2006 Intensive Week Long Study over Spring Break

This year students campus-wide will benefit from unique opportunities for week-long intensive study abroad over spring break. These innovative programs for intensive study abroad in Paris were expressly created to provide in-depth on-site international experiences. They include: 7 activity-rich days in Paris with meetings at the Paris Research Center, classes given on-site at the cultural, historical and political institutions you are studying, 6 nights in hotels, numerous group meals, site visits, cultural activities and UF credit.

Students should plan to arrive in Paris Sunday morning, March 12th. The Program ends Friday evening, March 17th. Students should plan to leaves Paris Saturday morning.

Programs Offered 2006

Download the 2006 Academic advisement sheet

Americans in Paris

ENC 4956*, 2 credits (* pending college approval)
Dr. Maureen Turim

Students enrolled in this course will study Americans' changing views of Paris as reflected in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and in selected Hollywood films, such as An American in Paris. The objective is to gain increased understanding of American and French culture by studying Franco-American interaction in American literature and film. Through readings, films, and their own writing, students encountering Paris—perhaps for the first time—can compare their responses to the city to those of many generations of Americans who loved Paris. Course requirements include selected readings from Americans in Paris, ed. Adam Gopnik; viewing of selected films prior to departure; attendance and participation in class and on field trips; and keeping a journal. The field trips will be walking tours, following the routes described by Hemingway, and visiting Paris cafés and restaurants favored by "The Lost Generation," such as the Closerie des Lilas and Café Select, and 27 Rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein held her literary salons, and some sites mentioned by Saul Bellow, such as the Hotel Crillon and the Café de Flore. There will also be a guest lecture by Professor Patrick Badonnel, Université de Paris 3.

Download Course Itinerary

Paris After the Avant-garde: An introduction to Contemporary Art in France

HUM 4956, 2 credits
Professor Sergio Vega

This course is expected to function as an introduction to contemporary art for students from all areas. In addition to engaging its participants in art appreciation, the course will focus in the post World War II period known as the Neo-Avantgarde. The lectures will introduce the artistic movements that took place in Paris and other parts of Europe in five decades, featuring a condensed revision of the artists, events and institutions as a way of mapping the main ideas that marked the transition from Modernism to Contemporary Art. Field trips to major art museums and art galleries, in addition to lectures from leading art curators and studio visits to artists working in Paris will make this course a unique experience of intensive immersion into today’s art.

Download Course Itinerary

> top

Programs offered 2005

Download the 2005 Academic Advisement Sheet

Cinema in Paris

ENC 4956, 2 Credit
Dr. Scott Nygren

An intensive course in Paris as the heart of world cinema culture. Students will visit locations that served as the setting of many French films, such as the streets of Montmartre where Amélie was set and the Champs Elysées for Godard's Breathless , to consider how Paris has been continually reinvented through film. We will study cinema in relation to the locations where cinema itself began, from the site of the first cinema exhibition by the Lumière brothers on the Boulevard des Capucines, to theater districts such as the Rue de la Gaité where melodrama emerged as the mode of narrative later appropriated by cinema. We will watch films at the Cinémathéque Française and other Parisian theaters, look at exhibitions of photography and painting that relate to cinematic representations, visit libraries devoted to the arts, and observe current television production. We will look at the role multimedia presentations play in Parisian museums, and meet with an experimental filmmaker. Students will produce experimental texts that combine analytical encounters and personal discoveries with photographs and collected documentation, annotated and supplemented by reading and film viewings.

French Political Institutions, History, and Culture (doc)

POS 4956, 2 Credit
Dr. Richard Conley
Download Handout (doc)

This course was designed specifically for political science majors and history students with interests in comparative politics and international relations. The course will provide students with an historical perspective on French politics and culture from the Revolution through World War II, as well as furnish an exceptional overview of political institutions in the Fifth Republic (1958-present) and France's role in international politics. The unique capstone will feature guest lectures from leading academics on France's political institutions, contemporary role in the European Union, and US-French relations. Visits to national political offices and military and cultural museums in Paris, in addition to World War II battlefields in Normandy, will reinforce students' understanding of France's rich socio-political history.

