Firstbridge

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’ lives differ in urban vs. wild environments? What role do – or should – institutions like zoos and museums play in preserving Earth’s legacy?

Capturing animals on film is as old as the medium of film itself: the world’s first bit of cinema is arguably of a horse running. Turning the lens of cinema on animals – 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 – 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 – both figuratively and literally – 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’s understanding of learning is being abstracted to machine learning, such as ChatGPT, and how information and data can be shared, and instructions given – in the form of recipes just as computer algorithms.

Throughout, each student will be encouraged to reflect on their own learning experience – 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?

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´s 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´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´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 regional and global 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’s vineyards get recognized as UNESCO World Heritage? Why did the multinational corporation Vallourec sell its last steel factory in its “home” town Montbard in 2022? By looking at two specific sectors, wine and steel, students will examine the social, political, and economic relationships between local, regional, national, and global actors and frameworks. Within global competition, wine-making is a French success story, whereas steel, once at the center of Europe’s industrial rise, has been in decline. Theoretical concepts like historical path-dependence, globalization, or multi-level governance will come alive as students pursue concrete research projects around wine and steel in Burgundy. A study trip to Montbard and Dijon will accompany our course.

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

The course will introduce the basic concepts behind digital images.

The students will:

• Understand the process of image formation both from a physical and digital point of view
• Understand how data can carry images and how these are represented on digital devices.
• Discover open-source tools for image creation and manipulation.
• Understand the recent results of AI in image production/manipulation

The course will cover six large topics:

1. Images as pixels matrix
2. Vectorial graphics
3. Computer Assisted Design
4. Drawing in 3D
5. Animations
6. Drawing machines

The object of this course is the study of the different modes of representation of space, objects, nature, people through time and the world.  Students will learn the essential modes of representation to express themselves, communicate or illustrate the world. These different skills will be acquired gradually, referring to the different modes of representation that will be relocated throughout history. 

Students will address the essential issues of drawing such as the representation of the body, volume, space, movement and their use through practical exercises.

We will study different modes of representation and projection of the world used throughout the ages and civilizations. We will study different types of anatomy, different rules of representation and projection (different types of perspectives (axonometric, conical, spherical)). We will also study the different tools developed since Antiquity to facilitate these representations (drawing machines, camera obscura, pantographs etc ...). We will make reconstructions of these tools in class. Different rules of drawing (from different continents and different eras) will also be discussed and compared.

David Tresilian’s CL1091 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? How is this culture seen in the students’ home countries? 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’s cities we explore the interaction between rapid social change, political power and professional planning. Today, uprisings fuelled 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 centres 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’s 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.

In this introductory management course we will study decision making processes of all types and the supporting analysis.  What communities and concepts have been created or developed by management?  How do employees and customers react?  How does the manager motivate or manipulate?  At what point (and why) may decisions cross ethical lines?  Students will perform research, analyze cases, movies, and series as well as play an active role in business simulations. 

Given that there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, why are some societies so obsessed with separating people into groups and referring to differences between groups as “racial”? Humans have always identified some people as “Us” and everybody else as “Other,” but the “scientific” discourse of race dates from the 19th century. After examining what science can say about the origins and evolution of our species, students will look at how racialized discourse came into use, how it came to justify slavery and imperialism, how it gave rise to eugenics, and how it can culminate in the ultimate denial of the kinship of humanity, genocide.

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 – the place of money in our world, the experience of debt, the forces that organize our desires and constrain our freedoms. Economic texts – even when they are full of mathematics – 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. 

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?

We often have preconceptions about the languages, dialects and accents spoken in our home countries or elsewhere. An accent, for example, may carry a particular status. One language might be used in schools, while another is spoken at home. A certain dialect might be used by news presenters, while another is not. Where do these ideas and customs come from? How do they affect speech communities and their relationships with other communities? What happens when different languages and dialects come into contact with each other? How do languages and dialects evolve over time and how is this evolution viewed within and outside of specific speech communities? Taking a diachronic perspective, we will examine the movement of people in the Middle East to see how their languages and dialects evolved. We will then follow the movement of people into Europe and the Americas, where a myriad of languages are spoken. Shifting to a synchronic perspective, the course will contemplate language interaction in multilingual communities and within multilingual individuals, code-switching between one’s languages, and the development of pidgins and creoles. Case studies, fieldwork, and reports of your own linguistic experience will be an integral part of the course. 

