91传媒

This course will explore the inner and outer worlds of animals in the contemporary world, in which humans are dramatically altering natural landscapes across the globe. We will begin by exploring the evolution and diversification of the animal kingdom. What explains the marvelous variety of behavioral and morphological traits that we can see today? Why do peacocks have such colorful tails? Why do pigeons puff up and strut around after each other in the spring? How do bees find food? Why do some animals live in groups, while others live alone? Why are there so many big mammals in Africa? We will then examine how humans fit into this family tree. When did humans evolve, why do we look and act the way we do, and how did we make our way to the top of the food chain? Finally, we will address the enormous impact that humans have had on this planet since our arrival, an epoch known as the Anthropocene. What are the major threats to biodiversity, and how can we mitigate them? Where is the wildlife in our cities, and how do animals鈥� lives differ in urban vs. wild environments? What role do 鈥� or should 鈥� institutions like zoos and museums play in preserving Earth鈥檚 legacy?

Capturing animals on film is as old as the medium of film itself: the world鈥檚 first bit of cinema is arguably of a horse running. Turning the lens of cinema on animals 鈥� whether felines, fishes, or microbes - and by extension on the ecosystems we live in, raises questions about the role of cinema in our understanding of nonhumans. What do these strange beings think about? How do they navigate their worlds? How do they get food, find a mate, sense danger, build a home? Are their senses the same as humans? How do different species interact in the same ecosystem? This hybrid theory-practice course will examine how cinema can explore these questions, both through the analysis of different representations of animals on the screen, as well as by making films with a focus on animals in different Parisian zoos and aquariums. As a production course, students will be trained in experimental and documentary film and sound methods specific to animal behavior and will produce creative film and sound sketches and a final film or sound project that considers how film can be used to attune to other ways of being. No prior experience in film or sound is necessary.

This course equips students with the tools to explore the underlying universality of all human languages while celebrating the distinctive features that render their own languages unique and, at times, challenging to learn. Through an array of immersive activities and thought-provoking discussions, students will hone their ability to conquer language acquisition challenges. By the end of the course, they will not only have a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity but also possess the skills necessary to effectively teach their language to classmates, children, or adults while studying in Paris. Whether you're passionate about language acquisition or teaching, this course offers a dynamic platform for exploring the intricacies of human communication and the art of language pedagogy.

Humans all over the world developed mathematical methods and concepts in order to learn and solve problems about their families, their societies, their world and their universe. This process, while seen as the achievement of groups of people, mirrors many of the key factors individuals address in their own voyages of learning 鈥� curiosity and attention; creativity and intuition; exploration and problem solving, as well as the importance of sociality, collaboration and memory.

In this course we will trace some of these ideas, starting with an autobiography of our own experiences in this domain. We will look at similarities and differences in ways that people from a number of different parts of the world created notions of number and shape and how that helped them better understand and navigate 鈥� both figuratively and literally 鈥� their worlds.

We will investigate the relationships between an explanation, a justification and a proof; between observations, data and conclusions; and between an analogy, a mental model and a mathematical model. Exploring patterns and coding information, we will invent artificial languages and make music. We will see how humanity鈥檚 understanding of learning is being abstracted to machine learning, such as ChatGPT, and how information and data can be shared, and instructions given 鈥� in the form of recipes just as computer algorithms.

Throughout, each student will be encouraged to reflect on their own learning experience 鈥� how do they learn? How can they adapt their learning style to different subjects? How can they apply the principles of curiosity, creativity, problem solving and collaboration to their own learning voyage?

Cultural diversity describes the variety of human experiences based on different cultures. This term is used in many parts of our lives including educational contexts, organizations and businesses, the art world, or political discourses and policy making. In this course, we will explore the social, political, and historical aspects of cultural diversity and difference. Through an interdisciplinary social science lens, we will examine the following questions: How do we experience and understand cultural diversity and difference? How do diversity and differences shape and are shaped by systems that affect individuals, families, communities, and society? How do notions of cultural diversity and difference contribute to practices of exclusions or social transformation and empowerment? We will explore these questions by examining the experiences of diversity, and dynamics of oppression and privilege in local, domestic and global contexts.

