France

This seminar studies literary and artistic production during the Modernist era, seen as a period of crisis that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It covers Picasso’s Cubism; Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; and the European literary scene including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; and Marcel Proust and André Gide in France. The course also examines this new literary “modernity” in American fiction, including Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Each novel provides an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, or the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism. The second part of the course looks at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The course considers how numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are not only critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of 20th century society.

This course aims at a broader and deeper understanding of Europe, developing a panorama of the meaning of the term “Europe” using a hybrid approach at once historical/cultural and institutional/political. It provides the basic knowledge needed to be an informed citizen of/in Europe and read and interpret accurately European current events. The course builds fundamental knowledge of the basics of European geography, and its common history and politics. It considers Europe as not simply a geographical area nor a multilateral treaty but a civilizational mosaic, and a whole. The course allows students to become familiar with the mainstays of French academic literature on European integration. The approach this course takes is to highlight and examine the key moments, what Solzhenitzyn called the nodal points, of the European adventure as a way of understanding what drove the artistic and religious revolutions that accompanied Europe's tremendous expansion on the basis of overseas conquest. Subsequently, and based on the understanding of the European historical ensemble, the course reflects on the political, economic, social, and even cultural convergence constituting the European integration which has been taking place over the past seventy years. 

This course on marketing covers product life cycles, marketing mixes, brand(ing), market segmentation, positioning, targeting, a case study approach, SWOT/TOWS analysis, Porter’s models (e.g. value chain), sales, globalization and international/global marketing, market studies, strategy, and various matrices.

This course provides the fundamental knowledge for the understanding of France's foreign policy in the Middle East from 1995 to the present. It weaves a panorama of the policy deployed in the region from the presidency of Jacques Chirac and the renewal of the Arab policy of France to draw up the assessments and perspectives. This course provides the cardinal elements of understanding the elaboration and application of France's Middle Eastern strategy. French foreign policy is examined through the prism of a chronological triptych that corresponds to three inflections of the foreign policy implemented: a posture inscribed in the Gaullist tradition with President Jacques Chirac (1995-2007); followed by the "Westernist" posture leading to a progressive alignment with American and Israeli strategies during the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande (2007-2017); finally, a willingness to return to a Gaullist position attempted by President Emmanuel Macron (2017-2022). In view of the breadth of the theme and the area covered, the teaching involves many disciplines, such as history, geography, economics, and international law, with a clear predominance of international relations and foreign policy analysis.