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.

The math-science approach will allow us to examine the origin and evolution of gender statistics, including how the data is collected, analyzed, and presented through case studies. Gender statistics play a key role in measuring gender gaps and assessing progress towards gender equality. 

The performing arts approach will serve to explore how artists question gender issues through multidisciplinary art forms. Contemporary performer artists use the art scene to deconstruct gender stereotypes and create new gender narratives interrogating us on gender evolution. We will see how the art scene develops sociological and philosophical topics.

In this class we consider authors who have used narratives, essays, journals, correspondence, and playfully inventive forms to explore different aspects of self-knowledge. The course has critical and creative components. Critical, since students develop skills of reading analytically and learning how to situate a text within a particular historical context. Creative, since students practice autobiographical writing in the forms deployed by their assigned authors. By learning how others have documented their experience across different genres, students become better readers of themselves and the world around them. They moreover enhance their ability to articulate this understanding in writing with greater clarity. Authors studied may include Saint Augustine, Michael de Montaigne, Madame de Sévigné, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vincent van Gogh, Jules Renard, Charlotte Salomon, Alejandra Pizarnik, Joe Brainard, Maryse Condé, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Han Kang, and Maria Stepanova.

In this class, we will read novels and short stories that engage with the city of Paris—its history, rhythms, and the rich array of cultural traditions that converge and coexist to compose it. Students will use readings as models for their own creative writing, which will also develop from excursions that move us out into the city to explore lesser-known neighborhoods, learn about the backgrounds of the people who live there, and discover the stories behind street names or monuments. We’ll study techniques for writing place in an affective, engaging way, and, at the same time, use our creative practice as a vector of curiosity, driving us to explore and encounter layers of literary culture in the city in which we live and write. We’ll read (or watch) works by Georges Perec, James Baldwin, Agnes Varda, Patrick Modiano, Maude Casey, Yoko Tawada, Leila Slimani, Charles Baudelaire, Mavis Gallant, and Edgar Allen Poe.

Witnessing an event implies a variety of questions related to involvement and agency. Indeed, individuals can either be witnesses/bystanders, thereby solely observing, while others can be victims or perpetrators actively participating in the event. Moreover, speaking about an event does not necessarily require physical presence; it can be done in absentia. Direct and indirect witnessing can both lead to an act of testifying, one that can possibly take various forms. In this FirstBridge course, we will examine literary, visual, and graphic representations of events that are experienced, seen, recounted, and transmitted. These literary, visual, and graphic works, labeled as testimonies, will allow us to analyze how to translate into words events that often leave us 'speechless' or that are latently processed. Students will focus on philosophical and literary debates regarding the ethical implications of aesthetic representations of violence and revolt. Questions about whether representing the event can lead to regaining a sense of agency will be addressed. Students will also consider the role of listening and of the reader in a potential testimonial chain that could permit different forms of engagement and participation.

The central focus of this Firstbridge course is the evolving notions of ‘war’ and ‘crime’ from the end of World War II to the present day. In the first half of the 20th century, the concept of ‘war crime’ reinvented international law in curious ways. During the Nuremberg trials, war as an event was judicialized- subject to not only to international relations, but to international law. In their aftermath, there has been a transformation in the way law engages with both ‘war’ and ‘crime’ as legal categories that shapes global discourse today. In this course, students will map the legal transformation of war by examining a certain oppositional relationships- between politics and law, local forms of justice and ‘global’ legal spectacles, collective guilt and individual responsibility, victimhood and perpetration.

Narrating war and violence through a criminal trial is a work of memory and affect as well as of legal norms. The promise of law is that it delivers both justice and a form of truth. It does so by telling compelling stories of human suffering through the binary of guilt and innocence. But this function is juxtaposed with its own limitations: law’s compatibility with history, its narrow sense of proportion and enforcement, and its aspiration for legitimacy and universality. In this course, we will learn what it entails to talk about war and violence in the language of criminal law by engaging two fundamental questions: How does law narrate war and crime? What does it highlight and what does it erase?