Human migration has shaped the fabrics of the modern world: not only racial conflicts that caused violence and slavery, but also the fine touches we put on our accent, dress and diet to blend in; not only heated congressional debates on whether refugees deserve a spot in 鈥渙ur鈥� society, but also the joy and frustration we experience when navigating a European capital city. How to make sense of our mobile life, treat others with kindness, and address pressing sociopolitical challenges brought by human migration? In this course, we examine how human migration takes place within social, cultural, and political contexts. To showcase the breadth of the field, this course scales up topics from individual experience (such as what objects one brings during studying abroad to maintain a sense of home) to social relations (such as how 鈥淲hite Muslims鈥� negotiate their identity in front of racial/religious others), to national governance (such as the exclusive role of national border and the perils involved in its crossing), and to global affairs (such as how American white couples rent Indian wombs to bear children for them). These topics are informed by major theoretical schools, including the Marxist class paradigm that addresses labor and material condition, symbolic interactionism that articulates how we perform identity work by telling stories, and social constructionism that questions the status quo. At the practical level, this course introduces a range of interdisciplinary methods including quantitative research, autobiography, ethnography, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, policy research, and intersectional analysis.

How have food, drinks, and drugs shaped the modern world economy? What empires & global social systems have risen and fallen in contests over crops, animals & the people who raise them? How do recent human mass migrations relate to the history of food & drugs? This course puts crops, stimulants, and intoxicants at the center of major global history topics since 1500. Students will gain insight into understanding and critiquing historical evidence, how to write a college-level essay in history and related social sciences, and how to undertake historical research using the resources of our globally connected library at AUP.

History cannot be understood out of it鈥檚 social, political and economic context. Actually, most historical events that required decision making can be explained by the need or the use of resources (food or any other). Science explains how natural resources influence History represents a biological approach to these historical events, consistently tackling to proof that they are not independent from their environmental context.

This course麓s schedule and outline are coordinated with its counterpart course Food, Drinks, and Drugs in World History taught by Professor Rosengarten (historian) and is focused on explaining the biological reasons why the historical events portrayed in her course happened.

The course is taught twice a week in two different ways: lectures structured over audiovisual content and flipped teaching, using the student麓s findings to deepen into the different lectures.

By looking at Burgundy, students will explore their new home, France, through one of its iconic regions.

A focus on Burgundy shows the limitations of national perspectives, from the time of the dukes and their rivalry with the kings of France to how the European Union, international organizations and world markets affect us today. Burgundy is not just French, it is enmeshed in larger contexts, and its fascinating history continues to shape its contemporary dynamics.

Why is Burgundy a region and not a state? How did Cassis de Dijon, the key ingredient of the Kir Royal cocktail, shape the course of European integration? How did the climats of Burgundy鈥檚 vineyards get recognized as UNESCO World Heritage? Why did the multinational corporation Vallourec sell its last steel factory in its 鈥渉ome鈥� town Montbard in 2022? Why do cattle farmers in Burgundy turn town signs upside down?

Studying specific questions in Burgundy, students will investigate the social, political, and economic relationships between local, regional, national, and global actors and frameworks. Theoretical concepts like historical path-dependence, globalization, or multi-level governance will come alive as we examine local-global interactions in Burgundy.

A study trip to Montbard and Dijon (October 2026) will accompany our course.

Through the looking glass, students will discover the place of wine in Burgundy, Paris, France, Europe and the world across millennia.

Wine, as they say, has deep roots. An exploration of wine, with an emphasis on the rise of the wine region of Burgundy, reveals the deep interconnectedness of regional, national, continental and world economics, politics and culture. We will explore the multiple scales as well as local, national, European and global actors who have made wine into the exceptional product it is today.

Where did wine as we know it come from? How did it spread across Europe and how did French regions become some of the most important producers of wine in the world? What role did religion play in the development and establishment of a wine culture? Why did certain regions in France focus on making specific types of wines and why is Burgundy the home to the noble varietals of pinot noir and chardonnay? How did a wine that has long been associated with being made by humble local families, come to be served on tables of nobles, then kings, then captains of industry around the world? Why do so few people have access to these fine wines?

By exploring the history of wine, students will examine the cultural, religious and political forces that shaped the modern world. From the elaboration of unprecedented agriculture techniques to medieval monasteries to public health and the art market, global wine consumption and commerce has contributed to some of the most everyday and exceptional practices of public and private life. Our aim is to dig into wine history to study it from Greece to glassware.

A study trip to Montbard and Dijon will accompany our course. We may also have occasional wine tastings.

David Tresilian鈥檚 CL1099 course on Modern to Contemporary in the Arab World uses literature and film to introduce students to a region which is often poorly understood by outsiders. Providing sound foundations in twentieth-century literature from a range of Arab countries, the course brings students right up to the present. What is the situation in the Arab World, ten years after the uprisings of spring 2011? What are the current debates on identity and culture in the region? Where is cultural life at its most dynamic?听 The study of a diverse range of texts, films, and digital materials gives students a basis on which to reflect critically on these questions and use them as a basis for a final project.

