France

This course offers a broad survey on Modern European political, intellectual, social, and cultural history, from the end of the 18th century to the aftermath of the Cold War. The topics covered include the age of Revolutions (the French Revolution and its consequences, the Napoleonic era, the Industrial Revolution), the age of Nationalism, the age of Imperialism and Colonialism, World War I and II and the Cold War.

This course is designed to provide a thorough overview of Critical Security Studies. It introduces and discusses theoretical perspectives and research objects at the heart of this burgeoning academic field. In doing so, the course supports a reflexive approach to the transformation of security, its related concepts and their empirical applications in close connection with key issues such as development, environment, migration, citizenship, and finance. It is organized in two main sections: the first section looks at the variety of theoretical perspectives in critical security studies; the second section introduces students to ongoing critical security research objects.

This course provides a foundational understanding of dynamic oceanography, including both global and regional ocean circulation, ocean–atmosphere interactions, as well as the basic equations used to describe fluid motion. A field-based component, involving embarkation on research vessels, familiarizes students with real working conditions in the marine environment and introduces them to observational techniques and data collection at sea.

At the age of global ecological crisis, this course looks at the environment in its historical dimension in order to understand not how we got here, but rather, where exactly we stand. By examining this history over a long 20th century and in various geographical areas, from North America to Asia, this course examines the environment for what it has become today: the most political issue in the contemporary world.

This course introduces the core methods of grammatical analysis through data from various languages presented in translation. Students learn to segment the speech stream into words, identify rules of agreement and phrase structure, and analyze syntactic units such as noun phrases and verb phrases. The course also covers the Leipzig Glossing Rules for precise morphological and syntactic annotation. Fundamental linguistic concepts—such as sentence structure, word categories, gender, number, case, person, constituents, and word order—are introduced through a comparative approach. These analytical tools are then applied to spoken French, where students produce morphosyntactic glosses and examine key features of French grammar. By the end of the course, students acquire essential skills for understanding how languages encode grammatical information.

This C1 level French course develops argumentative presentation and oral communication skills. Students practice writing an argumentative essay using the French methodology (identify an issue, create an outline, introduction, conclusion); perfect language skills: expand vocabulary, use argumentative tools, engage in conversation and involve the listener; improve comprehension of authentic written and audio materials; and discover and present a characteristic of French culture. The course reviews and deepens knowledge of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary (examples: direct questions in formal language; indirect questions; complex sentence syntax; conditional and subjunctive conjugations). It develops mastery of argumentative tools: logical links (introduction of elements and articulation: examples, addition, nuances, opinion); highlighting ideas; impersonal turns of phrase; expression of opposition and concession, hypothesis, condition.
 

This course provides a concise introduction to sociolinguistics, examining its interdisciplinary foundations and its relationship to linguistic structuralism. Students explore the definition and scope of sociolinguistics, the principal sources of linguistic variation, and the dynamics between linguistic norms and actual language use. The course also introduces key concepts in geolinguistics, focusing on how linguistic practices relate to geographic and social space. Together, these elements offer a foundational understanding of how language functions as a social phenomenon.

This course offers a structured chronological framework and a comprehensive introduction to the Victorian era in Great Britain (1837–1901). Through an exploration of political, social, intellectual, and artistic developments, the course examines how the Victorians navigated a world marked by rapid and sometimes unsettling change. Particular attention is paid to the interplay between ideological frameworks, social structures, and cultural production. In addition to lectures, the course includes seminar sessions designed to strengthen students’ analytical and written expression skills. These sessions provide training in core academic practices such as textual commentary and argumentative essay writing.

The ghost is a paradoxical figure: does it belong to the world of the dead or to the world of the living? Is it a revenant from the beyond, or the projection of the “fantasms”—the words share the same etymology—of the person who sees it? Keeping these questions in mind, and focusing on effects of surprise, ambiguity, and evocation, this course examines the adaptations and transpositions of the ghostly figure between literature and cinema. In the first part of the course, devoted to cinematic and operatic adaptations of Henry James’s THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the course explores the methods of adaptation—from straightforward illustration to the transformations required by the specific tools and languages of opera and film. How does each medium make the ghost “appear”? The second part of the course attempts a bolder comparative exercise by putting Charles Nodier’s short story INÉS DE LAS SIERRAS dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock’s film VERTIGO. The course pays close attention to the thematic resonances (the woman, the double, the investigation) that exist between these two works separated by more than a century, as well as to the distinctive ways in which each of them employs music and painting.