Can I reference a range within a dataframe using named columns?

Check out ? Between.

julia> using DataFrames

julia> df = DataFrame(a = 1, b1 = 2, b2 = 3, b4 = 5);

julia> df[:, Cols(:a, Between(:b2, :b4))]
1×3 DataFrame
 Row │ a      b2     b4    
     │ Int64  Int64  Int64 
─────┼─────────────────────
   1 │     1      3      5