Bringing together urban planning, architectural history and political geography, course ME1091 looks at cities in Western Asia and North Africa. It provides an overview of urban settlement in the Middle East from the beginnings of Islam to the eighteenth century, before focusing on the processes of urbanization in the region from 1800 until today. After looking at the specificities of the region鈥檚 cities we explore the interaction between rapid social change, political power and professional planning. Today, uprisings fueled by demands for social equity and democracy, major conflict driven migrations and the needs of capital all mark cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Students will reflect on issues related to the management, planning and design of extensive city regions, historic centers and poorly serviced self-built areas. Essentially, this course is an introduction to the challenges facing cities located at the critical meeting point of Africa and Eurasia.

This course invites students to study the exciting history of the development of the city of Paris through the lens of its architecture. From Ancient Roman times to the 19th-century projects of Haussmann and beyond, we will explore key architectural monuments within the context of their urban environments, and as often as possible, on site. Special attention will be given to the social, economic and political forces that helped to shape the appearance of the city throughout its history.

This course examines cultural (textual and visual) productions about minority identities in Paris. The city has always been a center attracting immigrants and refugees, who, in turn, influence the capital鈥檚 life and identity. After a short survey of pre-modern and modern times, the class focuses on the contemporary period with special emphasis on the traumatic legacy of the Second World War and colonial and postcolonial immigrations to the city. The course analyzes diverse representations of the tensions between marginalization and integration, between a universalist French identity and a multiculturalist Paris, and between diverging memories of traumatic histories.

The world of literature is often opposed to the world of economics, stressing imagination rather than reality, beauty rather than cost, subjective rather than objective realities. In this course, we will consider why it might be useful to challenge this opposition. Many great works of literature address the same themes and topics as economics 鈥� the place of money in our world, the experience of debt, the forces that organize our desires and constrain our freedoms. Economic texts 鈥� even when they are full of mathematics 鈥� tell stories and use images and metaphors. We will read foundational texts of economics (including work by Adam Smith and Karl Marx) alongside key literary texts from the past and the present in order to enrich and expand our understanding of historical and contemporary individual and social experience.听

This course is an introduction to money, debt, and taxes. To examine money, debt, and taxes we adopt a historical analysis based on old and new economic texts, some well-known, others hardly at all. The kinds of questions you will be able to answer by the end of the course include: why does money, of all things, have the ability to exchange all goods? How does money help our economy function? What causes inflation? How can you just invent a new kind of money like a cryptocurrency? What is debt and what role does it play in society? Is debt good, bad or something else? When and why were taxes invented? How can taxes keep or not a society together?听

What is a language? How many languages are there in the world? How do we go about counting them? How are languages traced to language families? Is there one prehistoric proto-language from which all languages evolved? In this course, we will investigate the diversity of languages and language families around the world, the structural characteristics of these languages, and how languages change over time.

Benefiting from the FirstBridge link to the course 鈥淪truggles, Cultures, Identities, and Revolutions in the Modern Middle East鈥�, this course will include an exploration of languages from the Middle East, both spoken and written, from antiquity to modern times. Finally, through collaborative projects, we will consider the issues of linguistic diversity and endangered languages.

Following the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, five founding moments have marked the history of the Middle East.

The first is the one of European promises, betrayals and establishment of maps and borders (1915 - 1920).

The second moment is that of the creation of Israel in 1947, followed by the First Arab Israeli war (1948-49), and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The third moment, 1973, is the one of the last Arab-Israeli war (in terms of State to state actor), the end of Nasserism, the oil boom and the rise of political Islam.

The fourth moment is that of the Iranian revolution in 1979 followed by the devastating Iraq-Iran war. It happened at the same moment when the Afghan jihad started against the Soviet army. Both events and their direct consequences led to 9/11 and to the series of conflicts in and around Iraq.

The fifth is the one that started in 2011, when revolutions against dictatorships erupted in many Arab countries. Conflicts, counter-revolutions and foreign military interventions followed and led to the series of crises that the Middle East (and the world) continue to witness today.

The course will explore these moments and will examine how the evolution of languages and dialects affected them culturally and politically.

This course approaches colonialism and its afterlives through literature and the arts produced in Africa and Europe. It looks at how writers, artists, and filmmakers have grappled with colonial and postcolonial experience, bearing witness to violence and displacement, challenging inherited narratives, and imagining forms of resistance and renewal. Moving from early modern encounters to the colonial and postcolonial periods, the course engages a broad range of works, including novels, poetry, film, photography, graphic narratives, music, and visual art. These cultural forms are studied not simply as reflections of history, but as active interventions that shape memory, social relations, and political imagination. Attention is given to questions of voice and representation, as well as to aesthetic choices such as narrative perspective, symbolism, the use of archives, and formal experimentation. By situating artistic works in their historical and cultural contexts, students are invited to consider how the arts address silences, unsettle dominant accounts of empire, and open up alternative ways of thinking about the past and its futures.

