History

This course covers 1000-1500 in premodern Spain. Through a selection of poems, chronicles, and legal works, students examine the ideological and social development of the peninsula through the eyes of those who witnessed it. The aim of this approach is to better grasp the interplay between ideas and writing from multiple perspectives. The selected texts demonstrate the depiction and role of women, Muslims, Jews, conversos (recent Jewish converts to Christianity), nobles, knights, and kings during the time period, giving a better insight into the way written media shaped the views and ideals of those who lived then, as well as the current understanding of the era. Themes include heroes and villains; the description of women; marginalized groups (e.g., Muslims); and the power of entertainment as a moral, persuasive, and educational tool. Through these thematic axes, students understand the development of history and ideas, as well as the diversity of perspectives and people from the Middle Ages.

Few chapters in all of history are as dramatic—both tragic and spectacular--as modern Jewish history. The apparent success of Jewish emancipation was challenged by popular and religious non-Jewish opposition, and efforts among Jews to control or turn back such changes. No matter what, Judaism and Jews did not stand still. Antisemitism gained traction as reactionary utopia, along with the persistence of traditional prejudice and discrimination. Against this background there arose a variety of Jewish ideologies, including: Modern Orthodoxy, Reform Judaism, Zionism, Territorialism, Variants of socialism, "Ultra" orthodoxies, and National extremism. 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jewish life changed radically, and European Jewry came close to being totally wiped out in the Holocaust. Since the late eighteenth century, Jews had sought new ways to think about and live in the modern world. Numerous individuals of Jewish origin took the lead in attempting to understand the changes wrought by modernity—including: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Bertha Pappenheimer, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. 

This course is about India from the 15th to the mid-18th centuries. This was a period of sometimes slow or subtle, occasionally cataclysmic, but often palpable transformation, and students examine the ways in which what people believed, where and how they lived, their relationship to the state and its power, and how they expressed themselves was changing. Although the course focuses first and foremost on India, by placing its history in its global context throughout this course, the class scrutinizes the emerging notion of a "global early modernity."

This course introduces students to the key texts, arguments and controversies in European political thought from the end of the 17th century to the present. This is based on the close reading of classic and complex texts, situated in their broader intellectual and historical context. A single key thinker is typically central to each week’s teaching, but these thinkers are read in relation to the political environments that shaped them and the debates in which they participated. Students explore the development of the central assumptions, arguments, institutions, and concepts that have played and continue to play a crucial role in political organization and debate across the Western world and beyond. 

This course analyzes the major upheavals that have shaped the Middle East and North Africa's strategic landscape in the post-Cold War era. It is structured around three key modules. The first provides a chronological overview, from the 1990s "Unipolar Moment" to the collapse of the Syrian regime in December 2024. The second focuses on the persistence of authoritarianism, along with the violent backlash and counterrevolutions that followed the Arab Spring. The third examines U.S. foreign policy and the Global War on Terror. Special attention is given to the Proxy Wars and Culture Wars that will define the future of the region, to the shifting alliances within a context of competitive multipolarity, and to civil societies, literature, cinema, cultural and intellectual fault lines.

This course deals with collective mobilizations of working class men and women (riots, strikes, syndicalism, demonstrations) from the 18th century to today. In history, the study of revolts and revolutions has raised the question of the people's participation in national politics. The revolting working classes are indeed a strong representation, full of meaning, images, and symbols. This image is perhaps all the more central in France where the national narrative is built on the legacy of the French Revolution, when the people imposed democracy. This course presents the very history of these mobilizations, of their action patterns and objects of contestation, while focusing on men and women who revolt. It outlines the history of ideas and political movements (socialism, communism, anarchism, etc) along with the history of political and union organizations that structured part of the popular protests. This course examines collective and popular mobilizations from the revolutionary period to today and analyzes the role of these mobilizations on political, social, and cultural history of contemporary France.

In this course, students analyze and discuss the different cultural forms (literature, film, art, philosophy, etc.) of the last 200 years that have influenced Western tradition, from Goethe to Miyazaki. The course aims to be a theoretical, practical, and experiential journey that helps students question and reflect on the humanities and their current relationship with nature, creating a baseline for analyzing any other discipline with ecological thought. This course is taught in Spanish and requires level B2 Spanish language background.

Although present for two thousand years in Gaul and then in France, Jews are like a “blind spot” in the national narrative. They are only sporadically mentioned in national history as persecuted (crusades, Dreyfus affair, Holocaust). Yet they have contributed to the construction of France at every period through their political, economic, religious, scientific, and cultural input. This course sheds light on more than 2000 years of this rich and eventful relationship, alternating phases of greatness, success, and integration followed by persecution and expulsion, then reconstruction. It is a national history but also a multiregional history, from the Comtat Venaissin to Provence, from Occitania to Alsace, Lorraine and Aquitaine, all the way to the fairs of Champagne and Paris. The course conducts a political reflection on the relationship of a minority constituted as a nation with the French state, and then on its successful integration. It examines the evolution of a religious minority in the very Catholic kingdom of France. Finally, the course addresses social, cultural, and economic history. It highlights the contribution of the Jews to France, but also of France to the Jews, and discovers the richness and diversity of the political, social, economic, scientific, cultural, and religious history of the Jews in France over the past 2000 years and their contribution to France's progress towards modernity.

The 20th century was marked by the clash of ideologies—fascism, Nazism, communism—and unprecedented violence. Its literary history, in turn, was shaped by bold formal experimentation (modernism) and the emergence of voices from regions and groups previously underrepresented. Through literature, particularly the novel, the course examines how writers grappled with this apocalyptic century. The novel, with its focus on individual experience and narrative complexity, provides a unique, non-ideological lens to engage with reality and history. It studies it through works by Dostoevsky, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Kundera, Garcia Marquez, Achebe and others.

This course argues for the importance of animals in the history of human society and culture. It examines the evolution of human and animal relationships, the role of animals in agriculture and society, animals in war, conquest, and empire, and the interconnected histories of human, animal, and environmental health. It analyzes the historical construction of the categories of "human" and "animal," and its implications for medicine, science, and animal rights. Themes examined include a history of domestication, animals as vectors of illness and plague in the Middle Ages, the Scientific Revolution and animal experimentation, the discovery of America and the Columbian Exchange, the emergence of animal rights in the 19th century, and animals, extinction, and climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries.