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.

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.