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 the 2008 Program Brochure
• Download the 2008 Academic Advisement Sheet

Courses Offered Summer 2008

History as Landscape: Film in Paris
(ENG 4133, 4 credits)
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, Clair, Epstein, Dulac, Duvivier and Carné, to Godard, Varda, Jeunet, Jacquot, Klapisch and Allouache. 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 des Ursulines theater where the premiere of Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman 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. 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)

European Integration From Napoleon to Nice: Law, Politics and Institutions of the European Union in the 21st Century
Professor  Clifford A. Jones (Law)
jonesca@law.ufl.edu

This course includes lectures and projects related to the history of European integration, some of the political, economic, and legal underpinnings of the EU, and discussion of the powers and roles of the respective institutions.  The very important and interesting aspect of inter-institutional rivalries and agreements will be discussed.  Some basic principles of EU law (distinct from the law of the countries making up the EU) will be covered, including the very important rules governing free movement of goods and services among the Member States.  Current case studies, perhaps including the difficulties encountered by American companies such as Apple (and its ITunes online music stores) and Microsoft with its Windows operating system and Media Player software, will be presented, bringing these issues home to students in a practical and relevant manner.  Finally, the prospects for the future of the EU will be discussed.  From its beginning with six members to the current 27, the EU has been on a “journey to an unknown destination,” to use Joe Weiler’s phrase.  Is the ultimate end a European superstate, a federal “United States of Europe,”  or something less?  Where will membership stop? Turkey? The Ukraine? Russia?  No one knows the answers to these questions, least of all the Europeans, but they are valuable questions for our students to consider.

Paris, Capital of the Twentieth and/or Twenty-First Century?
Sheryl Kroen (History)
stkroen@ufl.edu

In his most famous essay, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Walter Benjamin presented France and its glittering capital as the very quintessence of modernity. It was in the nineteenth century that the Prefect of Paris, the Baron Haussmann, paved the spectacular boulevards that made his city the envy and model for every modern city in the world. It was in the early nineteenth century that the arcades first appeared (the glass-enclosed shopping and leisure spaces), to be succeeded at mid-century by the cathedral-like department stores that made Paris the center of emerging consumer capitalism. It was the revolutionary events in France between the Great Revolution of 1789 and the socialist Commune of 1870-1871 that inspired Tocqueville and Marx to predict the political future of the world. In the nineteenth century every field of art and science—painting, photography, early cinema; poetry, fiction, cultural criticism; sociology, psychology, anthropology—boasted founders and pioneers, either born in France or having migrated there.

In this course we will follow in Walter Benjamin’s footsteps, and ask a very simple question: what is the status of France and its spectacular capital in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? We will start our journey in the 1930s and 40s, when Benjamin, like so many other leftist, Jewish intellectuals and artists found temporary refuge in Paris. The war, the occupation, the rise of Vichy, the resistance, the liberation, and the rebuilding of France under the auspices of the Marshall Plan offer the opportunity to consider the fate of France as global power shifted toward the United States, as New York City arguably became the “capital of the twentieth century” leaving Paris behind as a mere provincial backwater, and reducing France to a living museum of a civilization and culture of the past, rather than a glittering vision of the world’s future. But couldn’t one see it another way? With its starring role in the European Union, its commitment to a third way between the Soviet Union and the United States, its determined defense of social democracy, its continuous critique of American-style capitalism and culture, has France not fashioned a role for itself in the post-Cold War world as the capital of the twenty-first century?

Past Year's Summer Program Courses

• 2007
• 2006

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157-159 Dauer Hall
Gainesville, FL
Phone: (352) 392-2016 x. 256
Fax: (352) 392-5679