FirstBridge is the hallmark of your first year at AUP. This dynamic, innovative learning experience provides a solid foundation for the rigor of future academic work at AUP and allows you to gain new knowledge and skills that you will use outside the university and beyond in your professional life. You will explore a range of interdisciplinary issues and questions, and complete individual and team projects while improving vital skills in writing, public speaking and information literacy. It will connect you with the people and resources at AUP that will help you chart a critical pathway to academic and personal success. It is both an introduction to university life at AUP and an introduction to the cosmopolitan city of Paris.
You may be arriving at AUP with a strong sense of your intellectual interests and desired educational and career path, or you may not. FirstBridge is designed to help you confirm interests and explore new ones, to go outside of your comfort zone and take risks. If you have decided on a major or minor, we encourage you to choose a FirstBridge that is outside of this field. The following descriptions will help you to decide which FirstBridge is right for you. Follow the link that accompanies each FirstBridge, read the course descriptions carefully and let them spark your curiosity.
This year, FirstBridge courses come in two different formats:
Be sure to check not only the course descriptions but also the course format before making your final selection.
This FirstBridge course is at the crossroads of Arts and Computer Science. Its goal is to give an introduction to the representation of the world from traditional drawing techniques and digital perspectives.
The students will discover how the representation technics evolved with human history, from the first symbolic representation up to computer-assisted design.
They will acquire manual and digital drawing skills allowing them to communicate graphically with diverse means of expression.
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.
The course will introduce the basic concepts behind digital images.
The students will:
The course will cover six large topics:
This FirstBridge pairing brings together the study of literature and the study of economics, two of the most important ways we have developed for understanding human and social behavior. The disciplines might seem to be opposed to one another: economics seems to deal with the hard facts of the world, literature is often described in terms of beauty, imagination, creativity. We will explore and challenge that opposition, looking at the role of fiction, creativity, and imagination in economics, and the way in which literature models and represents economic behavior. We will consider how the two ways of thinking address a range of themes, including gift exchange, the commodity, value, money, and debt. By doing so we will gain a good understanding of some key concepts in the study of economics and of literature. But we will also consider how studying literature might make you a better economist, and how studying economics could make you a better reader of literature.
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?
The cultures of the Middle East and North Africa are plural. Though marked by monotheism, this region, running from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Arabian Gulf in the East, is home to diverse languages and cultures, cities and landscapes. In this First Bridge, students discover the region’s societies through literature, cinema, and other materials. They also study the Middle East’s urbanism and architecture, examining cities as diverse as Mecca and Médina, Cairo and Istanbul, Fès, Tunis and Diyarbakir, along with the capsular metropolises of the Gulf emirates. With these twinned classes, students find out how several disciplines, including cultural geography, urban planning and architectural history, as well as literature and cinema, construct knowledge. Paris, city of migrants, offers us museums and neighborhoods to visit that are important to Middle Eastern diasporas. Longer trips outside Paris are planned.
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 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.
In this First Bridge, students approach the essential question of identity—Who am I?—by reading a variety of autobiographical prose from antiquity to the present; they also interact with their physical, urban environment and its global literary legacy through their own writing. Students do this by responding creatively to the work of writers for whom Paris and other locales have served as setting and inspiration, while contemplating works that excavate the self in a variety of genres. This course encourages the playful effort of retracing the steps of the writers we will read (some of whom we will meet in person), and outings to museums and other locations in Paris will be frequent.
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.
All of us are shaped by constructs, myths and paradigms we aren’t even aware of, but that doesn’t keep them from having decisive impacts on how we live our lives and how we interact with others. Such constructs vary across and within cultures and change constantly, complicating our interactions – and sometimes making them quite contentious. There is no biological basis to the shifting category of “race,” yet our societies use it to organize and justify a range of activities and mindsets. Where does that originate and why do we continue? Brands, target markets, and even financial transactions are all equally invented concepts, but managers, organizations and customers must take them into account when making decisions: only by understanding and navigating them will their personal and organizational objectives be met. This FirstBridge will look at the concrete and the mutable from the origins of our species to contemporary practice. *Please note this course has been filled.*
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.
