France

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).

This course provides an advanced, comparative insight into citizenship debates with a specific focus on the intersection between citizenship, migration, and belonging. The course primarily concentrates on Europe and Northern America but systematically introduces comparative elements with other regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East) to provide a wider, global perspective on the politics of citizenship. The course delves into the transformations of citizenship regimes through the review and discussion of key scientific contributions in the field of citizenship studies, which has developed at the nexus of different disciplines over the past thirty years (political science, sociology, history, law). Beyond discussing citizenship and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion it entails, this course is also an opportunity to address more general concerns in social science research, such as how to assess change, how to ensure comparability across contexts, and how to address the gap between policy on paper and policy in practice.

This is an advanced course considering the economic forces that govern the geographic distribution of economic activity and its implications for economic outcomes and public policy issues. The course is divided into two parts. The first part develops a simple theory of cities as the result of the interaction between agglomeration and congestion forces. It studies in detail the agglomeration forces that attract firms, consumers, and workers to cities, as well as the congestion forces that limit the size of cities and how to overcome them through transportation networks and housing markets. The second part of the course extends the basic model to study a system of many locations, the dynamics of city growth and decline, and to conclude, the role of cities and geography for climate change.

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This course studies French business with a focus on commercial, communication, and marketing strategies. Topics covered include selection of products, distribution channels, communication and business image, visual and sound identity, communication decisions, and business reputation. The course utilizes local, national, generalized, and specialized mass media.

This course offers a study of the Second World War from a worldwide perspective. It explores these themes in two parts, in unfamiliar places and across unusual timescales. The first part begins with the question of what makes (and unmakes) a war a "world war" and reviews the conflict's development from its origins to its ending, well beyond the familiar 1939-1945 chronology. In the second part, it explores themes both familiar and unfamiliar from a global viewpoint, from the war's multinational forces to its ecology, economy, and popular memory.

This course presents the theories of international commerce from a classical and neoclassical perspective. The course covers the Ricardian model of exchange, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, and contemporary theories of international commerce.

This course introduces the legal, regulatory, and policy issues raised by social media platforms. It provides an accessible overview of current legal issues relating to social media, with a focus on European law. The first half of the course examines how platforms and states govern online content. The second half broadens the focus to the legal and political issues raised by social media platforms' business models and ownership structures. The assigned readings and lectures provide a thorough overview of the core issues and encourage critical thinking about the underlying power structures and conflicts of interests that shape legal decisions.

This course provides a critical introduction to French society with a strong emphasis on the debates and myths regarding French national identity (republicanism, integration). The first part of the course focuses on the main models which have been developed to account for French society (the Republic, the Education system, French Citizenship), and questions them in regard to the challenges French society had to face in the 20th century (democratization, immigration, globalization, women and LGTIQ+ movements). On the political sphere, as demonstrated by the recent presidential election, French society also confronts significant challenges with the rise of fringe parties (extreme left and, above all, the Rassemblement National). Traditional political movements (trade unions and working class actions) are equally defied by the rise of new social movements (unemployed, artists, women, gays), which put new identity (gender, sexuality, and others) at the heart of definitions within French society. The course tackles the issues of French identity politics through a focus on the media, with a true concern for their historical embeddedness, as a way to convey the complexity of events and debates that characterized French society through time.
 

This course analyzes anthropological texts and literature. It studies anthropologists including Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski. The course discusses these anthropologists and their writings as a group while comparing and connecting them to others.