French

This course covers the following topics and subtopics: reduction of endomorphisms, determinants, eigenvectors, and eigenvalues; characteristic polynomials and minimal polynomials; Cayley-Hamilton Theorem; diagonalization and trigonalization; Dunford and Gauss-Jordan Reductions; Hermitian and Euclidean spaces; bilinear forms; quadratic forms; self-adjoint; and orthogonal groups in 2 or 3 dimensions.

This course allows students to get familiar with the camera (film and/or digital) and its set of technical parameters. Lessons and exercises develop a technical foundations, understanding light, exposures, and dynamics. The course also includes an opportunity to work in the film lab to experiment with image development without a physical camera, and provides an opportunity to practice presentation by submitting photographs in exposition style.

This course is dedicated to better understanding the evolution of theatrical art in Europe from antiquity to the 20th century. It considers performance spaces characterized by their architecture, their place in the city, and their function in society to understand the possible history of the “places of theater.” The course starts by examining the origins of theater in ancient Greek and Roman society, followed by medieval theater and theater of the Italian, English, and Spanish Renaissance. It then studies French theater from the 17th century to the 19th century and finally, takes a look at European theater up to the 20th century.

This course delves into psychology and behavior when faced with risk, cognitive biases, and decision making. It discusses emotions and their relevance to economic phenomena and examines the works of Smith, Kahneman and Tversky, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and other names in psychological and behavioral economics.

This course explores the French-language crime novel from an eco-critical approach. It studies the crime and resolution as means that lead to a thematic and stylistic analysis of texts in which societal transformations and ecological and environmental issues become the fulcrums of a critical reflection of modernity, tradition, and community. The course discusses the works of three French-language authors: Désiré Boyla Baenga's LA POLYANDRE (1998), Modibo Sounkalo Keita's L'ARCHER BASSARI (1984), and Moussa Konaté's L'ASSASSIN DU BANCONI (2002) and L'EMPREINTE DU RENARD (2006). From a historical and theoretical reflection on the detective novel in general, it considers, on the one hand, the different ways of representing "ecological crimes" and, on the other hand, the way the detective novel focuses on place and ecology. Finally, the course examines how the Francophone detective novel reports on the environmental crisis.

This course introduces the current and past issues at stake in the political, legal, and cultural relations between religions and states. A subject of recurrent debate and controversy in France, laïcité (or rather, secularism) is rarely treated critically, dispassionately and from an international perspective. Such is the focus of this seminar. Depending on the areas covered, the course discusses more generally about “laïcité” (in the case of France) or “secularism” (in the case of Anglo-Saxon countries). The course is interdisciplinary, drawing on historical, political, legal, and sociological approaches. It also focuses on comparative approaches in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. 

This course involves the study of the physiology and development of the different organs and reproductive systems of plants, as well as how researchers study these processes. It includes lectures, lab work, and section work. The course examines the life cycle of plants, the use of arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism, and the methods of studying development such as transgenic plants, mutants, and reverse genetics. It also studies the organization of the shoot apical meristem (SAM) and the effects of mutations on its function, as well as how the SAM becomes the floral meristem and the development of the reproductive organs of flowers. The course finishes with a look at the root apical meristem.

In a process of progressive construction of knowledge, fields, sources, and methods of the history of contemporary worlds, initiation to the history of the 19th century constitutes an essential first step. From the end of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, this course demonstrates how the 19th century was primarily the century of the construction of nation-states. The affirmation of the principle of nationalities and the right of peoples to self-determination was achieved through multiple crises, revolutions, and military conflicts and new continental balances emerge. The 19th century is also that of the dynamics and tensions of industrial revolutions, in a new wave of globalization marked by an apogee of imperialism. The program of this EU, in its chronological, spatial and thematic definition, is specified each year within this general framework.

Empirically, this course deconstructs Lebanese political institutions and culture as they relate to collective violence. It models the latter, and draws out possible lessons that can be used to decipher other cases of turbulent consociativity. From a theoretical point of view, Lebanon provides a formidable laboratory in which to interrogate the definitions, categories and theses of classical political science. Civil war, intercommunal tensions, invasion and occupation, annexation, trusteeship and foreign intervention are all notions of political violence observed in situ in Lebanon. More broadly still, Weberian sociology of the state, Gellner's theory of the nation and theories of social movements are profoundly challenged by the Lebanese case. This course proposes a whole new approach to collective violence and to institutional and political sociology, using Lebanon as a case study.

This course provides an exploration of French language and civilization through several cultural facets: literature, music, news, politics, ecology, media, and cultural traditions. It analyzes various media in France throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and discusses their linguistic, social, and cultural significance.