France Courses
Visual Arts – Claire Amy Schultz
VIAR 215: Teaching Art Education Abroad
Immerse yourself in the heart of Paris, where art and education come to life! In this course, Paris becomes your classroom as you explore the intersection of art education and culture. You'll visit a variety of museums and cultural institutions to meet with professionals in the field of visual arts education, gaining firsthand insight into both contemporary and traditional teaching practices. From responsive lesson planning to hands-on learning, you'll develop valuable teaching strategies inspired by the vibrant art scene of Paris. Expect to visit iconic locations such as the Carnavalet-History of Paris Museum, Palais de Tokyo, and the Louvre, where you'll engage with museum educators and witness the role of art in education. This unique experience will prepare you to think critically about the impact of art on students and society, all while surrounded by one of the most artistic cities in the world.
VIAR 309: Art Education: Past, Present, and Future
Discover Paris as the ultimate backdrop for exploring the history and future of art education! This course invites you to dive deep into the evolving world of art education, with Paris' museums and exhibitions as your living textbooks. Experience the field's rich history through museum visits and contemporary exhibitions, translating what you see into your own creative work through drawing, photography, and innovative lesson planning. Highlights include guided tours of world-renowned institutions like the Carnavalet-History of Paris Museum, Palais de Tokyo, and the Louvre. Whether you're passionate about teaching, creating, or both, this course will equip you with the skills and inspiration to shape the future of art education.
English – Joel Rhone
ENGL 371/ HUMN 300/ HONR 385 – Why Paris? African American Writers Abroad
In his 1951 essay "I Choose Exile," Richard Wright wrote " [T]here is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America." Soon after he emigrated, Paris would quickly become home to a to a host African American writers who took to the City of Lights as a refuge from racial segregation in the U.S. Why Paris?: Black Americans Abroad offers insight into this moment in African American literary history. By asking why writers such as James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith chose Paris, this course invites to students to survey the internationalization of African American writing and political thought in the years immediately following the Second World War. Students will develop a strong sense of how Paris connected American racial politics to the postwar world, not just by the studying the work of black writers Paris but also by encountering Paris themselves. Course meetings will be accompanied by site visits to Les Deux Magot, where James Baldwin and Richard Wright exchanged heated words over Baldwin's essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," and Le Tournon, which was frequented by midcentury writers Ralph Ellison and William Gardner Smith. Locations of interest will also include the cabarets such as Le Chat Noir and Le Lapin Agile, where black American Jazz sounds both found foreign audiences as well as black American listeners. And in addition to these particular venues, students will also survey larger locales such as the Montmarte, the Latin Quarter, and Jardin de Luxemburg, which created a rich intellectual backdrop for black expatriate writers at midcentury.
ENGL 210/ HUMN 200/ HONR 285 – James Baldwin’s Paris Essays
James Baldwin charted a new course for African American literature with "Everybody's Protest Novel," an essay he wrote in Paris in 1947. Like many of his subsequent essays, the assessments Baldwin issued in this one would resonate throughout the American literary landscape even as Baldwin remained abroad. This course focuses on Baldwin's Paris essays in order to account for the utility of Baldwin's cosmopolitan literary persona. We'll discuss the ways that Baldwin uses distance, correspondence, and estrangement in order to structure his assessments of racial politics in America and connect them to a global state of affairs outside the U.S. In addition to in-class discussions of Baldwin's essays, this course will also feature site visits to the locations that housed much of Baldwin's intellectual life and work. These include the cafes Les Deux Magot and Cafe de Flore in the St. Germain de Pris neighborhood, as well as Rue de Verneuil, where Baldwin lived in his early years. Additional locations of interest will include the river Baldwin invokes in his essay "Encounter on the Sienne" as well as the Sainte-Genevieve Library and Shakespeare and Company, which Baldwin also frequented.