France

This course covers gender issues such as employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. The course explores how feminist legal theory has questioned the way the law is constructed and applied according to certain stereotypical views of sexual identity and the roles of women. The seminar also investigates how queer theory has influenced the legal field by rejecting traditional gender identities which do not fully encompass the issues that concern the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual population. Students use a comparative perspective to consider what can be learned from these different legal standpoints as we encounter changes in family law and employment law, how queer theory influences gender law, and what might be new ways to consider legal concepts such as consent, personal autonomy, and discrimination.

This course covers the influential factors that play a role in creating a successful marketing strategy. It focuses on the world of wine and the champagne industry in particular. It highlights the region, important players from the vine to the wine, and the production process. Finally, the course considers the marketing of luxury: what constitutes luxury, who it attracts, and how to sell it.

This seminar explores the relations between Transcendentalism and various reform movements and utopian projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, in the areas of religion, education, women's rights, socialism, pacifism, and abolitionism. It places special emphasis on three themes: the religious and philosophical roots of the idea of human perfectibility; the self-image of the age (the nineteenth-century as the Age of Progress), and its critics; and the tension between individual and collective ideals of reform.

This is an advanced C1 level French language course for students who have completed a minimum of four semesters of university level French and also have had experience in a francophone context (educational, professional, or touristic) that enables them to be comfortable communicating orally and in writing. The course focuses on the four competencies of spoken expression, written expression, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. The spoken expression section masters providing clear, detailed descriptions on complex subjects, integrating related themes, developing particular points, and concluding in an appropriate manner; expressing oneself fluently and spontaneously without searching for words; using language flexibly and effectively for social and professional purposes; and expressing ideas and opinions with precision and relating statements to those of one's interlocutors. The written expression section practices expressing oneself in clear and well-structured text and present one's own point of view; writing about complex subjects in a letter, essay, or report, highlighting what the important points; and adopting a style appropriate to the intended reader. The listening comprehension section focuses on understanding a long speech even if it is not clearly structured and the connections are only implicit, and understanding TV programs and films with minimal effort. The reading comprehension section practices understand long and complex texts, both factual and literary, appreciating differences of style, and understanding specialized articles and long technical instructions even when not related to one's field.

This course examines some fundamental questions about the nature of war and conflicts in international politics. It covers the following topics: whether war is part of human nature or a social invention; if democracies are less prone to fight than authoritarian regimes; whether war is an unavoidable consequence of anarchy, and if so, the role of human agency; what factors contribute to conflict among nations and how these factors have changed over time; if the nuclear shadow is back in our contemporary international security; has the window of humanitarian operations been closed; and whether we can speak of “new wars” in the 21st century. The course uses an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating insights from political science, anthropology, psychology, and history to better understand our current international environment.

This course introduces the main concepts of modern labor economics. It covers the relation between labor market and other markets. The course combines microeconomic and macroeconomic analytical tools to analyze how society develops, allocates, and rewards human resources. It then studies a wide range of labor-related issues with special emphasis on empirical evidence in the literature and the evidence reported by government agencies and policy makers. The basic data analytic tools are introduced and discussed at length. Topics of focus include the theory of human capital, labor supply, labor demand, the life-cycle model, immigration and migration, and the role of unions.