University of Bordeaux

This course presents the major movements, authors and works of sociology from the nineteenth century through the 1970s. It focuses on: the apparition and developments of sociology (cultural, political, economic); its theoretical and empirical orientations; the choice of fields and subjects studied in sociology (the main ones being on social issues and questions); debates, oppositions, and conflicts that animate the field of study.

This course offers an overview of the history of architecture in France and emphasizes on the historical and social context of each piece studied. The historical range goes from: Antiquity with Classical architecture, to the Middle Ages with the Romanesque and the Gothic architecture, to the Modern times with the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Rococo architecture, to finish with the Contemporary Times and the Neoclassicism.

This translation course is taught at the second-year level. The course focuses on training students how to translate both the tone and grammar of Francophone and Anglophone literature. Students first translate from English to French, and then from French to English. Students are given abstracts from English and French writers, mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century.

Problems in International Politics can be defined as issues to be considered, tackled, or answered thanks to theories, concepts, and methods used in the discipline of International Relations. This course addresses some contemporary international problems by having a look at them through the scientific lenses provided by International Relations. Given the potentially huge domain of international issues, the topics concerned focus on international security, broadly defined, rather than international political economy.

This class is intended for non-biology majors and focuses on a single project for the entire semester. The project is a blog that is to be created on a genetic disease or type of cancer. The purpose is for students, whose concentration is not on biology, to learn more about biological diseases and experimental methods.

The objective of this course is to initiate the understanding of the methods and models of optimization. The first part of the course concerns convex optimizations, specifically conditions of optimality, the algorithm of the gradient, and its variants. The second part of the course concerns linear programming in the real and natural numbers. The emphasis is put on modeling. Topics include: modeling, the formalization of concrete problems in the form of mathematical optimization; optimization without constraints (analytic resolution, dichotomy, variants of the gradient); optimization with constraints (conditions of optimality, linear programming, linear programming with whole numbers).

This course examines, on the one hand, the notions of artist and object of art and, on the other hand, the question of the meaning of art, by appealing to other disciplines of the human sciences such as anthropology, hermeneutics, psychology, semiology, and sociology. To do this, the different disciplines are not presented theoretically, but in an application to objects and issues in the history of art. Topics include: the artwork as a sign, the qualification of the object in the other fields, the notion of artist as proposed by the sociologist or the psychologist. The aim is to introduce students to the approaches proposed by these disciplines and to show them the contribution they can make to a better approach to the questions of meaning and definition of the objects being studied.

This course explores the sociology of organizations. It explores the structures of enterprise, and examines the many historical and contemporary theories that explain these structures. Students examine different critiques of these theories and studies, and how organizations and enterprises work on a sociological level.

This course closely examines the French Presidential Election of 2017 and its potential impact on the future of French politics. Topics include the rise of new political parties and the factors that led to the victory of Emanuel Macron.