. During their senior year, honors students perform research as part of CSER UN3990 Senior Project Seminar. Senior projects are due in early April. The Honors Thesis is an excellent option for any student interested in pursuing a Master’s degree or Ph.D. Students should consult with their director of undergraduate studies no later than the beginning of the first term of their senior year if they wish to be considered for departmental honors. Students who are awarded departmental honors are notified by their department in mid-May.

In order to qualify for departmental honors, students must satisfy all the requirements for the major, maintain a GPA of at least 3.6 in the major, and complete a high quality honors project. In addition, each student is expected to meet periodically with his or her supervising project adviser and preceptor. Although the senior thesis is a prerequisite for consideration for departmental honors, all Ethnicity and Race studies majors are strongly encouraged to consider undertaking thesis work even if they do not wish to be considered for departmental honors.

Core Faculty and Executive Committee

 
  • Sayantani DasGupta (CSER, Professional Studies)
  • Jennifer Lee (Sociology)
  • Catherine Fennel (Anthropology)
  • Karl Jacoby CSER Co-Director (History)
  • Claudio Lomnitz (Anthropology) 
  • Frances Negrón-Muntaner (English and Comparative Literature)
  • Mae Ngai CSER Co-Director (History)
  • Carlos Alonso Nugent (Department of English and Comparative Literature)
  • Ana Maria Ochoa (Ethnomusicology) 
  • Deborah Paredez (CSER and Professional Practice)
  • Audra Simpson (Anthropology)
  • Mariana Souto-Manning (TC Professor of Education)
  • Kevin Fellezs (Ethnomusicology and IRAAS)
  •  

Affiliated Faculty

Rachel Adams
Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
View Profile

Carlos Alonso
Morris A. & Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
View Profile

Vanessa Agard-Jones
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
View Profile

Christina Duffy-Ponsa
Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
View Profile

Nadia Abu El-Haj
Professor of Anthropology

Kevin Fellezs
Assistant Professor, Music Department/Institute for Research in African American Studies
View Profile

Kaiama L. Glover
Associate Professor, French Department /African Studies Program, Barnard College
View Profile

Steven Gregory
Associate Professor of Anthropology and African-American Studies, Department of Anthropology and Institute for Research in African-American Studies
View Profile

Frank Guridy
Associate Professor of History
View Profile

Kim Hall
Professor, Department of English, Barnard College
View Profile

Jill Hill
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education, Department of Counseling & Clinical Psychology, Teachers College
View Profile

Marianne Hirsch
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
View Profile

Jean Howard
George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Department of English and Comparative Literature
View Profile

Theodore Hughes
Professor of Korean Studies

Elizabeth Hutchinson
Associate Professor of Art History, Barnard 
View Profile

George Lewis
Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Department of Music
View Profile

Ana Paulina Lee
Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures
View Profile

Natasha Lightfoot
Associate Professor of History

Celia Naylor
Associate Professor, Department of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College
View Profile

Pablo Piccato
Professor, Department of History; Director, Institute of Latin American Studies
View Profile

Caterina Pizzigoni
Assistant Professor, Department of History
View Profile

Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Professor, Department of Anthropology
View Profile

Samuel Roberts
Associate Professor, Department of History
View Profile

Joseph Slaughter
Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
View Profile

Gray Tuttle
Leila Hadley Luce Associate Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies

Christopher Washburne
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnomusicology
View Profile

Major in Ethnicity and Race Studies

The requirements for this program were modified on March 2022. Students who declared this program before this date should contact the director of undergraduate studies for the department in order to confirm their correct course of study.

