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James Shapiro leads participants through the pair of plays that the Public Theater will stage this summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This series of classes will offer insights into the language, style and performance histories of the plays, with the goal of preparing theatergoers to get the most out of seeing these productions. June...

The world is not usually imagined for the benefit of women. What can feminist science fiction tell us about these oppressive arrangements and how the world might be otherwise? What makes a work of science fiction feminist? From utopia to dystopia, satire to space opera, in what ways does science fiction hold up a mirror to difficult realties?...

Memoirists write their personal stories in a way that appeals to the emotions and experiences of their readers. Jewish memoirists Esther Amini, Angela Himsel, and Ilan Stavans will sit down with author Marcia Butler to talk about how they use the memoir format to express their identity and history.

What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding...

In writing The Idiot,a novel dear to his own heart, Dostoevsky set about to depict a truly good man. As he asks whether goodness can survive in the world and/or a novel, Dostoevsky also addresses traditional assumptions about marriage, family life, the “woman question,” Russian identity, health, sickness, love and death. To celebrate the 150th...

Join charismatic actor and teacher Leo Schaff as he breathes life into Shakespeare’s words, acting out portions of the play and offering illuminating insights into the Bard’s language, plot lines, historical context and eternal relevance, all with a generous sense of humor. The Tempest - January 8 The magic hand of Prospero guides us through...

Art was anything but peripheral to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” of nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third...

Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western...

How do numbers relate to the world? What insights can we derive from data? How do we separate signal from noise? This course is an introduction to statistical thinking and its applications to data analysis at a level accessible to a broad audience with no prior statistical background.  We’ll learn and make intuitive the fundamental methods...

Food, Power and Control: How our obsession with food is a sign of our growing sense of powerlessness Our lives can sometimes become tasteless, lacking in meaning.  We search for novelty and innovation and have forgotten about depth and context. Our choices in food are just one of the many ways that we express our yearning for something with...

Three Seminars on Nabokov’s Lolita First Seminar: If Lolita excites me, should I feel bad? We may as well admit it: Nabokov’s Lolita is designed to arouse our desire.  But how exactly does it work?  How does Nabokov encourage readers to take pleasure in Humbert Humbert’s pedophilic experiences even if they don’t share his perversity?...

Join Colm Tóibín, celebrated author of Brooklyn and professor at Columbia University, for a course on three Irish writers and three American writers. The divided self and the delighted eye—this course explores the idea of internal tension in a text, literature in which there is an argument enfolding, an argument that animates the text; as well...

In the past few decades, Georges Bataille has become something of a dirty secret on American bookshelves. Much of his notoriety is due to his erotic novel Story of The Eye, a work where overt symbolism is interwoven with graphic sexuality. His late arrival on the American literary scene and his unique prose make it almost surprising to learn that he...

Join James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, for a seminar on Shakespeare’s long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” both of which he composed during a plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, and “A Lover’s...