France

This course provides an overview of the political history of France from 1815-1940. It covers the failed Second Republic, neither democratic nor liberal; the return of imperial France, a final transition between an authoritarian regime and a liberal regime; the Third Republic, a severe struggle between the royalists and republicans; and the radical party, aimed at a liberal democracy. The course highlights how, through the end of the 19th century, the installation of the Republic was fraught with economic crises and political oppositions. 

This course explores how space is navigated in the modern novel. It focuses on Kafka’s LE CHATEAU, which describes various types of places (roads, bridges, inns, walls, corridors) and disturbed perceptions of space-time, to see how literature places the modern subject in the wide world. The course considers the difference between places and spaces: physical and geographical space, private and public space, foreignness and strangeness, borders and limits, cultivated and uncultivated. It observes how a text, narrative or descriptive, constructs a space and the symbolic role it can give it.

This course addresses the call for the provincialization of Europe and the West, the decolonization of science, and the indigenization of national or regional social sciences. It covers the history of sociology from the mid-19th century onwards, including new insights into the hidden development of Southern sociology and a more critical vision about how the canonization at play in sociology still excludes minorities, women, and Southern sociologists.

From the patriotic tunes of the inter-war mandatory period to the underground music of the Arab Uprisings, Middle Eastern and North African popular music is deeply entangled with politics. Since the late nineteenth century, states and various social groups have attempted to channel the power of patriotic hymns and subversive songs. This course draws on the sociology and anthropology of culture to revisit the history of the region through music. It looks beyond periods of political upheaval to understand the everyday significance of musical practices in authoritarian, neoliberal, and postcolonial settings. Whether we understand it as a tightly knit web of meaning or as a soundwave that travels around and beyond the Middle East, popular music – its production, circulation, and consumption— tells a larger story about the making and remaking of identities and power relations in modern nation-states in the region.

This course focuses on the reading of classical texts in political theory and philosophy. It confronts foundational texts in the Western tradition (Plato, Hobbes, Tocqueville, Marx, Arendt, Foucault) to improve reading skills, better understand the history of political ideas, and develop views on current political events. The course provides an opportunity to practice the use of precise concepts and to develop stronger argumentations.