The major in ethnicity and race studies consists of a minimum of 27 points. All majors are required to take three core courses as listed below:

Points
Core Courses
1.
CSER UN1010INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STUDIES (or)4.00
2.
CSER UN3928COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION4.00
OR
CSER UN3942RACE AND RACISMS4.00
3.
CSER UN3919MODES OF INQUIRY4.00
Specialization
All majors will select one of the areas of specialization listed below from which to complete their remaining coursework:
Asian American studies
Comparative ethnic studies
Latino/a studies
Native American/Indigenous studies
Individualized courses of study
Majors who elect NOT to follow the Honors track must complete at least five CSER elective courses, in consultation with their major adviser, within their area of specialization. At least one of these electives must be a writing-intensive seminar (3000 or above level courses must be chosen within the department). Majors who elect to follow the Honors track must complete at least four CSER elective courses, in consultation with their major adviser, within their area of specialization.
Honors
In lieu of a fifth elective, Honors majors are required to enroll in the following course in the spring semester of their senior year, during which they are required to write a thesis:
CSER UN3990SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR4
Honors majors are required to present their senior essays at the annual undergraduate symposium in April. Students may fulfill this option in one of the following two ways:
1. By matriculating in the Senior Thesis course and writing the thesis under the supervision of the course faculty.
2. By taking an additional 4-point seminar where a major paper is required and further developing the paper into a thesis length work (minimum of 30 pages) under the supervision of a CSER faculty member.
Language Courses
- One of the following is highly recommended, although not required for the major:
- One course beyond the intermediate-level in language pertinent to the student's focus
- An introductory course in a language other than that used to fulfill the degree requirements, but that is pertinent to the student's focus
- A linguistics or other course that critically engages language
- An outside language and study abroad programs that include an emphasis on language acquisition

Concentration in Ethnicity and Race Studies

The requirements for this program were modified on March 2022. Students who declared this program before this date should contact the director of undergraduate studies for the department in order to confirm their correct course of study.

The concentration in ethnicity and race studies requires a minimum of 19 points. Students take two core courses (may choose between CSER UN1010 and CSER UN1040) and four elective courses, one of which must be a seminar:

Points
Core Courses
The concentration in ethnicity and race studies requires a minimum of 19 points. All students who choose a concentration are required to take two core course as listed below:
1.
CSER UN1010INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STUDIES (or)4
2.
CSER UN3928COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION4
OR
CSER UN3942RACE AND RACISMS4
Specialization
Students must complete at least four courses, in consultation with their major adviser, in one of the following areas of specialization. At least one of the elective courses must be a seminar.
Asian American studies
Comparative ethnic studies
Latino/a studies
Native American/Indigenous studies
Individualized courses of study

Fall 2023

Ethnicity and Race Studies

CSER UN1010 INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STUDIES. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Students MUST register for a Discussion Section.

Introduction to the field of comparative ethnic studies

Fall 2023: CSER UN1010
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 1010 001/10947 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
602 Northwest Corner
Bahia Munem 4.00 24/30

CSER UN1040 CRIT APPRO-STUDY OF ETH & RACE. 3.00 points.

This course provides an introduction to central approaches and concepts animating the investigation of race and ethnicity. We will not treat either of these categories of difference as a given, nor as separable from other axes of social difference. Rather, we will apply an interdisciplinary and intersectional framework to illuminate how these concepts have come to emerge and cohere within a number of familiar and less familiar socio-cultural and historical contexts. We will consider how racial and ethnic differentiation as fraught but powerful processes have bolstered global labor regimes and imperial expansion projects; parsed, managed, and regulated populations; governed sexed and gendered logics of subject and social formation; and finally, opened and constrained axes of self-understanding, political organization, and social belonging. Special attention will be given to broadening students understanding of racial and ethnic differentiation beyond examinations of identity. Taken together, theoretical and empirical readings, discussions, and outside film screenings will prepare students for further coursework in race and ethnic studies, as well as fields such as literary studies, women’s studies, history, sociology, and anthropology

Fall 2023: CSER UN1040
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 1040 001/10927 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
509 Knox Hall
Jennifer Lee 3.00 19/22

CSER UN1111 INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STDIES DS. 0.00 points.

CSER UN3490 POST 9/11 IMMIGRATION POLICIES. 4.00 points.

Since September 11, 2001, there has been an avalanche of immigration enforcement policies and initiatives proposed or implemented under the guise of national security. This course will analyze the domino effect of the Patriot Act, the Absconder Initiative, Special Registration, the Real I.D. Act, border security including the building of the 700-mile fence along the U.S./Mexico border, Secured Communities Act-that requires the cooperation of state and local authorities in immigration enforcement, the challenge to birthright citizenship, and now the congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization. Have these policies been effective in combating the war on terrorism and promoting national security? Who stands to benefit from these enforcement strategies? Do immigrant communities feel safer in the U.S.? How have states joined the federal bandwagon of immigration enforcement or created solutions to an inflexible, broken immigration system?

Fall 2023: CSER UN3490
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3490 001/10952 Th 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Elizabeth OuYang 4.00 21/22

CSER UN3521 CULTURES OF THE US–MEXICO BORDERLANDS. 4.00 points.

In recent years, the US has built a multi-billion-dollar wall along the Mexican border. While the wall may appear to be an anomaly, it rests on longstanding legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. In this seminar, we will look at these legacies through the eyes of Natives, Latinxs, whites, and others who have lived in the US­­–Mexico borderlands. Within the confines of literature, we will read novelists like Willa Cather, playwrights like Cherríe Moraga, and poets like Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo). Meanwhile, across the more capacious category of culture, we will engage with promoters who encouraged whites to claim homesteads, periodistas who emboldened Latinxs to protect pueblos, and leaders who helped Natives fight for sovereignty. By blending literary studies and ethnic studies, we will gain a thorough grasp of the territories that have taken shape since the US–Mexico War (1846–48), especially the ones that we currently call Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. From these concrete contexts, we will ask and answer more abstract questions: What are borders—are they physical boundaries, or are they psychosocial conditions? Similarly, what are nations—are they stable and homogeneous groups, or are they flexible and diverse communities? Ultimately, what are human beings—can they be branded as illegal aliens, or do they have inalienable rights? During the semester, we will work through these questions both collectively and individually: to enrich our in-class discussions, each student will complete a four- to five-page close-reading essay, a fourteen- or fifteen-page research essay, and a multimedia borderlands map

Fall 2023: CSER UN3521
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3521 001/18562 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Schiff Earl Hall
Carlos Nugent 4.00 16/18

CSER UN3919 MODES OF INQUIRY. 4.00 points.

Corequisites: CSER UN3921
Corequisites: CSER UN3921 This class, a combination of a seminar and a workshop, will prepare students to conduct, write up, and present original research. It has several aims and goals. First, the course introduces students to a variety of ways of thinking about knowledge as well as to specific ways of knowing and making arguments key to humanistic and social science fields. Second, this seminar asks students to think critically about the approaches they employ in pursuing their research. The course will culminate in a semester project, not a fully executed research project, but rather an 8-10 page proposal for research that will articulate a question, provide basic background on the context that this question is situated in, sketch preliminary directions and plot out a detailed methodological plan for answering this question. Students will be strongly encouraged to think of this proposal as related to their thesis or senior project. Over the course of the semester, students will also produce several short exercises to experiment with research techniques and genres of writing

Fall 2023: CSER UN3919
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3919 001/10929 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Sayantani DasGupta 4.00 11/18

CSER UN3913 VIDEO AS INQUIRY. 4.00 points.

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with visual production, particularly video production, as a mode of inquiry to explore questions related to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and other forms of social hierarchy and difference. The class will include readings in visual production as a mode of inquiry and on the basic craft of video production in various genres (fiction, documentary, and experimental). As part of the course, students will produce a video short and complete it by semester's end

Fall 2023: CSER UN3913
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3913 001/18668 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Frances Negron-Muntaner 4.00 15/15

CSER UN3922 RACE&REPRESENTATION IN ASIAN AMER CINEMA. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 22.

