Susan Pedersen

Took her in 2019, hands down the best CC prof. ever (Professor Thomas Dodman was also fantastic). I'm an introvert and it has always been stressful for me to participate in a small group setting but Prof. Pedersen was absolutely supportive and she made me feel like my view matters. I wasn't very good at writing papers either but her feedback helped me improve a lot both in terms of grades and formulating a philosophical argument as well. Would 100% recommend.

Professor Pedersen is the best professor I have ever had. Not only is she one of Columbia's most eminent faculty members, but she's also a devoted teacher who really cares about her students. She had me worried on the first day of class when she advised that we drop if we had writer's block, but when I was having trouble on my essays she would meet with me with just a few hours notice. I would take anything I could with her. Most everyone (everyone?) in the class took it because they had some personal connection to Ireland already. All that being said, this was not necessarily my favorite course at Columbia. It is basically a survey course taught as a seminar, so it favored breadth over depth. The readings are, for the most part, the broad strokes of political history. I could see some people liking that, but others might not, so it's worth keeping in mind. The assignments were all good and reasonable. We wrote three papers – one using parliamentary papers, one using a longer primary source, and one research paper. She is a very fair grader.

Pedersen is like a walking encyclopedia. She knows so much and really listens when people contribute. She's really focused on teaching students how to be "historians," which will be helpful for any research based course you may want to take. She has a relaxed style about leading seminars, making it an enjoyable environment to be in.

Susan Pedersen is a knowledgeable, interesting and very nice professor, whom I had the privilege of studying under for both second-semester CC and for the British history class. Regarding CC, there isn't much to say: Prof. Pedersen is excellent at getting students to participate, and there was always an engaging discussion going. She also enjoyed adding a lot of historical background, especially for the British philosophers. She didn't have that much to add herself about the philosophers' worldviews, besides stressing some general points, so mostly you get your classmates' ideas (which is what CC is all about, right?). A couple of points you should know: 1) Her midterms have short answer questions, not IDs, and these can be a little tricky, because they might pertain to a particular part of the works or class discussion. So you need to study harder for tests than usual. 2) She has pop quizzes (seven per semester), so you can't just not do the reading or even sparknote it if you want a solid participation grade. For British History, this wasn't for me the best history class I've been to (that would be Prof. Janaki Bakhle's "Gandhi's India"), but it's a very solid class. A lot of emphasis on the party politics, rather little on foreign policy. But the lectures are engaging and interesting, and the workload typical for a history class. The one thing I really didn't like is that t…

This is by far the best history class I've taken at Columbia. I've never learnt so much from one class (and go through an entire notebook plus 15 more pages). Prof. Pedersen packs a lot of information into one lecture and she starts class on-time. There is a lot to learn and British politics can get pretty messy, but it's worth it. The one aspect of this course that I did not like was a long research assignment. It wasn't very clear on what we had to do and it involves spending a lot of time in the stacks picking out a suitable document to work with. Furthermore, you'll have to spend some more time identifying the characters within your document. Granted, the "long" assignment only consists of 5 pages (and you'll run out of room to put everything on), but it takes forever to write. The readings are doable but can get heavy at times. The grading for the entire course is completely dependent on your TA.

Approaching the genre of a senior thesis; structuring and organizing thesis research; citations; writing style; and we all wrote a first "chunk" of our theses as well as a prospectus laying out the thesis project.

Professor Pedersen changed my entire attitude toward the Core. After several lackluster Core professors, I had almost given up on getting the kind of Core education that I had dreamed about when I came to Columbia, but Professor Pedersen completely renewed my hope in the Core. In her section, I was able to dig into (very difficult) classic texts and really understand what they were saying, and actually discuss deeply with my classmates what it all meant. The section was really discussion-based, which was great. Professor Pedersen was really good at moderating the discussion and getting everybody excited enough about the texts as to participate in class. She also sometimes broke us into smaller discussion groups to talk about various important points in a text, and then we would come back together and go over all of them as a class, which really helped my understanding. Professor Pederson showed us constantly that she really cared about our education and that we were getting the most out of the CC curriculum. As I realized partway into the class, she's a named professor of the Core, so she has a deep interest in making the class the best it can be. She always wanted to hear feedback on her teaching style, the selection of books on the syllabus, and the general method of CC instruction. She also knows every single book on the syllabus inside and out, and can (being a History pro…

About 3 readings a week that can be pretty long but are well worth it, 1 short paper and accompanying presentation, 1 long research paper (15-20 pages)

Fantastic class. Professor Pedersen is probably the best lecturer I've ever had. I had very little interest in British history but i took the class for my distributional requirement. The syllabus is very well put together and between the readings and lectures, you cover a huge amount. Professor Pedersen lectures as if it were a conversation. She has a bare-bones outline of the lecture (which students also get a copy of) but she knows the material so well that she can give a full lecture without any additional notes or slides. The only downside to this is that there's a LOT of reading. If you do all of it, it's generally 175+ pages a week. You can get by not doing all of it but you should do most of it. Some of the fiction, which are quicker reads, obviously. The midterm and final both have a pretty tough ID section (answering very specific questions about names of people and policies). Outside of reading the workload isn't too bad though. If you have any interest in British history, modern Europe or world history, I would recommend this class. It's not easy, but you get a ton out of it. Also, she's the director of undergrad studies so if you're a history major, you can go talk to her outside of class and she's really nice and helpful there too.

Professor Pedersen is great. Her lectures are always interesting and informative. If you attend class and take good notes, there is pretty much no need to read the textbook. There are a lot of primary source and scholarly articles read in the course, but not an overwhelming amount of them, and they are useful in understanding the period. I loved the class.