Liberal Arts Intensive

Sunday, June 23 – Saturday, June 29, 2013

One Week Coed Program, Residential and Commuter Options

Students choose one class for the duration of the 1-week program to be attended 9:30 am - 12:30 pm, Monday through Friday. Afternoons are an opportunity to complete assignments and engage in on and off campus activities, including Broadway shows, baseball games, dance classes, and so much more! 

2013 Courses:

Architecture

NEW YORK CITY DESIGN INTENSIVE

Diana Martinez

In this introduction to the many scales of design in New York City, we will learn from practicing designers about their work through a series of talks, tours of design studios, and visits to museums and sites in the city. This course will introduce a range of design – including graphic design, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Students will keep a design journal and will be required to make daily entries on the course blog.

URBAN ECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABILITY

Sevin Yildiz

New York City is a tremendously rich and varied ecology that is also a thriving metropolis. This intensive program will focus on a case study that includes an Urban Site, as well as a Building. Students will learn how each case study is influenced and defined by the physical components of site or topology (man made vs. natural) and the sustainable materials that have been used, as well as the more nuanced relationships of culture, policy, human use, and psychology that affect the understanding and formation of those physical components. Case study topics may include: Central Park, neighborhood urban parks and gardens, urban medians and bicycle lanes, The High Line and Roof Gardens, the Diana Center, the Times Building, Lincoln Center, and the Solarium. Students will be introduced to the agencies that are making and affecting the use of sustainable methods and materials. For example: The Urban Green Council, Building Green, and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene - Fit City Initiative. 

Art History

MEDIEVAL ART IN MANHATTAN

Lauren Mancia

From the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters, to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, to Columbia's own Rare Book and Manuscript LIbrary, New York hassome of the greatest medieval art outside of Europe. Spend a week learning about the European Middle Ages through the lens of its art. The majority of the classes will be conducted in the galleries of New York museums: we will learn about medieval architecture inside of a gothic cathedral and about medieval manuscripts while handling actual illuminated books from the Middle Ages. By the end of the class, students will gain familiarity with the methodology of art historical inquiry and the culture of the Middle Ages; they will also become experts on some of the great artifacts that medieval people left behind, in the classrooms of some of the great cultural institutions of Manhattan. 

History

MODERNIST NEW YORK CITY 

Joanna Scutts

What makes a city, a poem, or a painting ‘modern’? This course will explore New York’s vibrant literature, art, film and music during the early twentieth century, an era of fast-paced and profound cultural change. We will read fiction and poetry by writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance; we will visit the sites that inspired them and study the art and architecture of the period through visits to MoMA and to the Studio Museum in Harlem. Our readings will present a spectrum of modern urban experience, from the thrills of new technology, architecture, and economic opportunity to the fears of alienation, poverty, and violence. Together we will explore how the culture of New York City responded to the challenges of a rapidly modernizing world—and how the city, in turn, became the quintessential modern environment.

Law

SCIENCE AND THE LAW (NEW!) 

Frederic Stark 

Science and Law often appear to be fundamentally different processes. Science is based on collaboration - on researchers around the world publishing their work in open journals for all to share and use. Science also develops incrementally, as the new builds bit by bit upon the old. law and the legal system, on the other hand, are based on confrontation - on two opponents presenting their cases and arguments, with one or the other ultimately being declared the "winner." Also, unlike scientific research, legal proceedings are expected to produce definitive answers within markedly brief time spans. At times, however, the two cross paths, when a judge or jury is asked to rule on a case in which the issues at hand are questions of science and technology. What should be taught in high school science classes? What possible uses of a new technology should be permitted or prohibited? At what point does emerging scientific evidence of potential harm warrant governmental restriction on the activities of private enterprise? In this course, we will examine landmark legal cases that have addressed these very issues. We will also compare the ways in which science and technical knowledge create situations that fall outside existing legal principles and precedents. 

Literature

Sharon Fulton

DISCOVERING OLD NEW YORK
This course digs into New York City’s rich history by exploring novels, autobiographical narratives, and short sketches by some of the most renowned writers of the past: Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others. In addition to reading selections in which these authors paint New York City from 1840's through the Gilded Age, we will watch films, go on walking tours, and visit The New York Tenement museum. The course offers a panorama of New York City's history, and it considers the variety of human experience that the city's literature captures. 

Music

MUSIC AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN NEW YORK CITY (NEW!)