This seminar focuses on the critical analysis of Asian representation and participation in Hollywood by taking a look at how mainstream American cinema continues to essentialize the Asian and how Asian American filmmakers have responded to Hollywood Orientalist stereotypes. We will analyze various issues confronting the Asian American, including yellowface, white patriarchy, male and female stereotypes, the “model minority” myth, depictions of “Chinatowns,” panethnicity, the changing political interpretations of the term Asian American throughout American history, gender and sexuality, and cultural hegemonies and privileging within the Asian community

CSER UN3926 LATIN MUSIC AND IDENTITY. 4.00 points.

Latin music has had a historically strained relationship with mainstream music tastes, exploding in occasional boom periods, and receding into invisibility in others. What if this were true because it is a space for hybrid construction of identity that directly reflects a mixture of traditions across racial lines in Latin America? This course will investigate Latin musics transgression of binary views of race in Anglo-American society, even as it directly affects the development of pop music in America. From New Orleans jazz to Texas corridos, salsa, rock, and reggaeton, Latin music acts as both as a soundtrack and a structural blueprint for the 21st centurys multicultural experiment. There will be a strong focus on studying Latin musics political economy, and investigating the story it tells about migration and globalization

Fall 2023: CSER UN3926
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3926 001/10946 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Edward Morales 4.00 23/22

CSER UN3928 COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Enrollment limited to 22.

Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructors permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents

Fall 2023: CSER UN3928
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3928 001/10928 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
304 Hamilton Hall
Manan Ahmed 4.00 19/20
Spring 2024: CSER UN3928
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3928 001/13107 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Karl Jacoby 4.00 20/22

CSER UN3964 Maya Guatemala-Neoliberalism & Resistance. 4.00 points.

Guatemala’s recurrent history of Indigenous genocide is closely linked to U.S. interventions. Meanwhile, Maya organizing in Guatemala has helped spearhead Indigenous political visibility globally. This course examines socio-historical dynamics that have shaped Indigenous Guatemala to better understand current crises like migration and postwar violence. We study settler colonialism; Maya land dispossession and labor exploitation; U.S. corporate imperialism via banana republics; Maya autonomy efforts; Maya intellectuals, populist organizing, and the guerrilla revolutionary movement; racism and postwar multiculturalism; genocidal military counterinsurgency; sexual violence and femicide; the social impacts of Guatemalan and U.S. Catholicism and Evangelicalism; postwar neoliberal restructuring; and the rise of the narco-state and resource extraction on Indigenous territories. We will look at contemporary postwar issues of political disillusionment, militarized “war by other means,” conflicts between Indigenous communities and environmental conservationists, gender and the recovery of Indigenous law and anti-GMO organizing involving Native seed banks. We pay special attention to Indigenous political action as resistance to highly oppressive regimes of terror

CSER GU4000 INTRO TO AMERICAN STUDIES. 3 points.

See department for course description

CSER GU4360 AMER DIVA:RACE,GDNDR&PERFMNC. 4.00 points.

What makes a diva a diva? How have divas shaped and challenged our ideas about American culture, performance, race, space, and capital during the last century? This seminar explores the central role of the diva—the celebrated, iconic, and supremely skilled female performer—in the fashioning and re-imagining of racial, gendered, sexual, national, temporal, and aesthetic categories in American culture. Students in this course will theorize the cultural function and constitutive aspects of the diva and will analyze particular performances of a range of American divas from the 20th and 21st centuries and their respective roles in (re)defining American popular culture

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology

EEEB GU4321 HUM NATURE:DNA,RACE & IDENTITY. 4.00 points.

The course focuses on human identity, beginning with the individual and progressing to communal and global viewpoints using a framework of perspectives from biology, genetics, medicine, psychiatry, religion and the law

Spring 2024

Ethnicity and Race Studies

CSER UN3303 Whiteness, Sentiment and Political Belonging. 4.00 points.

