French

This course is for students at an intermediate level. It develops students' abilities to participate, be at ease, and make themselves understood in simple daily professional and social interactions. The activities are based on oral productions such as media, films, and songs in order to give students the opportunity to practice pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, clarity, spontaneity, fluency, and interaction through role-plays, songs, and presentation. The objective of the written part of the course is to help students read and write short texts of various types. Students learn how to describe events and express feelings and wishes in a letter. Grammar is studied through the observation of various texts, such as letters, novels, short stories, and news articles. Exercises of French grammar are also part of the course.

In Western culture, the city is the epitome of political and cultural expression, which gives the urban question a complex, diachronic, and dialectical character; it mirrors major economic, social, and political tensions. This course deciphers the fundamental elements of this complexity in tension with the fields of geopolitical thought applied to territories, in the decisive context of the environmental transition. In a dynamic and interactive way, the course takes on a contemporary political culture of the urban condition, allowing a political approach to urban citizenship, more diasporic or mobile where the network prevails over the territorial continuity. Instruction alternates between the classroom and the city.

This course analyzes the comic, a narrative art that reads not only in each successive box but also in a complex system relating to the space of the board and album as a whole. It applies literary tools to the media to take into account the image and sequencing. The course focuses on the theme of “the quest” using comics from the French-Belgian domain: set in a medieval universe more fantasized than properly historical. It considers quests and conquests in antico-medieval fictions including literature, cinema, and games.

From the study of monuments to the archeology of buildings, this course provides an up-to-date view of the specific investigative methods applied to ancient monuments that have developed over the past few decades. These will be the subject of a broad historical perspective, methodological initiation, and practical approaches. The course builds skills that any art historian required to study architectural works must have today: knowing and understanding the history of monumental studies and the evolution of their methods, up to the implementation of building archeology in its various facets, and creating an aptitude to go beyond disciplinary limits to consider collaborations with neighboring disciplines (Archaeology, Archaeometry, History). 

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

This course covers the political history of Europe from the second half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. It reflects on the first half of the 19th century, when the great powers agreed to maintain the order established by the Congress of Vienna in Europe and to defeat the national movements. It then explores how liberalism and democracy experienced an important development in the second half of the 19th century when the achievement of Italian and German unity responded to the failures of 1848, in a Europe where, except for France and the United Kingdom, democracy did not progress. Until 1914, authoritarian regimes were numerous and quite powerful. Finally, it discusses the aftermath of the Great War when Europe was confronted with a new phenomenon, that of a fascist wave that affected both Eastern and Southern Europe.

Based on a historical approach, this course questions the various theoretical models of development and their extensions in economic policy. It discusses the various "developmental" approaches of the 1950s and 1970s which made underdevelopment an international problem and whose solution must be found at the national level. It then examines the vision adopted from the 1980s onwards which saw it as a national problem to be tackled at the international level, leading to a homogenization of development strategies underlying structural adjustment. Finally, faced with the (at least relative) failure of the various decades of development, and while underdevelopment remains one of the major issues of the 21st century, the course considers the current focus on reducing poverty and inequality, while the concept of sustainable development is being promoted.

This course focuses on the study of contemporary texts and recordings drawn from the French media (radio, television, newspapers, and films), as well as on the function and place of media in the French society. Exercises give students the opportunity to practice document analysis, grammar, phonetics, and general comprehension. Students also work on a project for the semester with two professors on a media topic of their choice.

This beginning French course focuses on developing oral and written competencies and understanding the basic sentence structure of French. Students learn the basics of introducing oneself in French, simple vocabulary, basic verbs, and conjugations in the present form.

From the contemporary to the extreme contemporary, this course offers a journey through literature. It provides an opportunity to discover, through the study of a few authors and excerpts from various works, how French literature of the last decades takes on a form of engagement and disengagement in the uncertainty that creates our present. The course sharpens sensitivity and broadens knowledge in the literary and cultural fields. It improves mastery of the French language to develop the capacities of analysis, synthesis, and criticism essential to intellectual work. The course focuses on the novel, the short story, and the theater on the path of renewal at the borders of reality and fiction: telling again and again, telling the real in times of crisis.