University of Bordeaux

This course provides a foundational understanding of dynamic oceanography, including both global and regional ocean circulation, ocean–atmosphere interactions, as well as the basic equations used to describe fluid motion. A field-based component, involving embarkation on research vessels, familiarizes students with real working conditions in the marine environment and introduces them to observational techniques and data collection at sea.

At the age of global ecological crisis, this course looks at the environment in its historical dimension in order to understand not how we got here, but rather, where exactly we stand. By examining this history over a long 20th century and in various geographical areas, from North America to Asia, this course examines the environment for what it has become today: the most political issue in the contemporary world.

This course introduces the core methods of grammatical analysis through data from various languages presented in translation. Students learn to segment the speech stream into words, identify rules of agreement and phrase structure, and analyze syntactic units such as noun phrases and verb phrases. The course also covers the Leipzig Glossing Rules for precise morphological and syntactic annotation. Fundamental linguistic concepts—such as sentence structure, word categories, gender, number, case, person, constituents, and word order—are introduced through a comparative approach. These analytical tools are then applied to spoken French, where students produce morphosyntactic glosses and examine key features of French grammar. By the end of the course, students acquire essential skills for understanding how languages encode grammatical information.

This course provides a concise introduction to sociolinguistics, examining its interdisciplinary foundations and its relationship to linguistic structuralism. Students explore the definition and scope of sociolinguistics, the principal sources of linguistic variation, and the dynamics between linguistic norms and actual language use. The course also introduces key concepts in geolinguistics, focusing on how linguistic practices relate to geographic and social space. Together, these elements offer a foundational understanding of how language functions as a social phenomenon.

This course offers a structured chronological framework and a comprehensive introduction to the Victorian era in Great Britain (1837–1901). Through an exploration of political, social, intellectual, and artistic developments, the course examines how the Victorians navigated a world marked by rapid and sometimes unsettling change. Particular attention is paid to the interplay between ideological frameworks, social structures, and cultural production. In addition to lectures, the course includes seminar sessions designed to strengthen students’ analytical and written expression skills. These sessions provide training in core academic practices such as textual commentary and argumentative essay writing.

The ghost is a paradoxical figure: does it belong to the world of the dead or to the world of the living? Is it a revenant from the beyond, or the projection of the “fantasms”—the words share the same etymology—of the person who sees it? Keeping these questions in mind, and focusing on effects of surprise, ambiguity, and evocation, this course examines the adaptations and transpositions of the ghostly figure between literature and cinema. In the first part of the course, devoted to cinematic and operatic adaptations of Henry James’s THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the course explores the methods of adaptation—from straightforward illustration to the transformations required by the specific tools and languages of opera and film. How does each medium make the ghost “appear”? The second part of the course attempts a bolder comparative exercise by putting Charles Nodier’s short story INÉS DE LAS SIERRAS dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock’s film VERTIGO. The course pays close attention to the thematic resonances (the woman, the double, the investigation) that exist between these two works separated by more than a century, as well as to the distinctive ways in which each of them employs music and painting.

This course provides both fundamental and advanced knowledge in chemical oceanography, specifically to describe the chemistry of seawater and to present the processes that control its composition. The course offers a quantitative approach to material transfer processes at environmental interfaces, as well as their interactions with the oceanic biosphere, and details the (bio)geochemical processes responsible for modifying these transfers across time and space. The lectures cover topics such as the chemical composition of seawater, inputs of dissolved and particulate material to the ocean, elemental cycles, gases in seawater and ocean–atmosphere exchanges, redox conditions in the ocean, the use and relevance of stable and radioactive isotopes, particle transfer from the ocean surface to the sediments, and material exchanges between the oceanic crust and seawater. The course is complemented by a field excursion in a coastal environment involving sample collection, as well as tutorials and laboratory practical sessions during which the collected samples are analyzed.

This course is an introduction to the study of state-building and state-formation dynamics in Africa since precolonial times, and to the broader question of politics in Africa. It introduces multidisciplinarity into the study of politics: it is indeed one of the major contributions of African studies to combine political science with history, anthropology, and development studies. Two main approaches are combined. First, the historical approach, which evokes pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa. Archives, maps and documentary film extracts are used to illustrate the ways in which power is exercised and criticized on the longue durée. Second, the sociological approach considers the modalities of policymaking in Africa, to which a plurality of actors take part – in partnership but also often in competition with state bodies.

This course provides the tools to develop an analysis when confronted with information related to indicators of spatial disparities and development, such as GDP, HDI, economic growth rates, and others. The course places emphasis on concepts, issues, and challenges—of a social and political nature—associated with understanding how indicators are produced, their roles, their limitations, and their embeddedness within political contexts and ideologies. The course encourage students to formulate well‑reasoned arguments supported by knowledge (literature and examples) and by skills (analysis, reformulation, argumentation) on the theme of spatial disparities and development indicators. It equips students to develop their own critical analysis when faced with information concerning spatial organization, spatial inequalities, and development indicators.

This course analyzes the different steps of nervous system development during prenatal, postnatal, and adult life, and the pathological consequences of its alterations. Examples of key molecular and cellular processes are studied in several models (invertebrate, vertebrate, in vitro and organoids).