France

This course is dedicated to eloquence in French as a foreign language. It gives students the keys to speaking with ease, convincing and captivating their audience. The course works on the fluency, clarity, and impact of speeches, using documents from French culture in an intercultural perspective. Listening to and understanding others enables everyone to progress and "carry your voice," as Stéphane de Freitas puts it. The main activities include: vocal and body warm-up: work on breathing, posture, self-confidence, sound-based games; spontaneous expression games: exercises to free speech and enrich vocabulary; active listening and critical thinking skills; practice in prepared speeches: learn to structure, argue, work on tone and emotional management, appropriate oratory techniques and classic French rhetoric. This course offers a comprehensive approach to improving speaking skills and mastering eloquence by blending oratory techniques, practical exercises and creativity. Qualified guest speakers will enhance the practical aspects of the course.

In contemporary literature, the African city appears as a space in permanent flux, capable of taking on very diverse, complex and sometimes difficult to define forms. The course on the relationship between the colonial city and the post-colonial city is part of a general reflection on urban space in Africa. It aims to examine its history, architecture, sociology and representations. In the vast repertoire of representations, there is one constant that is the fruit of the continent's history, the trace of its colonial heritage. Today's African metropolises were often yesterday's small colonial towns. Modelled on European models, colonial cities, far from remaining pure "European enclaves", were transformed from the outset into mixed-race spaces, places of encounter, cross-fertilization and confrontation between Western and indigenous societies and cultures, but also places of cultural syncretism. Based on readings and analyses of texts from Nocky Djedanoum's collection Amours de villes, villes africaines (2001) and Léonora Miano's Contours du jour qui vient (2006), this course explores the ways in which cities are represented in African literature, and the different conceptions of the city as a place of rupture and negotiation between past and present.

Whether you are interested in fashion design, media, business, or just looking at it from the general perspective of a customer, this course discovers a complete understanding of what is sustainability in fashion and how to achieve it. With Paris as one of the world’s major fashion capitals, this course takes advantage of the city’s resources, exploring exhibitions and special visits to see how brands and leaders are embracing sustainability on a broad scale. These experiences complement practical, real-world case studies in the classroom. The course studies fashion through the perspective of circular economy to evaluate different definitions and practices of sustainability in the field. Topics include an in-depth look at sustainable materials, scrutiny of production and distribution models, evaluation of sustainable business practices, sustainable design strategies, and the influential role of consumers in fostering sustainable styles and lifestyles.

This course focuses on multivariate linear regression model with OLS (basic notions) and multivariate linear regression model with OLS 2/2 (main issues). Topics include: assumptions, Gauss-Markov theorem, Partialling-out interpretation; endogeneity: the omitted variable problem, instrumental variables, testing endogeneity, testing overidentification restrictions; proxy variable as solution to the omitted variable problem; measurement error in dependent variable; heteroskedasticity.

