Three New Majors for the New Academic Year

At AUP, you’ll get to experience what the French call “la rentrée,” a period of reflection and renewal that follows summer vacation and sets you up for the new academic year. This time around, our academic community is also engaging in renewal; AUP students have new options available for furthering their academic pathways, with no less than three new majors launching this Fall semester.

Fashion Studies

The Fashion Studies major—coordinated by professors Renate Stauss and Sophie Kurkdjian—lets you gain deep insights into fashion as a global cultural phenomenon and a vast professional industry. You will explore fashion as both objects and ideas, as both craft and process, through places, spaces, images, films and texts.

AUP provides a unique setting to study fashion; Paris is a city that remains one of the focal points of today’s global fashion system. But while the city provides a rich point of departure, the program is focused on the decentralization of the discipline that pushes back against established hierarchies.

The program’s combination of academic study and applied collaboration leads you to combine entrepreneurial and creative spirit with open-mindedness, innovation and an acute sense of ethics. You will graduate as a critical and creative thinker, knowledgeable about the diverse histories and cultures of fashion.

Global French Studies

The French Global Studies major—coordinated by professors Caroline Laurent and Franck Andrianarivo Rakotobe—provides you with advanced French language skills alongside firsthand experience of the multicultural reality of the more than 300 million French speakers worldwide.

You will explore how the French nation has left its mark on world history—through both revolution and colonization—alongside the contributions of French-speaking thinkers, writers, scientists and artists. You will develop an understanding of Francophone worldviews on major contemporary political and societal issues, such as sex and gender, race and ethnicity, ideological and religious tensions, social justice and climate change, migration, and identity.

Paris is studied as a multifaceted city: a historical testament to a centuries-old culture with a continuously vibrant modern artistic scene. Paris provides a rare opportunity for you to access a diverse range of traditions and perspectives by engaging with an ever-changing transnational urban space, sheltering diasporas from all over the world.

Quantitative Economics and Finance

The Quantitative Economics and Finance major—coordinated by professors Gail Hamilton and James Ward—provides you with the foundational analysis, techniques and skills needed to operate in technical economic and capital management roles.

You will focus on the application of quantitative and applied mathematical, economic and computer science techniques within global economic institutions and capital markets. You will learn to develop technical solutions to challenges within economics and finance, including the time value of money, information asymmetry and latency, data management, uncertainty, diversification, model selection and construction, hedging, and security replication.

From these tools and techniques—and the breadth of course offerings—you build a reflective, ethical and global understanding of the strengths and limitations of these applied approaches. You learn economic and finance concepts alongside the mathematics skills and data science programming techniques that allow you to develop models and solutions to interdisciplinary international economics and finance problems.