This course examines European colonialism as both a historical process and an ongoing condition whose effects continue to shape societies, politics, and cultures in Africa and Europe. It explores how colonial empires were built, justified, contested, and dismantled, and how their legacies persist beyond the formal end of empire. Beginning with early European expansion in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, the course analyzes colonialism as a system of economic exploitation, racialized violence, and political domination, as well as a site of resistance and negotiation. With a focus on Africa, case studies range from the transatlantic slave trade and nineteenth-century imperial partition to the crises of decolonization. Moments of rupture 鈥� war, genocide, and revolution 鈥� are emphasized while being situated within longer imperial histories. The course combines historical scholarship with primary sources to examine colonial experience, memory, and empire鈥檚 afterlives. Museum visits in Paris and hands-on engagement with archival materials, visual culture, and media narratives encourage critical reflection on how colonial histories are remembered and contested today. By the end of the course, students will be able to situate contemporary debates about diversity, human rights, and environmental crisis within deeper imperial histories and analyze the enduring entanglements between Africa and Europe.

Mathematics is often seen merely as the study of numbers, but that is only a tiny fraction of what it truly encompasses. In essence, mathematics is the art of reasoning and abstraction, a way to understand and explain the world around us. It lies at the heart of humanity鈥檚 enduring desire to make sense of what we observe and to push the boundaries of what we know.

This course will introduce you to the study of thinking itself 鈥� the field of logic. Logic gives structure to the information we take in, to our thoughts, and to the way we communicate through language. Through engaging with games and puzzles, we will open our minds to new ways of thinking - thinking creatively, recognizing patterns, and discovering new paths for thought. We will practice building sound reasoning and learn to recognize fallacious ones. We will also learn the boundaries of logic 鈥� situations where rational methods fail and paradoxes emerge. And finally, we will see how studying the structure of our own thoughts has helped us teach machines to 鈥渢hink鈥�.

We don鈥檛 know exactly when philosophy began, but we do know that from its earliest days, the concept of logos was central. In ancient Greek, logos means both discourse and reasoning highlighting the two central dimensions of philosophy: the ability to reason through words.

In this course, we will explore how philosophers from antiquity onward practiced and refined the art of thinking. We鈥檒l examine how their commitment to proper reasoning shaped not only their ideas but also their way of life. Thinking well was not just an intellectual exercise it was a form of training, a discipline that empowered the mind.

By engaging with philosophical methods of reasoning, students will strengthen their ability to think clearly and rigorously. Practicing the art of thinking in this way enhances not only philosophical understanding but also improves performance across other disciplines and enriches everyday life.

This course provides a thorough examination of Paris fashion, exploring it as both a cultural institution and a global economic force. Tracking its evolution from 19th-century artisan workshops to modern multinational luxury conglomerates, the course examines how Paris has secured and sustained its status as the symbolic and commercial epicentre of fashion. Starting with the emergence of haute couture under pioneers such as Charles Frederick Worth, students analyze how craftsmanship, exclusivity and artistic authorship became central to the Parisian model. It then investigates the creative revolutions of designers such as Gabrielle Chanel and Christian Dior, whose work reshaped modern aesthetics and consumer culture. Moving into the late 20th and 21st centuries, the course will examine the transformation of family-owned couture houses into global luxury corporations. Particular attention is given to the rise of conglomerates such as LVMH and Kering, analyzing how branding, licensing, marketing, supply chain management and financialization have reshaped the industry. Finally, the course critically engages with the contemporary challenges facing the Paris fashion system, such as sustainability, ethical production, diversity, technological innovation and competition from other global fashion capitals. 听

This course introduces students to the business of fashion through the lens of political economy. Moving beyond the glamour of the runway, we ask: How does capitalism shape what we wear, who makes it, and what does it mean? Students will analyze the fashion industry as a complex system of production, value creation, and power relations.听

The course is organized in four movements. We begin with foundational concepts from materialist political economy labor, value, the working day, machinery applied directly to garment production. We then examine the institutional structures of the fashion industry: corporate governance, global value chains, conglomerates, and financialization. From there, we confront the system's inherent contradictions: labor exploitation, ecological crisis, and ethical conflicts such as the anti-fur movement. Finally, we ask how the industry might transform.听

Throughout the semester, students鈥� assessment integrates historical, structural, and critical perspectives. The module runs in parallel with a fashion history course, creating a rich dialogue between aesthetics and economics. No prior business knowledge is required only curiosity about the forces that dress the world.