We hear and read about struggles in many regions in the world, but how much do we know about the origins and causes of these struggles and about the cultural and linguistic richness of the societies in these regions? This FirstBridge will examine this question through the perspectives of history, politics, and linguistics. The history and politics course will examine the Middle East and its contemporary politics, including the evolution of Arabic through political and social developments and its relation to other languages in the region. The region’s rich array of languages and their histories, as well as languages in other parts of the world, will be the focus of the linguistics course. Excursions that investigate historical, political and linguistic relations between Europe and the Middle East through European, French and Parisian environments will also be a part of the course, as well as external speakers, film screenings, and individual and group research projects based on relevant questions identified together during the semester.
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.
This course uses food as an entry point into investigating identity formation and environmental management over space and time in the Atlantic World. The Atlantic is a heterogenous space of different environments, peoples, and cultures between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Yet, historians and anthropologists have proposed considering the “Atlantic theater” as a research category for understanding human mobility and environmental change in a region collectively shaped by diasporas of people, plants, and pathogens since c. 1500. The course is led by a historian (Rosengarten) and a biodiversity scientist (Caballer Gutierrez); each week of the first semester students will think about one crop, dish, or food culture that plays a prominent role in Atlantic history. We will contextualize these items both historically and ecologically as we move around the ocean. Our weekly case studies include questions such as: what could a Viking arriving in 10th-century Iceland eat and cultivate in volcanic soils? Where can sugarcane grow, and how did sugar production move from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic to drive the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 15th century? How does the history of the peanut industry in Senegal explain Senegalese national dishes and 19th-century French imperial expansion? What are the consequences of crude oil runoff in the Niger Delta region for Nigerian populations that do not consent to ingesting it, but are nonetheless exposed to this toxicity by today’s Big Oil industries? Food and crop histories show us how the Atlantic world of uneven geopolitical relationships was forged in modern history. At the same time, they provide insight into the present and futures of climate change and uneven environmental degradation for communities around the world. Throughout our Atlantic itinerary, we ask: do food and consumption practices mirror or obscure our historically shifting identities?
Are there any minorities in France? Some interpretations of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” a foundational document for the country, insist that for all citizens to be equal there must be no differentiation between individuals. And yet, slavery, after being abolished in 1794, was reestablished in overseas territories in 1802; practitioners of religions other than Catholicism have not always enjoyed equal protections under the law; Algerian natives were not afforded the same political rights as European colonists; women gained the right to vote in 1944.This FYE will look at historical documents and fictional representations by authors like Dumas, Sand, and Ernaux, of both French universalist ideals and minority experiences to see where current debates about identity politics in France come from. The first semester will focus on the long nineteenth century, from the revolution to the first world war. The second semester will trace the legacy of the debates we explored in the fall, culminating in a study trip to two different memorials to elements of French history, Le Puy du Fou and the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage in Nantes.
This First Year Exploratory course explores music by combining approaches from Film Studies and Comparative Literature and investigates the role of place in the production and reception of musical, cinematic and literary works. How do the specifics of place shape the reciprocal relations between music, literature and film? In what ways do writing and film critique, record and convey musicality? What are the political and cultural dimensions of music production, when viewed from the lens of journalistic and critical writing or documentary and narrative filmmaking? Students will be encouraged to reflect on music they enjoy already, as well as making new musical discoveries. Indeed, students will engage with a diverse array of musical genres—from jazz to contemporary rap, from pop and rock to electronic and experimental music—and investigate the ways in which different forms of music inspired writers and filmmakers of fiction and non-fiction.
The first semester of the course will overview theoretical questions, supplemented with frequent field trips to music venues, museums and cinemas and include exercises in creative, journalistic and scholarly writing. One aim will be to transform preconceived notions of Paris as a place of music and unveil a rich array of Francophone musical and experimental culture. We will engage in listening and viewing exercises and apply experiential analytical techniques in order to enhance our critical understanding and appreciation of the arts of writing, film and music, anchored as they are in distinct “scenes” and places of Paris. The second semester will feature a project-based study trip to a European capital of music (Berlin or London), with a concomitant charting of its literary and cinematic legacies, which will in turn expand the students’ engagement with important “scenes” of musical culture. The course will also include collaborative activities, a program of guest speakers and workshops from figures from the worlds of music, writing and film.
