Summer Study Abroad at the Paris Research Center

These interdisciplinary programs welcome students from all areas majors. All courses include newly designed international opportunities with professors who have distinguished themselves as outstanding teacher/scholars at UF, nationally and internationally. Each class has been enhanced with site-specific activities and excursions, guest speakers, and all have been carefully selected for academic excellence and approved by their academic units. There is no language requirement for these programs. We welcome your questions and interest and look forward to offering course of study and international experiences that will serve you for a lifetime.

• Download 2010 Summer Study Abroad Brochure (PDF)
• Download Advisement Sheet (PDF)

Courses Offered Summer 2010

Intensive Intermediate French at the Paris Research Center
Instructor TBA
(FRE 2274, 6 credits)

Intensive French is a student-centered communicative language class that integrates the experience, observations and impressions of students living with French host families in Paris. Emphasis is placed on the development of language proficiency and cultural awareness. The student will work on all language skills in the classroom and is asked to take her/his learning outside the traditional learning environment. Since it is an intensive six-week class, the lessons, lectures, films, plays, fieldtrips, and interaction with instructor(s) and students will be carried out in French. A journal in French is required. (Course taught in French).

History as Landscape: Film in Paris
Professor Scott Nygren (English)
nygren@ufl.edu

This course introduces the history of French film in the cultural context of Paris. The class will continually alternate between screening films shot or set in Paris, and visiting the locations and contexts that the films bring to life. Films will be drawn from all eras and include some of France's most famous directors, from Lumière, Méliès, Ray, Leger, Bunuel, Renoir, and Carné, to Godard, Varda, Jeunet, Klapisch, Allouache, and Absa. Students will visit 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 visit the site of the first cinema exhibition by the Lumière brothers on the Boulevard des Capucines, and the Studio 28 theater where Bunuel’s L’Age d’or triggered a riot. You will have the opportunity to watch films at Parisian theaters, and visit museum exhibitions as part of the visual culture that provides a context for cinema. The larger purpose of the class is to consider how film has transformed the social experience of time over the 20th century, with film narrative as a model for understanding narratives of history. In addition to an exam on narrative theory and film analysis, students will maintain a hybrid journal that combines analysis, personal experience, photographs and collected documentation, with reading and film viewings. (Course taught in English at the Paris Research Center in Paris, France)

Temples of Modernity: The Spectacle of the Museum
Professor Mark Thurner
mthurner@ufl.edu

Although the concept of “museum” is ancient, the museum as we know it is a modern invention. This invention appears to be a spectacular success. Indeed, it would appear that “modernity” and “civilization” require museums. How and why did museums become a requirement of modernity? And why does this requirement remain seductive in our postmodern and postcolonial age? In a word, what have museums done, said, and allowed to be seen that still seems worth doing, saying, and seeing?

Paris is the perfect setting for our inquiry. Although neither the museum nor modernity nor civilization are exclusively French inventions, Paris houses several iconic museums of art, natural history, and anthropology that have helped fashion “The City of Lights” as the icon of modernity and civilization. These include most notably the Musée du Louvre, the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and the Musée de l’Homme. Perhaps ironically, and as new museums such as the primitivist Musée du quai Branly dot the manicured urban landscape, the city of Paris itself has come to exhibit many of the elements of a museum. Our on-site inquiry into the cultural history of the museum will be taught in and around these iconic museums. Well-armed with a battery of critical readings on the history and theory of museums in Paris and elsewhere, UF students will visit museums, take field notes, and write papers that examine key elements of the history, theory, politics, and ethnography of Parisian museums.

Lieux de mémoire: Transitions et discontinuités de l’ancien
régime à la révolution
Professor Brigitte Weltman-Arons
bweltman@ufl.edu

French historian Pierre Nora devised the concept of lieu de mémoire in order to identify the ways in which collective memory braids both material, concrete objects such as monuments, and abstract, and intellectual entities such as institutions. This memory may be quite at odds with the positivist undertakings of historians, based on archives and the reliance on the authenticity of the document. Collective memory, on the contrary, may very well transgress these rules and select from the past lieux de mémoire that are highly charged with affect and that end up acquiring the solidity of historical evidence.

The course brings together two historical periods: the end of the Ancien Régime in France (mostly the eighteenth century), followed by the French Revolution (1789) and its aftermath. The course will focus on a few lieux de mémoire from the end of the Ancien Régime and of the Revolution. Links will be established between texts (excerpts from literary works, pamphlets, essays, etc. written in the periods considered) and places in and around Paris, in order to demonstrate a cultural and memorial impact. Places, parks, museums will inform our reading of the written material. Moreover the course aims to show how a given place or text acquires a different significance in the transition from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution. Course will be taught in French. Prerequisite: FRE 2201 or its equivalent.

Beginning French at the PRC
Instructor TBA
(FRE 1144, 3 Credits)

This course, which constitutes the basic sequence in French for the development of skill in the language, is a student-centered, communicative language class that integrates the experience and impressions of students living in Paris. Emphasis is placed on the development of language proficiency and cultural awareness. The student will work on all language skills and is asked to take his or her learning outside the traditional learning environment. Class includes many outside activities. Combines FRE 1130, FRE 1131.

Past Year's Summer Program Courses

• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006

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