Undergraduate Languages Cultures and Societies 2024-2025

Focusing on major cities in Europe and the Americas, this course unit uses a range of texts, including films, poetry and fiction, to investigate urban spaces as sites of promise, power and loss. Representations of global cities, and experiences of urban dwellers, highlight themes such as empire, identity, leisure, labour and love. Set amid glittering facades and gritty back streets, the texts studied in this course explore the many meanings of the urban experience across place and time. These urban encounters also provide a way of understanding key social, political and cultural moments in the past and present.

This course  advocates for greater multiculturalism in how we approach cultural responses to the climate and biodiversity crisis. We will use a range of French-language film, fiction, poetry and theory (though ironically, in English translation!) to investigate environmental themes, genres and strategies in French culture. The focus is on how these texts represent the human subject in relation to the environment of which it is part, shaping diverse narratives of change and agency.

Eurovision is the largest musical event in the world, followed by 70 million people every year. Since its beginnings in 1956, the concept of Eurovision has been changing over the years and through different historical periods, especially with regard to conflicts and European identity and sense of belonging.
The popularity of the event makes it globally recognized by the general public, but what is hidden behind the festival? what meanings do the performances and visual representations have? how are countries, different cultures and folklore represented? Is Eurovision political? How does Eurovision represent national identity?
The purpose of this course is to study the different representation methods offered by the Eurovision Song Contest through not only its history, but also analysing the most recent examples of the festival, focusing especially on the new millennium, with the arrival of new countries into the contest.

This course  advocates for greater multiculturalism in how we approach cultural responses to the climate and biodiversity crisis. We will use a range of French-language film, fiction, poetry and theory (though ironically, in English translation!) to investigate environmental themes, genres and strategies in French culture. The focus is on how these texts represent the human subject in relation to the environment of which it is part, shaping diverse narratives of change and agency.