Global Core Requirement

Committee on Global Core 

globalcore@columbia.edu

General Information, Academic Affairs
cc-academic@columbia.edu 

Global Core Requirement Website

The Global Core requirement asks students to engage directly with the variety of civilizations and the diversity of traditions that, along with the West, have formed the world and continue to interact in it today. Courses in the Global Core typically explore the cultures of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East in an historical context. These courses are organized around a set of primary materials produced in these traditions and may draw from texts or other forms of media, as well as from oral sources or performance, broadly defined.

Global Core courses fall into two categories, and can be, on occasion, a hybrid of the two types: those with a comparative, multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary focus on specific cultures or civilizations, tracing their existence across a significant span of time, and may include Europe and/or the U.S.; and those that address a common theme or set of analytic questions comparatively (and may include Europe and the U.S.). The Global Core requirement consists of courses that examine areas not the primary focus of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization and that, like other Core courses, are broadly introductory, interdisciplinary, and temporally and/or spatially expansive.