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The program cost is $TBD, plus University fees of $240, totaling $TBD. A late fee of $100 will be added to your program cost after December 16. Program cost includes tuition for 6 credit hours, lodging in two-person rooms/four-six person apartments, metro passes, museum entrance fees, and transportation for program-sponsored field trips. Round-trip airfare on the group flight which includes transportation to and from the airport is $TBD.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 – Quality Education: This goal promotes inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning. In this course, students engage with history, performance, and creative practices, developing artistic skills and cultural understanding while exploring the evolution of circus and avant-garde art in Paris.

100 years ago, Alexander Calder ignited audiences' imaginations with his Cirque Calder, a miniature world made from ordinary materials. He transported his tiny circus in a suitcase, creating spontaneous one-man shows which combined small sculptures, sound, kinetic elements, and narratives. This work influenced the development of performance art and later evolved into Calder’s innovative kinetic mobiles and monumental metal sculptures he called stabiles.

The circus continues to be a place of wonder - immersing audiences in a fantastic world, outside of mundane day-to-day life. Explore Paris through the lens of the circus, avant-garde art of the 1920's, and the evolution of performance in sculptural practice. Learn low-tech and portable fabrication techniques, focusing on wire work and found object assemblage, to create your own piece to be performed at the conclusion of the class. Dive into the history of the Parisian circus at The Musée des Arts Forains, a private museum of funfair and fairground objects located within the Pavillons de Bercy. Experience a live performance at the historic Cirque d'Hiver Bouglione, one of the oldest circuses in the world, giving you a glimpse into how these traditions continue today. Play, spontaneity, and improvisation will guide our creative practice as we learn, make, and explore!

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities: This goal emphasizes the protection of cultural and natural heritage while fostering inclusive, resilient communities. In this course, students explore the intersection of art, nature, and urban life in Paris—examining how carousels, gardens, and museum collections reflect human relationships with the environment and cultural heritage over time.

Picture a Parisian carousel - the mesmerizing lights, enchanting music, vivid colors, and rhythmic movement that work together to create an experience engaging all of your senses. Considering the carousel as a decorative object, one might marvel at the intricacies of the craft and construction, but upon closer inspection, they provide a complex entry point to examine the relationship of art and nature. 

This course will explore nature as a cultural construct through the lens of the carousel. Their aesthetic, mechanical, and technical development provides a framework to understand how the emerging urban and industrial landscapes of the 1800's changed the relationship of people and nature. Through readings, site visits, and discussions, we will consider the ways in which animals and art intersect. We will explore the gardens of Paris and their carousels - from the oldest, the Jardin du Luxembourg Carousel built in 1879, to the contemporary and unusual Dodo Manège in the Jardin des Plantes. We will dig deeper through exhibitions at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature) which highlights the relationship between humans and animal through their collection of ancient, modern and contemporary art. The Musée Archéologie Nationale holds many examples of paleolithic animal art, where we can consider the appearance of animals in some of the earliest creative expressions. From the cave to the carousel, the monument to the amusement park, you will gain an appreciation of many ways that artists interpret, re-imagine, and reflect our relationship to the natural world.

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. Çàɬֱ²¥s 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.

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.