France

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.

This course introduces the ways in which mental health has been studied as an academic discipline across the humanities and the social sciences. It shows that both the definition and the treatment of mental ill-health is not universal but shaped by the society in which people live. The course focuses primarily on the period of time from the closure of the lunatic asylums in Great Britain in the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Through an anthology composed of newspaper articles, political speeches, and party manifestos, the course analyzes some of the factors which influenced mental health policies, such as advances in medical knowledge, changes in social values, political ideals, the influence of the media (including social media), and financial cost. Alongside these factual texts, the course studies short extracts from films and literary works in order to gain an understanding of how changes in society’s attitudes towards the mentally unwell are reflected in cultural works.