This course asks how anthropology and literature can allow us to interpret and navigate French culture. It is structured around the first-year student’s encounter with France as an urban, cosmopolitan space (Paris) and as a rural country, full of local history and legend (Cevennes region). In the first semester, you will learn to write in specific anthropological and literary genres (field notes, prose poems etc.). You will then be “sent into the field” - the metro system, neighbourhoods and cafés – in order to produce ethnographic and literary writing about these spaces of cultural belonging and artistic creativity. The second semester shifts your focus from the urban geography of Paris to rural lifeworlds. A five-day field trip to a remote hamlet in the Cevennes will allow you to retrace Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous donkey travels, but also to learn about the past and present of this “terroir” – the fiery memories of Protestant revolt, the legacies of mining, enduring masonry traditions of dry stone, chestnut cultivation, and tourism. You will discover that being an enquiring ethnographer can allow you to become a better writer, just as being a sensitive writer can spark ethnographic insights. France thus becomes both a field of ethnographic investigation and a playground for critical and creative work.
Two global cities of great history, among the very largest in Europe, home to populations of many origins. How do these cities function on a daily basis? How do their inhabitants build meaning in their lives? How do they connect with each other, turning space into place? Seen as typical of the technicized territories in which so much of humanity lives today, our two cities reflect the many challenges facing our societies.
Visits to sites in Paris are an integral part of the course as is a journey to İstanbul in the spring semester.
Paris Through its Artists is a course that introduces students to the city of Paris through the many artists who have lived here and created work inspired by this city. The purpose of the course is two-fold: students will delve into the artistic communities that thrived in the city during the beginning of the twentieth century. They will also produce creative work based on the lives and works of artists that they encounter.
We will begin with a history of Paris around the French Revolution, followed by a survey of Haussmann-era Paris. A quick look at Impressionism will be followed by an in-depth study of artists working in the early 20th century. We will focus on how the two World Wars changed the lives of artists forever and how the technological advancements of that time made possible new modes of storytelling, painting, performance, and poetry. But most importantly, we will delve deep into the lives of artists in Paris and the deep influence that the city of Paris has had on its artists, writers, and poets.
Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami, oil spills, chemical spills, floods, dam failures, nuclear meltdowns, tornadoes, and avalanches. Disasters can have crippling consequences for people and their communities. The problem of risk mitigation and recovery must include the physical, societal, economic, legal, political, logistic, medical, and financial points of view. In this course you will look at the entire anatomy, from cause to consequence to cleanup, of the greatest disasters of our time.
These FirstBridge courses explore how discoveries in astronomy have shaped the cultural, political, and scientific development of humanity. They raise questions about the existence of other beings, including sentinel AI and aliens, and explore ways in which we can coexist.
Space exploration holds political and strategic significance. Military projects related to space travel held a crucial role in the balance of power towards the end of the Cold War. Yet the constant increase in the cost of space technology ultimately made it necessary to pool global resources and postpone confrontation. An entire economy has emerged around space travel, situated in changing cultural attitudes. Discover how this context provides opportunities to divert power away from the military industrial complex and towards efforts leading to peace.
Experimental science and data science started with Galileo Galilei's studies of the Earth gravity and celestial objects. In this first bridge, we discuss how discoveries in astronomy has shaped the cultural evolution and scientific development. We will investigate several great astronomical observations of the sun, planets, stars, galaxies, cosmology in different cultures/countries
In this FirstBridge we will explore our conceptions of and relationship to nature. In one half of the course, this will be done through discussing anthropological and historical case studies, revealing how human imagination, politics, social systems and design practices collectively shape ideas of nature, landscape, wilderness and ecology. The other half of the course will explore the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and how it informs the conceptual, legal, and political framework that colours and often circumscribes humanity’s relationship with nature and ability to respond to the climate crisis. With a clear view of the problems, we will then discuss how humanity can more effectively address the climate crisis.
This course will explore the legacy of the Enlightenment conceptions of nature, human nature, and improvement/progress in contemporary thought, law, and politics. Particularly, we will focus on how these idea colour and frame our conceptions of property, justice, rights,sovereignty and the emergence of nation-ness. This will be done with a focus on investigating how this legacy informs and often circumscribes our relationship with the natural world and inhibits our ability to respond to the climate crisis. However, we will not stop with simply a clearer view of the problem, but regularly discuss how these obstacles, imbedded in our ideological, legal, and political frameworks, can be overcome.
This course addresses how humans have ‘made’ the natural world conceptually (through ideas about nature, ecosystem, organism, and ecology) as well as materially– through millennia of direct action in and on landscapes and territories. We will account for the role of perception, imagination, culture and ideology as well as the social and spatial practices that materially shape landscape through geopolitical conflicts, international responses to the climate crisis, the legal personhood of glaciers and rivers, art, climate activism and conservation practices. From the gardens of Haifa to the glacial terrain of Nunavut and the shifting aridity line of the Negev desert, this course is structured with selective case studies that interrogate material practices, ideas of nature, and their consequences for ecological systems in which the human and the nonhuman are not as distinct as one might think.