Scholars of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race have long been preoccupied with the terms, categories, and processes through which the United States has excluded or qualified the citizenship of particular groups, including women, immigrants, indigenous nations, and descendants of enslaved Africans. Yet it has spent less time interrogating the unqualified content of Americanness, and the work that the imagination of a "default" American identity does in contemporary political life. This seminar introduces students to this problem through an unspoken racial dimension of American political belonging -- the presumed whiteness of ideal American citizens. Readings drawn from several disciplinary traditions, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, history, and journalism, will ground students in the course's key concepts, including racial markedness, the history of racialization, and public sentiment. Students will mobilize these tools to analyze several cases that rendered white sentiment explicit in politically efficacious ways, including the "panic" incited by the destabilization of race-based residential segregation, the "paranoia" of conspiracy theorists, the "sympathy" associated with natural disasters, and the "resentment" or "rage" associated with the loss of racial privileges

Spring 2024: CSER UN3303
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3303 001/13126 Th 10:10am - 12:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Catherine Fennell 4.00 15/15

CSER UN3522 War, Gender & Migration. 4.00 points.

What are the lived experiences and historical contexts of war? How are war and peace gendered and racialized? How do war and conflict impact and complicate belonging and influence the movement of people across borders and boundaries? With these questions in mind, this course examines the dynamics of war and its aftermath through a complex intersectional lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, and nation. We will also consider how war and conflict lead to forced migration. Most regions of the world are currently or have been, immersed in war and conflict. In order to better understand how and why wars are fomented and conflicts occur, we will examine U.S. wars as well as transnational conflicts and perspectives, while considering how the construction of “the enemy” is gendered and racialized. We will utilize readings from various fields of study to examine historical processes of war, conflict, and displacement. We will combine diverse texts and theoretical engagements, lectures, documentary films, discussions, and class-based activities to interrogate war and notions of subjectivity, alterity, and belonging across time, place, and space

Spring 2024: CSER UN3522
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3522 001/17041 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Bahia Munem 4.00 16/15

CSER UN3701 LATINX RACIAL IDENTITY & CULTURAL PRODUCTION. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 22.

The course will investigate the impact of racial identity among Latinx in the U.S. on cultural production of Latinos in literature, media, politics and film. The seminar will consider the impact of bilingualism, shifting racial identification, and the viability of monolithic terms like Latinx. We will see how the construction of Latinx racial identity affects acculturation in the U.S., with particular attention to hybrid identities and the centering of black and indigenous cultures. Examples will be drawn from different Latinx ethnicities from the Caribbean, Mexico and the rest of Latin America

Spring 2024: CSER UN3701
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3701 001/13111  
Edward Morales 4.00 15/22

CSER UN3821 Archives of Possibility. 4.00 points.

In part due to the rise of social and political movements challenging and reshaping colonial narratives about the past, the emergence of digital technologies, and unprecedented access to information, attention to archives has increased over the last decades. This course aims to familiarize students with theories, histories, and practices of archival-building as a mode of knowledge production and to explore questions regarding the relationship between archives and power. The course also examines how and under what conditions archives open up new possibilities by producing and circulating marginalized knowledge, narratives, and perspectives; promotes archival research, and familiarizes students with the basics of preservation in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As part of the course, students will research Columbia's archives and build their own as part of this process

Spring 2024: CSER UN3821
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3821 001/17756 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Frances Negron-Muntaner 4.00 16/12

CSER UN3905 ASIAN AMERICAN & PSYCH OF RACE. 4.00 points.

This seminar provides an introduction to mental health issues for Asian Americans. In particular, it focuses on the psychology of Asian Americans as racial/ethnic minorities in the United States by exploring a number of key concepts: immigration, racialization, prejudice, family, identity, pathology, and loss. We will examine the development of identity in relation to self, family, college, and society. Quantitative investigation, qualitative research, psychology theories of multiculturalism, and Asian American literature will also be integrated into the course

Spring 2024: CSER UN3905
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3905 001/13123 T 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Motoni Katayama 4.00 13/15

CSER UN3928 COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Enrollment limited to 22.

Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructors permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents

Fall 2023: CSER UN3928
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3928 001/10928 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
304 Hamilton Hall
Manan Ahmed 4.00 19/20
Spring 2024: CSER UN3928
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3928 001/13107 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Karl Jacoby 4.00 20/22

CSER UN3940 COMP STUDY OF CONSTITUTNL CHAL. 4.00 points.

This course will examine how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Focus will be on the role that race, citizenship, capitalism/labor, property, and ownership played in the court decision in the context of the historical, social, and political conditions existing at the time. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government sanctioned segregation, the struggle for reparations for descendants of slavery, and Japanese Americans during World War II

Spring 2024: CSER UN3940
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3940 001/13117 Th 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Elizabeth OuYang 4.00 17/22

CSER UN3990 SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR. 4.00 points.

The Senior Project Seminar will focus primarily on developing students’ ideas for their research projects while charting their research goals. The course is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete a senior thesis paper or creative project. An important component of the seminar is the completion of original and independent student research. The seminar provides students a forum in which to discuss their work with both the instructor and their peers. The professor, who facilitates the colloquium, will also provide students with additional academic support through seminar presentations, one-on-one meetings, and classroom exercises; supplementary to the feedback they receive from their individual faculty advisors. The course is divided into three main parts: 1.) researching and producing a senior project thesis; 2.) the submission of coursework throughout the spring semester that help lead to a successful completed project; 3.) and an oral presentation showcasing one’s research to those in and beyond the CSER community at the end of the academic year. This course is reserved for seniors who are completing a CSER senior project and who have successfully completed Modes of Inquiry in either their junior or senior year

Spring 2024: CSER UN3990
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3990 001/13109 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Darius Echeverria 4.00 9/10

CSER GU4004 Data, Race, Power and Justice. 4.00 points.

For more than a century, scientists, policy makers, law enforcement, and government agencies have collected, curated and analyzed data about people in order to make impactful decisions. This practice has exploded along with the computational power available to these agents. Those who design and deploy data collection, predictive analytics, and autonomous and intelligent decision-making systems claim that these technologies will remove problematic biases from consequential decisions. They aim to put a rational and objective foundation based on numbers and observations made by non-human sensors in the management of public life and to equip experts with insights that, they believe, will translate into better outcomes (health, economic, educational, judicial) for all. But these dreams and their pursuit through technology are as problematic as they are enticing. Throughout American history, data has often been used to oppress minoritized communities, manage populations, and institutionalize, rationalize, and naturalize systems of racial violence. The impersonality of data, the same quality that makes it useful, can silence voices and displace entire ways of knowing the world

Spring 2024: CSER GU4004
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 4004 001/13135 F 10:10am - 12:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Brian Luna Lucero 4.00 14/22

CSER GU4005 Abolition: Theory and Practice. 4.00 points.

This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenthand nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first half of the class, we will consider abolition in England and its colonies, Haiti, Cuba, and the U.S. In so doing we will examine both primary sources from abolitionist print culture (narratives by fugitives from slavery, speeches, poems, and polemical tracts), as well as secondary sources by historians, literary critics, and political theorists. In the second half, we will likewise read writing by activists (some incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and some not) alongside journalism and scholarship from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral studies. Across both periods, Black writers will take up the bulk of our attention

Spring 2024: CSER GU4005
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 4005 001/13125 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
420 Hamilton Hall
Matthew Sandler 4.00 12/18

CSER GU4350 CINEMA OF SUBVERSION. 4.00 points.

Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky said that “the artist has no right to an idea in which he is not socially committed.” Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas and Spanish-born Octavio Getino postulated an alternative cinema that would spur spectators to political action. In this course we will ask the question: How do authoritarian governments influence the arts, and how do artists respond? We will study how socially committed filmmakers have subverted and redefined cinema aesthetics to challenge authoritarianism and repression. In addition, we will look at how some filmmakers respond to institutional oppression, such as poverty and corruption, even within so-called “free” societies. The focus is on contemporary filmmakers but will also include earlier classics of world cinema to provide historical perspective. The course will discuss these topics, among others: What is authoritarianism, what is totalitarianism, and what are the tools of repression within authoritarian/totalitarian societies? What is Third Cinema, and how does it represent and challenge authoritarianism? How does film navigate the opposition of censorship, propaganda and truth? How do filmmakers respond to repressive laws concerning gender and sexual orientation? How do they deal with violence and trauma? How are memories of repressive regimes reflected in the psyche of modern cinema? And finally, what do we learn about authority, artistic vision, and about ourselves when we watch these films?

Spring 2024: CSER GU4350
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 4350 001/13114 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
315 Hamilton Hall
Eric Gamalinda 4.00 14/22

CSER GR5001 METHODS IN AMERICAN STUDIES. 4.00 points.

Conceived in the 1920’s and 1930’s, American Studies sought to make a synoptic account of the “national character.” Since the 1960’s, the field has turned towards a focus on various forms of inequality as the dark side of American exceptionalism. This course surveys the development of the field’s current preoccupations, covering a range of periods, regions, groups, and cultural practices that present productive problems for generalizations about U.S. identity. We begin with the first academic movement in American Studies, the myth and symbol school—and think through its growth in the context of post-WWII funding for higher education. We then move on to a series of debates centered at intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We’ll close by examining the historical background of protest movements built around the identitarian concerns about rape culture and mass incarceration

HIST UN1512 The Battle for North America: An Indigenous History of the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. 4.00 points.

This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America. We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples. You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies. Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century. This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence. Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history

Spring 2024: HIST UN1512
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
HIST 1512 001/11676 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
303 Hamilton Hall
Michael Witgen 4.00 17/35

HIST UN3501 Indians and Empires in North America. 4.00 points.

In this course you will be asked to re-think American history. That is, we will approach the history of America as a continental history. This will require that we think of North America as a New World space, a place that was inhabited and occupied by indigenous peoples, and then remade by the arrival and settlement of Europeans. You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, as well as colonial and Euro-American. This approach to the study of North American history is designed to challenge the epistemology and literature of the history of colonization and American expansion, which displaces Native peoples from the central narrative of American history by placing them at the physical margins of colonial and national development. Instead we will explore the intersection and integration of indigenous and Euro-American national identity and national space in North America and trace their co-evolution from first contact through the early nineteenth century

Spring 2024: HIST UN3501
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
HIST 3501 001/14731 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
402 International Affairs Bldg
Michael Witgen 4.00 10/15

CPLS GU4325 Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and Anti-Racisms. 3.00 points.

In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions? Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices. This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experimentation to public health xenophobic fear mongering. The second half of the semester will be dedicated to examining medical and grassroots anti-racist practices: from the free health clinics and hospital takeovers of the Black Panther and Young Lords Parties, to environmental activism in Flint and the Sioux Rock Reservation to antiracist AIDS and COVID activism

Spring 2024: CPLS GU4325
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLS 4325 001/10663 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Sayantani DasGupta 3.00 20/20

SOCI GR6068 Reckoning with Asian America. 4.00 points.

It took the mass murder of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 to draw national attention to what Asian Americans have been warning about since the wake of Covid-19: a surge in anti-Asian violence and hate. Since the onset of the coronavirus, 1 in 8 Asian American adults experienced a hate incident, and 1 in 7 Asian American women worry all the time about being victimized, reflecting an under-recognized legacy of anti-Asian violence, bigotry, misogyny, and discrimination in the United States that dates back more than 150 years. Drawing on research and readings from the social sciences, this course links the past to the present in order to understand this legacy, and how it continues to affect Asian Americans today

Spring 2024: SOCI GR6068
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
SOCI 6068 001/12636 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
509 Knox Hall
Jennifer Lee 4.00 13/15