This seminar serves as an introduction to Scottish Studies, an interdisciplinary field combining history, literature, sociology, food studies, and other approaches. The three parts are closely linked both chronologically (focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries) and thematically, all three intertwining themes of food, literature (or writing), and Scottish national identity. The first section looks at the ways in which Scotland was “invented” or reinvented in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perceived until the mid-eighteenth century as a backward land ridden with religious strife and tyrannical politics, Scotland emerged as a proud Romantic nation. The seminar first examines the rise of travelling, tourism, and travel-writing as ways of creating and disseminating new representations of the nation. Then the study bears on the cult of two men who lived in the late eighteenth-century: the national "Bard" Robert Burns and Thomas Muir, a lesser-known defender of the French Revolution, victim of tyranny who was celebrated in Bordeaux and Paris and died in 1798, providing inspiration for later generations of democrats. The cult of heroes raises many questions: who became a hero and why? What aspects of their lives were brought forward, what aspects were hidden? What (ideological, nationalist, etc.) purposes did the cult of heroes serve? Who contested heroes and why? What about heroines? A particular focus of interest is the Burns Supper, a tradition closely associated with Scottish identity: invented in 1801, it is still vivid today, has become global and has taken on many different meanings across time and place, serving in particular to celebrate Scotland’s role in the British Empire. The second section examines writing by a selection of nineteenth century Scottish authors and the influence of their texts on cultural life and popular culture in Scotland and the wider world in ensuing centuries. The seminar touches on the afterlives of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson as international authors; literary and cultural tourism in Scotland and elsewhere; Scottish food and drink as evolving literary tropes as well as the scholarly annotation of 19th-century Scottish texts for the needs of 21st-century readers. Finally, the course witnesses history at work in family recipe books in the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland: In England and Scotland, the tradition of the landowning gentry keeping recipe books began in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, these accounts had become a way for the elite to establish their way of life as a continuum, a vital and enduring heritage passed down from generation to generation. The National Library of Scotland holds a large collection of cookery books, some of which come from the papers of one particular family: the Malcolm family of Burnfoot in Dumfriesshire. Readers can witness the evolution of these records from the first manuscript written in 1782 to the last one in 1892. Examining the family’s recipe books gives us a glimpse into the food consumption habits of an upper-class Scottish family and serves as a valuable record of their ascension up the social ladder. The way cultural influences can be traced in these recipe books also tells us about history from a different, fascinating angle: that of food.

Despite its apparent proximity to the history of cinema, this course is in fact a "History and Cinema" course. It looks at both fiction and non-fiction cinema and considers questions posed by Michèle Lagny and Marc Ferro on how film allows us to rethink the historicity of history and whether cinema and television modify our vision of history.

This course focuses on contemporary theater creation (theater and society, theater and music, theater about theater, etc.). It considers theater and modernity in the 20th and 21st centuries, and how to make theater today. The course starts with Brecht and the French theater of the 20th century, to consider the stage mutations and teeming directions of contemporary creation. It then studies the New Theater (50s and after), theater and society, the question of feminicide, and authentic theater from Othello to the present day.

This course introduces the mathematical theory of probability, starting with the definition of probability spaces to the fundamental limit theorems, namely the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. The following concepts are covered: measurement theory, probability spaces; conditional probability and independence; random variables, discrete random variables; density random variables; discrete random vectors; density random vectors; notions of convergence for sequences of random variables; limit theorems; Gaussian vectors. 

This course explores the evolution of classic French cinema in all its diversity from the 1930s to the 1950s, while highlighting its aesthetic, ideological, and cultural characteristics through the genres, major directors, actresses/actors, and currents representative of production at the time. It looks at the technical, practical, and financial changes brought about by the transition to talkies, and the cultural repercussions on production. The Occupation sheds light on the genesis of the institutional foundations of today's cinema, with government involvement in the organization of the film industry. The post-war period also provides an opportunity to grasp the subtext of the cultural policy issues that are still relevant today, linked to cultural exception or diversity, of which the Blum-Byrnes agreements are the crucible from which subsidized cinema was born.

This course examines the ways in which Paris has, more or less successfully, upheld its position as the fashion capital of the world, through corporate strategies and government policies to bolster an industry, which faces issues related to environmental sustainability and labor ethics. Besides a critical understanding of the economics and politics of Parisian fashion, the class equips students with a thorough knowledge of the social significance of fashion which, in French 19th century author Balzac’s words, “is an expression of society”. How then, has French society shaped and been shaped by fashion? Through lectures, site visits and urban walks through the streets of the city, the students discover the creativity of Parisians, who have mobilized fashion as forms of political and aesthetic expression during some of the most important events of the city, including the 1789 French revolution, the industrial revolution, May 1968, and more recent youth culture and social movements. Students reflect upon historical and current regulations and norms around covering and uncovering our bodies with textile, and what they say about living up to or disregarding social identities and inequalities related to sexual and gender identities, religion, class and racialization. What are the societal consequences of shifting ideals of beauty and style? What does it mean to shop, thrift or mend clothes in Paris today? Whose labor matters and why? And how may one of the World’s most polluting industries evolve to the better in the near future?