France

This course considers current climate events and case studies in tandem with theoretical concepts and indicators. Topics include the ongoing debates and central concepts of green-growth; understanding the current climate crisis and its relationship with capitalism; faults with using GDP to measure development; international economic relations pertaining to the environment; how to collectively govern natural resources; theories and principles of political instruments to regulate the economy and the environment; and how to transition away from fossil fuels. 

This course performs micro-genealogies of various strands of “practical philosophy” and “philosophical practice,” both ancient and modern, to rethink how philosophy can provide the conceptual tools needed to tarry with the complexities of individual and social life. It addresses questions such as what is happiness and the good life; at what expense do we find happiness; what are the conditions for freedom; and how to engage with death, illness, and finitude. This course critically examines how happiness has been imagined in the past and the present, from virtue and duty to wellness and bliss.

This course is an initiation to writing for the theater, examining the link between writing and spoken text. It includes several writing exercises that lead progressively toward a short play which is then workshopped among the class. In addition to this practical dimension of writing, the course includes reading and discussion of the dramatic texts of various actors.

This course provides a critical understanding of the major issues currently faced by European countries, and the interplay between Member States, European institutions, global challenges and democratic legitimacy concerns. It analyzes the facts to understand the major causes and potential consequences and think of possible solutions to address challenges existing in the euro area, those created by the unprecedented migrant flows in Europe, stemming from climate change. The course also looks at the rise of Euroscepticism and the issue of democratic deficit in the European Union. The course provides a critical approach and a solid understanding of the major issues and debates on the topics covered during the class.

In examining how contemporary political power is organized, notably through constitutions, this course presents a view of issues past and present, legal and political, French or foreign, national and international.  It also offers several keys so that students can orient themselves among the facts, the information, and the documentary sources.  Students are given a certain amount of information but also encouraged to build intellectual and practical skills to bring out their critical thinking abilities, their ability to hold a rational argument, and stimulate their creative intellectualism.  The themes examined in the course include: defining a certain number of fundamental notions related to the analysis of constitutional law and the political institutions; examining several examples of foreign political institutions; and understanding the trajectory, the situation, and the characteristics of today’s French institutions.  Through case studies and applied examples, each course meeting is an opportunity to enrich the methodology required to examine these issues.

This course addresses the key issues that affect the economy and society in emerging markets: globalization, slowing growth, Covid-19, demography, women, urbanization, religion, commodities, water, renewable energies, climate change, currencies, enterprises, and geopolitical power politics. The course considers how the emergence of BRICS, the five major emerging national economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and the following wave of emerging countries appearing in the South, from Nigeria to Indonesia through Ethiopia and Vietnam, has created a strategic challenge for the OECD countries. The emerging markets are analyzed as both growing markets and competitors, with which new partnerships must be invented.

The time separating the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) from the nineteenth amendment that granted American women the right of vote (1920) marked a turning point in the history of women in the US. Although a number of women rose to prominence in the male-dominated literary world of the second half of the nineteenth century, most of them have long been forgotten. The recovery work to which feminist criticism gave an impulse in the 1970s and is still ongoing today has drawn attention to the pivotal role played by some of these writers in the redefinition of women's place in American society. This course initiates a reflection on the way in which these women dealt with such issues as slavery, domesticity, industrialization, and the rise of a visual culture in the fast-developing society of their times. Due attention is paid to the Gothic genre that allowed them to express their most intimate concerns and anxieties under the cover of supernatural fiction, as well as to the regional sketch, a supposedly minor genre that some of them turned into an instrument of resistance to the dominant patriarchal ideology.

This course, the first in our intensive summer language program sequences, with its contiguous course FR12B, is roughly equivalent to the first two quarters or to the first semester of beginning French language instruction on students' home campuses. FR12A and FR12B introduce basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills to the complete beginner and the beginner with limited previous knowledge of elementary French within a French-immersion context. Placement in this course is determined by students' previous experience and the results of a language assessment taken prior to arrival. Course material includes: K. Jansma, MOTIFS: AN INRODUCTION TO FRENCH, Heinle, 6th Edition, 2014. Through the FR12AB sequence, students gain the ability to communicate in spoken and written French and develop a foundation in French grammar, basic working vocabulary organized, and information on French and Francophone culture including greetings, leisure activities and sports, vacation time, family structures, schooling and values of the French Republic, the distribution of household chores, environmental protection, cuisine, grocery shopping and eating habits, the workplace, café life, multiethnic society, youth culture, and the geography, and music and cuisine of the francophone world. Students engage in short conversations using simple sentences and basic vocabulary with occasional use of past and near future tenses. Covered in this course are the present, past, and near future tenses, along with high-frequency regular and irregular verbs, reflexive verbs, and the imperative and polite conditional moods, as well as subject and object pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive and demonstrative adjectives, interrogative expressions, expressions of quantity, and time and weather expressions. Course grading is composed of class participation, small group and pair work, role play, written exercises, dictation, presentations of cultural products such as songs, films, audio texts, a variety of short, simple texts on cultural perspectives, and writing activities.