This course serves as an introduction to feminist philosophy and the role of digital media in facilitating and/or in challenging access and participation in the public sphere. We will turn to classic papers in feminist philosophy to understand key concepts such as oppression, sex and gender, misogyny, and intersectionality. We will also use media sources, such as newspapers articles and podcasts, to understand the public discourse surrounding feminist topics. We will also explore what new avenues can digital media provide to voice one’s claims, occupy public spaces and call out perpetrators on TikTok? How and why do these media sometimes fail to live up to their claims of democracy and liberation? The main takeaways from this course will be the ability to think critically about the different claims made by feminist philosophy, and to examine the different ways social change can come about. Throughout this course you will learn how to articulate a philosophical position, to support the claims you are making, and to respond to objections. The critical thinking skills you will practice in the classroom will be of use in your own life and in your understanding of current events.
This course serves as an introduction to feminist philosophy. We will turn to classic papers in feminist philosophy to understand key concepts such as oppression, sex and gender, misogyny, and intersectionality. We will also use media sources, such as newspapers articles and podcasts, to understand the public discourse surrounding feminist topics. The main takeaways from this course will be the ability to think critically about the different claims made by feminist philosophy, and to examine the different ways social change can come about.
Does posting a video of a mob lynching on YouTube, signing an online petition, reporting police violence on Twitter, calling out perpetrators on TikTok and publicly disclosing classified government information count as actively expressing one’s voice? The radical potential of new communication media is often thought of as bringing about new political possibilities. The course explores multiple ways that social movements, advocacy organizations, and activists use new media to intervene in the public sphere, and intervene in the design of new media, across the globe. Case studies will be used to move back and forth between theory and practice, where studying the practice will inform the theory, and vice versa. What new avenues can digital media provide for the flourishing of a political life?
This course on justice and rights will delve into the historical and philosophical origins of the concept of human rights. The main focus of this course is to facilitate a dialogue between ancient Greek philosophers who discussed the question of justice and modern legal theorists who explore the question of rights. One of the objectives of the course will be to excavate the ideas that help shape contemporary international human rights and consider whether its European origins frustrate the discipline’s universalist aspirations. We’ll trace how these ideas have been retranslated into the discipline and the implications of framing human rights as a discourse of universal justice and emancipation.
This course will provide students with a critical perspective on contemporary theories and practices of international women’s rights. It will approach women’s rights in an interdisciplinary manner, drawing on gender theory, postcolonial theory and Marxism. We will follow a broader critique of human rights that questions the universality of rights and their supposed break from international law’s history of empire and colonialism. Although the inclusion of women in international law was a crucial and necessary moment both for women and human rights, the women’s rights discourse has also been mobilised to reinforce relationships of domination.
This course consists of three parts. In the first part we will build a theoretical foundation to identify the problems we aim to address and to situate our response. In part two, we will consider how the female subject has been incorporated and constructed in women’s rights and the material and political consequences of this construction. Finally, in part three, we will ask how feminist knowledge and theory can help us resist and engage with rights differently.
This course aims to delve into the origins of our notion of Human Rights, which trace back to ancient Greece. We will explore how the question of justice evolved into the concept of natural law and natural rights. We will begin by examining the concept of justice in ancient philosophy, with a particular focus on Plato's Republic. This work provides one of the most comprehensive discussions of the existence of a "real" justice that transcends all justices defined by different cultures. Next, we will study Aristotle's work on the distinction between legal justice and natural justice, which will enable us to introduce the emergence of the concept of natural law with the Stoic philosophers. This course will focus on how different ancient philosophers argued for the transcendence and universality of certain human orders, values, and moral laws throughout history. This will help us understand the entire intellectual debate that gave birth to the natural law theory.
General Contact
advising
aup.edu
Undergraduate Students
Dominique Meys
dmeysaup.edu
Tel: +33 1 40 62 06 71
Office: 3rd floor
Quai d'Orsay Learning Commons
6, rue du Colonel Combes
75007 Paris, France
M,T,W,T,F: 09:00-17:00
FirstBridge Coordinators
Raphael Bloch Laine and Kate Zhang