Marti Newland

How does music inform cultural identity and how does cultural identity inform music? This course works to answer this question using the cultural diversity of the New York City population as our guide. We will listen to recorded music including soundtracks of films set in New York, top 40 hits, classical, jazz, world music, and indie recordings affiliated with New York. We will also attend live musical performances at outdoor concerts, as well as concert hall and small indoor venue performances throughout Manhattan. Discussing these listening activities alongside our observations of musicians and their audiences, we will draw on scholarship about cultural identity in order to investigate how music in New York City both reinforces and destabilizes cultural identity. It is not necessary to be a musician in order to participate in this course.

Psychology

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER DIFFERENCE (NEW!)

Judy Jarvis 

Gender and sex difference research is one of the most popular fields in psychology. Psychologists seek to measure how women and men are different on every imaginable characteristic: aggression, obedience, and aptitude at math, to name a few. However, there is significant evidence to indicate that women and men are actually much more alike than different and that much gender difference research is biased towards finding differences, even if they don't exist. In this interactive class, we will act as psychological sleuths: reading psychology studies on gender and sex difference, debating methods and findings, doing our own observational research, and proposing our own studies in small groups. We will also take a field trip to one or two art museums to explore how some of the course's themes (such as the naturalness of gender and real or imagined differences between the sexes) also emerge in art. 

Science

SCIENCE AND THE LAW (NEW!) 

Frederic Stark 

Science and Law often appear to be fundamentally different processes. Science is based on collaboration - on researchers around the world publishing their work in open journals for all to share and use. Science also develops incrementally, as the new builds bit by bit upon the old. law and the legal system, on the other hand, are based on confrontation - on two opponents presenting their cases and arguments, with one or the other ultimately being declared the "winner." Also, unlike scientific research, legal proceedings are expected to produce definitive answers within markedly brief time spans. At times, however, the two cross paths, when a judge or jury is asked to rule on a case in which the issues at hand are questions of science and technology. What should be taught in high school science classes? What possible uses of a new technology should be permitted or prohibited? At what point does emerging scientific evidence of potential harm warrant governmental restriction on the activities of private enterprise? In this course, we will examine landmark legal cases that have addressed these very issues. We will also compare the ways in which science and technical knowledge create situations that fall outside existing legal principles and precedents. 

Theatre

THEATRE IN THE CITY

Julie Bleha

This course explores the richly diverse theatrical worlds of New York City, focusing on two significant theatrical elements: text and environment. We will look at the city as both the subject of drama and as an influence in producing and staging practices, exploring the idea of the city itself as character and performance space. We will read several plays, attend a performance, and visit with working theatre artists. The class will study the context and genesis of the shows we see and also critique them. Thus, by the week's end, we will have experienced theatre from the perspective of practitioner, audience member, scholar and critic.

ON BROADWAY: AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER IN NEW YORK CITY (NEW!)

Kristy Riggs 

This course traces the evolution of American musical theater throughout the twentieth and into the twnty-first centuries. We will take an in-depth look at how the elements of the musical from casting to choreography work together to form the aesthetic spectacle of musical theater. Topics include the marketing and consumerism of musical theater in New York City, the use of media and technology on the stage, and the significance of musical theater as a powerful representation of American and New York identity. During class sessions, students will sing and act out scenes, discuss primary sources and video clips, and visit with guest performers. Our class will take a backstage tour of a theater, visit the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and attend a live Broadway performance. 

Urban Studies

UNDERSTANDING THE CITY: ANALYZING NY NEIGHBORHOODS AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Elizabeth Pillsbury

In this course we will explore New York City neighborhoods to gain a better understanding of how cities operate.  We will use the urban landscape as our classroom, discussing the works of urban planners, theorists and fiction writers alongside historical newspaper articles and maps to examine how New York functions today and in the past.  In explorations ranging from Barnard’s Campus to the Lower East Side, we will ask what factors contribute to a neighborhood’s vitality.  What makes certain parks and street corners more vibrant or more dangerous than others?  We will think historically about urban planning decisions, asking why some buildings gain historic protection while others are torn down, and why certain renewal efforts succeed and others fail miserably. How and why are services and social benefits distributed unequally in the city? And finally, we will ask: what would it mean to build a more sustainable and equitable city? 

Writing

DOCUMENTING THE PRESENT: THE ART OF ATTENTION

Sara Marcus

What does it mean to write about ourselves—or not to write about ourselves? “I imagine,” Joan Didion writes, “that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. . . . My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” During our week together, we will document the world around us and, in so doing, create records of our personal experiences. We will read poems, essays, and fiction; we will listen to music, to noise, and to silence; we will visit museums and the Barnard zine archive; we will write every day. At the end of the week, students will make their own books, telling stories of their New York summer lives.