Sex, Scandals, and Violence in Contemporary French Film

ENC 4956, 2 Credits
Dr. Amy Ongiri

Beginning with the scandal of the nouvelle vague movement, we will explore Paris as the site of some of modernity's most important scandals in relationship to aesthetic and cultural practice, first examining Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless to address the interconnection between violence, scandal, and cinematic innovation in French film. Continuing our exploration of aesthetic ruptures originating in avant-garde movementsÊbeginning with the scandal caused by plans to erect the Eiffel Tower for the Universal Exhibition of 1889Êwe will explore Paris scandals from the controversial nightlife of the Moulin rouge and nearby clubs of the Pigalle district to the scandals created by the daring outrages of the surrealist movement and the insistence on absurdity of the Dada movement and of Marcel Duchamp's urinal. We will then continue to examine the theme of modernity and its discontents as expressed through the highly aestheticized version of urbanity found in the dark futurism of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's 1995 film City of Lost Children . The course will end with a visit the section of Paris dubbed èLittle Africaî as we explore èthe headscarf controversyî and changing conceptions of French identity with Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film Hate and with the 2002 film Baise-Moi , banned for its frank exploration of the relationship between eroticism and violence.

Translation in the EU

LAS 4935, 2 Credits
Dr. Cesar-Lee & Dr. Elizabeth Lowe

Viewed as a ècondensed internship in translationî, this Spring Break program constitutes an enhancement to the course Translation for Diplomacy, Law, and European Union Issues and to courses on EU Studies offered in various departments. The purpose of the course is to understand the role of the translator as mediator and communicator in today's European multi-lingual and multi-cultural societies. We will start in Paris where the first impulse towards the EU was born; visits will include UNESCO and the Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Economique (OCDE), among others. We will conclude our tour in Brussels, the administrative center of Europe, where site visits will include the Service de Traduction of the EU.

> top

Programs offered 2004

Representing the Streets of Paris: A Cinematic City

ENC4956, 1 Credit
Dr. Maureen Turim
More on this class and proposed itinerary

A special course in which students will visit sites famous for their presence in films about Paris, concentrating on understanding how different sections of Paris become the representation of different classes and styles of daily life. Cafés, restaurants, and avenues, parks and buildings, subways and bus lines: how do films use, indeed create, the space of the city? We will also see exhibitions relating to cinema, watch films at the Cinémathèque Française and other Parisian theaters, look at exhibitions of photography and painting that correlate to cinematic representations, visit libraries devoted to the arts, as well as the vidéothèque. We will look at the role multimedia presentations play in Parisian museums, and meet with an experimental filmmaker. Students will turn in analytical diaries of their discoveries, illustrated by their photographs and collected documentation, then annotated and supplemented by their reading and film viewings.

French Political Institutions, History, and Culture

POS 4931, 1 Credit
Dr. Richard Conley
More on this class and proposed itinerary

This course was designed specifically for political science majors and history students with interests in comparative politics and international relations. The course will provide students with an historical perspective on French politics and culture from the Revolution through World War II, as well as furnish an exceptional overview of political institutions in the Fifth Republic (1958-present) and France's role in international politics. The unique capstone will feature guest lectures from leading academics on France's political institutions, contemporary role in the European Union, and US-French relations. Visits to national political offices and military and cultural museums in Paris, in addition to World War II battlefields in Normandy, will reinforce students' understanding of France's rich socio-political history.

Modern Paris & Contemporary French Culture

FRE 4956, 1 Credit, Taught in French
Dr. Bernadette Cesar-Lee and Dr. Gayle Zachmann
More on this class including proposed itinerary

In this survey of the principal political, intellectual, social, and artistic currents that have marked France and France's image since World War II, we will pose the question of what Modern Paris represents today and what it may mean to be French within a unified Europe. A co-taught course, this unique week-long study presents lectures by Dr. Bernadette Cesar-Lee and Dr. Gayle Zachmann at daily site visits to cultural and political institutions of Paris and the European Union.

Spring Break Course Archive

• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006

> back to current year spring break courses page

> top