University of Bordeaux

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.

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 covers African American movements including CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality (1942), which concentrated on strategies such as sit-ins and picket lines; the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957); the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement dedicated to put an end to segregation practices and offer alternate means to achieve somewhat similar ends: the transformation of American democratic institutions. It addresses the movement from litigation and nonviolent action to a more radical approach, and later from black power to black politics and the Black Lives Matter movement. The course also covers the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a multifaceted cultural movement which arose from the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement. It included all the arts – music, literature, theater, dance, the visual arts – and relied on regional cultural infrastructure built after the major riots which erupted during the first half of the 1960s. It was embodied by African American artists and intellectuals, and deeply influenced American culture, in particular the relationship between popular culture and “high” culture, as well as other minority arts in the same period. The course looks at its history, its different forms, its sources and its heritage.

In a process of progressive construction of the knowledge, fields, sources and methods of the history of contemporary worlds, the introduction to the history of the 20th century constitutes an essential second stage. While the history of the 20th century is traditionally approached from the top, i.e. national and international institutions, democratic and totalitarian political regimes, and economic and social theories, and while it is primarily marked by the two world wars and the tensions of international economic crises, it must also be approached from the bottom, at the level of societies and individuals. The course studies the common experiences, cooperation, and exchanges that have developed in different areas over a long twentieth century.

This course explores topics of machine learning and deep learning, examining both the foundations and applications of the topics. Starting with the basics of how to pre-process data, the course then ventures into linear models. Further topics include cross validation, support vector machines, kernels, regularization, boosting, bootstrap aggregating, and stacking.