Courses
Spring 2026 Course Listings
All schedule information is tentative. Please see the Registrar's site for the latest information.
For a short introduction to each of our course offerings or language levels, click on the course title below.
Language Courses
For more information about FREN 10-105 placement/enrollment, please see our Language Programs Placement page. If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Harder.
For students with little or no knowledge of French language. Permission required (please see instructions on our Language Programs Placement page).
What do Montréal, Paris, and Dakar have in common? What are the rules regarding how many times one kisses a friend on the cheeks? Why is France called l’Hexagone? Learners discover the basics of French language and culture while speaking, listening, reading, and writing about everyday situations in France & Francophone countries.
Prerequisite: A grade of C- or higher in FREN 10a or the equivalent. Permission required (please see instructions on our Language Programs Placement page).
How does the attitude of a French student toward family and strangers differ from the experience of an American student? How do the French view work and vacation? Learners will deepen their knowledge of French and Francophone cultures while expanding their ability to speak, read, listen, and write in French.
Prerequisite: A grade of C- or higher in FREN 10a or the equivalent. Permission required (please see instructions on our Language Programs Placement page).
Did you study French in the past and need more speaking and writing practice plus a grammar review? This Intermediate French class is for you! Exploring social “controversies” related to, for example, gender identity and Smartphone addiction, it focuses on essential communication skills such as comprehension, contemporary vocabulary use, and conversational practice. Our materials include videos, music, websites, articles, and short stories, with an emphasis on Haitian culture in the final unit.
Prerequisite: A 30-level FREN course or the equivalent. Permission required (please see instructions on our Language Programs Placement page).
Students advance their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, while focusing on key elements of French and Francophone cultures. Through the study of films, comics, current events, and cultural comparisons, we explore the ways in which French speakers’ perceptions of time and space differ from our own. We also examine issues of globalization in the francophone world.
Prerequisite: FREN 104b, or the equivalent. Permission required (please see instructions on our Language Programs Placement page).
Improve your speaking skills while learning about and discussing socio–cultural issues that distinguish the French view of the world from that of Americans. Students will focus on expressing themselves better orally while continuing their work on reading, listening, & writing as they explore current topics of debate like slang usage and immigration.
Spring 2026 Upper-Level Courses (above FREN 105)
Prerequisite: French 105a, or permission from the instructor.
Examines the roots of French revolutionary thought in the seventeenth century and traces their movement in politics, social structures, and artistic works through the beginnings of the Third Republic in France. Grounded in the revolutionary idea of fashioning not just a nation but a "peuple" from the inside, the class will rely upon historical documents such as maps, accounts, objects, pamphlets, and edicts to give context for the analysis of artistic works including novels, plays, caricatures, poems, and paintings. Those “texts,” many by or about women, will give students a deep understanding of the development of the secular French state, its culture of political activism, and contemporary notions (and vocabulary) of revolution and suffrage. Usually offered every third year
Prerequisite: FREN 105a.
Guided by prominent French and Algerian writers and filmmakers, we will explore major episodes of the history of the twentieth-century and disentangle the knots tying together Algeria and France: knots of violence—colonial violence, war violence, terrorist violence; knots of memory, or rather, of conflictual memories—the memory of colonization; the memory of the traumatized veterans of the Algerian War, of the harkis (Algerians who fought along the French), of the pieds-noirs, as the French of Algeria were called, of the Algerian Jews, who parted from their ancestral Judeo-Arab culture; knots of identity—divided or fractured identities, in Algiers or in the French banlieues peopled by immigrants from North Africa. Usually offered every second year.