Core Curriculum Office
More detailed information about Columbia’s Core Curriculum including its history.
Bulletin/Catalog
View department and course descriptions online.
Major Advising
Learn more about a specific major or compare different majors in a variety of ways.
Columbia: An Introduction
A short film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ric Burns, CC ‘78, featuring interviews with Columbia students, faculty and alumni.
The Beginning
A course of study rooted in the celebrated Core Curriculum, a Columbia tradition for nearly a century: A series of small, discussion-based seminars exploring foundational texts, enduring documents and exemplary experiments in literature, philosophy, history, music, art, and science. Rigorous training in the new century’s essential skills: analysis, argument, quantitative reasoning, logical inference and creative thinking. A community of shared inquiry that ranges over intellectual disciplines, historical eras, cultural contexts and contemporary concerns – and connects generations of Columbia students with each other. Real school spirit.
The Core Classes
- Contemporary Civilization
- Literature Humanities
- Art Humanities
- Music Humanities
- Frontiers of Science
- Foreign Language
- Major Cultures
- Physical Education
- Science
- University Writing
Beyond The Core
Advanced study in dozens of major fields. Independent or guided research in the University’s many research centers and institutes, including the Center for the Study of Human Rights, the Committee on Global Thought, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Interdisciplinary and interdepartmental majors and concentrations that combine coursework in two or more areas of study. Special and combined degree programs tailored to students’ specific academic interests and long-term professional goals. Unparalleled opportunity.
Selected Books
“Shakespeare’s overwhelming study of the tragedy of old age and the politics of the family has held the stage continuously since it’s first performance in 1606. In recent years it has rivaled Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as the most frequently produced and intensely studied of Shakespere’s tragedies; its analysis of the disintegration of the closest family ties, the resentment and violence underlying the most intimate relationships, has seemed to speak to peculiarly modern concerns.”
King Lear, Edited by Stephen Orgel
The Pelican Shakesperare
“Here is a book that was written over fifteen hundred years ago by a mystic in North Africa. Yet to those who have ears to hear, it has a great deal to say to many of us who are not mystics today, in American... The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints.... The City of God, for those who can understand it, contains the secret of death and life, war and peace, hell and heaven.” -- Thomas Merton
City of God, By Saint Augustine
Penguin Classics
“Each new generation is bound to produce new translations. [Lattimore] has done better with nobility, as well as with accuracy, than any other modern verse translator. In our age we do not often find a fine scholar who is also a genuine poet and who takes the greatest pains over the work of translation.” -- Hugh Lloyd-Jones, New York Review of Books
The Illiad of Homer, Translated by Richard Lattimore
University Of Chicago Press