Film: Visite inaugurale du nouveau siège de Google France Google France opened a new headquarters in Paris today – an event which, interestingly, merited a press conference with none other than President Sarkozy and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Given the rocky relationship between the technology behemoth and France, it was indeed, as Sarkozy put it...Read more »
Map enthusiast Eric Fischer has shared a wonderful language-mapping image via his Flickr stream. It is a map of Twitter use by language. There is some overlap in color key, so you have to deduce whether Twitter users are using French or Malay, but nonetheless this is a pretty cool visualization of language. If...Read more »
Images Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina You can browse by country, name, or subject (includes photos and many caricatures as well, like the one on the left). Photos from the French site 1914-1918.fr. Texts For both in-class discussion and as a written assignment, I had students read an...Read more »
Throughout a course on 20th-century and contemporary France, I’ve been incorporating popular songs into our analysis of what it means to be French, from the post-war period to the present day. I’ve used music in a variety of ways: comparing two songs from the same period, or from vastly different periods (1945 and 1975,...Read more »
Patrick Weil, a research fellow at the CNRS and also a former professor of mine, has just published an essay entitled Etre français, les quatre piliers de la nationalité (Editions de l’Aube, January 2011). Although I haven’t yet had the chance to read it, an abstract describes his conjecture that French nationality is based...Read more »
Welcome to a new semester! I’m teaching a civilization class this spring and thought I’d share some of the ideas I’m using for course material. In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the example of a geography text book to demonstrate the process. As an introduction to...Read more »
I was living in France in 1999-2000 when the millennium was all the rage. On the occasion of the turn of the new century (yes, a year early), I picked up a copy of a compilation CD called Les plus grandes chansons du siècle. I still have it and indeed, it has many classics, one...Read more »
Sometimes the objectives of a course require the viewing of a full-length film in class. For example, in a writing class I have used La Fille sur le pont (1999) and Vipère au poing (2004) as the basis for an assignment on writing a critical review. But in the language classroom, where it’s more...Read more »
It was recently brought to my attention that the journal Modern & Contemporary France is offering articles for free. Many of the subjects are relevant for a course in French civilization, post-revolutionary French history, or literature. In preparing for a civilization course I’ll be teaching in the spring, I was particularly drawn to the following...Read more »
One difficult aspect of teaching grammar is the disjointed impression given by a series of grammar lessons: when going over the difference between the gerond and the infinitive, for example, we tend to give students a long series of sample sentences showing when one form is used rather than the other. When talking about...Read more »
