Firstbridge

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? 

David Tresilian’s 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? 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 ME1099 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.

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 “our” 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 “White Muslims” 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.

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.

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.

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 takes its name from the book The Poetics of Space by the author Gaston Bachelard. Students will look at ways in which creative writing approaches space, place, and the environment. Students will explore how creative writers over the last hundred years have engaged with the cities they live in, but our investigation is not related to the urban. Through a close attention to ecopoetics and environmental art, we will also be looking at the work of contemporary artists who use the environment as both message and medium, creating art works that, through their direct engagement with the land, bring much needed attention to the grave dangers of an ecological crisis.

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?

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.

In this course, we explore the different neighborhoods (“arrondissements”) that make up the city of Paris through the lives and works of featured artists from the world of literature and visual / performing arts. We examine how the city and its different neighborhoods have influenced their lives and inspired them to tell their stories in the form of books, paintings, sculptures, plays and films.

Through museum visits and city walks as well as reading excerpts from books and viewing performances and films, we will discover various places in Paris where the artists found their ideas and inspirations that led to their artistic creation. We will also invite artists to our class who are working and creating art today in Paris.

Who made ‘Paris’ in the past, and who makes it today? Architects, lawmakers, or labourers, perhaps. But what about artists? Sometimes overlooked as makers of the metropolis, this course puts artists centre-stage as producers of Paris. Through literature, as well as painting, music, film, performance and design, we will consider how artists and writers have influenced imaginaries, experiences, and understandings of Paris (or, sometimes, misunderstandings). This course will introduce us to various figures (including the urban wanderer and the outsider), places (queer salons of the 1910s, arcades, or surrealist walks through the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont), and experiences (such as migration and activism), as we explore how art and literature variously help form or disrupt ideas of Paris and the people that live here; and how this can help us consider about our place in Paris today.