Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue
With an important history of immigration, France has long been a site of cultural contact and exchange. This course considers the country’s multicultural make-up and the ideologies, institutions, conflicts, and paradoxes that shape how that diversity has taken form through time. Conflicts and controversies of the past 40 years, which include the rise of the extreme right, the problem of the disadvantaged suburbs, the question of Islamic headscarves, and more, have in particular pushed these questions to the front of the country’s domestic agenda. Looking historically and across several case studies, we ask as well as what the French example can add to our understanding of culture, diversity, and race. Conducted in English.
College Core Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Offered only at NYU Paris. An overview of important developments in French philosophy from the 16th century to the 1950s. We will look at the epistemological and metaphysical debates that followed the rediscovery of Ancient philosophy and the Copernican revolution, with Montaigne’s skepticism, Descartes’ rationalist theory of knowledge, and Condillac’s empiricism. We will then focus on developments in French political philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, closely intertwined with political events. We will read Rousseau, an important influence on the French revolutionaries, before turning to 19th-century debates about equality, with Proudhon’s anarchist criticism of property rights, and Tocqueville’s cautious liberal perspective on the political consequences of equality. Finally, we will look at two key movements in French philosophy in the first half of the 20th century, Bergson’s attempt at understanding the temporal duration conscious beings inhabit, and Sartre and de Beauvoir’s distinctive development of existentialism, a philosophy that grapples with the consequences of human freedom.
Philosophy (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
Through a focus on contemporary Paris, this course aims to explore the insights offered by anthropological approaches to cities and urban life. We will consider the relationships between urban spatial organization and an array of social, economic and political phenomena; the relevance of consumption and display to the shaping of urban identities; and the shifting dynamics of social groups and boundaries within the urban context. This will be accomplished through course readings and also through training in urban ethnographic research methods, supporting each student’s own systematic observation over the semester of one locus of everyday Parisian life. The final project for the course will be a piece of ethnographic analysis based on this field research.
Social and Cultural Analysis (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Wed
It would be a misnomer to assume that technology is something we “use.” Rather, the human appears as embedded in a matrix of the socio-techno-material. In this sense, there is something quite non-technical about technology which has an intrinsically social nature and can take the form of bodily and socializing techniques, the canalization of creative powers, becomings of all sorts, and of course the mechanical and material manipulation of ourselves and our life-worlds. We must thus speak of a biological and technical habitus of dependency and over-coming, one constituted by everything from creating art, to language, to ideological persuasion, to human enhancement and post-humanism, and various forms of convergence. What is the relationship between these various techniques and technologies and their respective effects (ethical, cultural, aesthetic) on the category of the human? Social transformation and technology cannot be theorized in isolation. The technological, mediological, and digital have to be unearthed as constitutive of our shared “material culture” and milieu. Within such a milieu, which is both internal and external to actors and agents implicated within it, the “essence” of the human is not only potentially redefined, but indeed dissolved. In such a potential redefinition and dissolution, one finds a radically new ethical and political threshold that has yet to be adequately theorized. This course attempts to reveal this threshold through developing a critical heuristic which maps the topoi of the socio-eco-techno system. Drawing on mediology, ethics, and the French school of the anthropology of techniques, we explore such topoi in terms as both “deep” historical sediment and also futurology with a view to illuminating how our values are negotiated and transformed in our rapport with the technological.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Wed
Islam is the second most important religion in France (after Roman Catholicism) and France has the highest Muslim population in Europe. Complex events from the mid-20th century forward have led to continuous heated debate and controversy about the place of Muslim citizens within the secular Republic. France’s interwoven history with Islam dates back, however, to the first Umayyad conquests of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century and then to the period of the Crusades. Through the use of primary sources, literary and filmic texts, and critical readings (notably in history, sociology and cultural studies), this course traces the complexity and heterogeneity of French perceptions of Islam within a broad historical perspective beginning with these early encounters and continuing up to the present day.
French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
In this course we focus on four contemporary novels in which the world of the character, the narrator, or the author, is read through the lens of a literary classic. In each case, the reading and rewriting of the primary text involves temporal and spatial displacements (from the 18th to the 20th century, from Europe to the Caribbean and to the South Pacific) that generate shifting perspectives and a constant reshuffling of center and periphery. Between a reverential affiliation to the past and a creative misreading and rewriting of it, these intertextual encounters with « great » Western literary works insistently raise the questions of identity, originality, and “writing back”. Exploring these questions will therefore also involve drawing on comparative, translation, and postcolonial studies.
French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
Machine learning is an exciting and fast-moving field of computer science with many recent consumer applications (e.g., Microsoft Kinect, Google Translate, Iphone’s Siri, digital camera face detection, Netflix recommendations, Google news) and applications within the sciences and medicine (e.g., predicting protein-protein interactions, species modeling, detecting tumors, personalized medicine). This course introduces undergraduate computer science students to the field of machine learning. Students learn about the theoretical foundations of machine learning and how to apply machine learning to solve new problems. Assuming no prior knowledge in machine learning, the course focuses on two major paradigms in machine learning which are supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, we learn various methods for classification and regression. Dimensionality reduction and clustering are discussed in the case of unsupervised learning
Computer Science (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Thu
There are many cognitive tasks that people can do easily and almost unconsciously but that have proven extremely difficult to program on a computer. Artificial intelligence is the problem of developing computer systems that can carry out these tasks. We will focus on three central areas in AI: representation and reasoning, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Computer Science (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
Offered only at NYU Paris. Examines various philosophical and psychological approaches to language and meaning, as well as their consequences for traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Discusses primarily 20th-century authors, including Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine.
Philosophy (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
This course is designed to help students to develop vocabulary, learn new idiomatic expressions, and improve fluency and pronunciation. The emphasis is on the understanding and production of contemporary spoken French through a study of authentic documents such as radio and television interviews, advertisements, and spontaneous oral productions.
French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed,Tue,Thu
Continuation of FREN-UA 9001. To continue on to the intermediate level, a student must complete both FREN-UA9001 and FREN-UA 9002. This two-semester sequence is equivalent to FREN-UA 9010.
French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
In this course we focus on four contemporary novels in which the world of the character, the narrator, or the author, is read through the lens of a literary classic. In each case, the reading and rewriting of the primary text involves temporal and spatial displacements (from the 18th to the 20th century, from Europe to the Caribbean and to the South Pacific) that generate shifting perspectives and a constant reshuffling of center and periphery. Between a reverential affiliation to the past and a creative misreading and rewriting of it, these intertextual encounters with « great » Western literary works insistently raise the questions of identity, originality, and “writing back”. Exploring these questions will therefore also involve drawing on comparative, translation, and postcolonial studies.
Comparative Literature (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
Beginning by considering how impressionism refined and redirected the artistic aims of 19th-century realism, follows the development of progressive art to the brink of cubism and pure abstraction in the first years of the 20th century. Following impressionism and post-impressionism, close attention is paid to symbolism, aestheticism, art nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, fauvism, and expressionism. The aesthetic aims of these movements are analyzed in tandem with the social and cultural conditions that generated them.
Art History (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks