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FirstBridge is discovery

FirstBridge is the hallmark of your first year at 91视频. This dynamic, innovative learning experience provides a solid foundation for the rigor of future academic work at 91视频 and allows you to gain new knowledge and skills that you will use outside the university and beyond in your professional life. You will explore a range of interdisciplinary issues and questions, and complete individual and team projects while improving vital skills in writing, public speaking and information literacy. It will connect you with the people and resources at 91视频 that will help you chart a critical pathway to academic and personal success. It is both an introduction to university life at 91视频 and an introduction to the cosmopolitan city of Paris.

Choosing a FirstBridge

You may be arriving at 91视频 with a strong sense of your intellectual interests and desired educational and career path, or you may not. FirstBridge is designed to help you confirm interests and explore new ones, to go outside of your comfort zone and take risks. If you have decided on a major or minor, we encourage you to choose a FirstBridge that is outside of this field. The following descriptions will help you to decide which FirstBridge is right for you. Follow the link that accompanies each FirstBridge, read the course descriptions carefully and let them spark your curiosity.

FirstBridge Courses (Spring 2025): Overview

  • FirstBridge 1: Communicating Across Divides
  • FirstBridge 2: Evolution and Othering, Science and Fiction

FirstBridge 1: COMMUNICATING ACROSS DIVIDES

According to several philosophers and thinkers, language defines humanity, while each language is a different lens through which to see and understand the world. Language allows us to share emotions, experiences, and stories, transmit knowledge, form communities, and govern those communities collectively through politics. In this FirstBridge we will examine language from a variety of perspectives and explore how we can understand and communicate across divides ranging from linguistic and cultural to political and epistemological.

PO1099 FB1 鈥 UNDERSTANDNG & ADDRESSNG POLT'L & EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIVISION with Professor Peters

This course will explore how language defines humanity; particularly our ability to transmit knowledge and govern ourselves collectively through politics. We will examine and discuss the important role language plays in society, epistemology, and democracy as well as how they are interrelated. We will use the works of philosophers and theorists along with class discussions to begin to grasp these ideas and apply them to the current political crises of political polarization, 鈥淔ake News鈥, and democracy in order to better understand these crises and how we can begin to address them. Students will leave this course with a deeper practical understanding of contemporary politics, democracy, epistemology, and language, including how they might begin to meaningfully communicate across the political and epistemological divisions rending apart societies and nations.

FR1099 FB1 鈥 TEACHING YOUR OWN LANGUAGE IN PARIS with Professor Bloch Lain茅

This course equips students with the tools to explore the underlying universality of all human languages while celebrating the distinctive features that render their own languages unique and, at times, challenging to learn. Through an array of immersive activities and thought-provoking discussions, students will hone their ability to conquer language acquisition challenges. By the end of the course, they will not only have a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity but also possess the skills necessary to effectively teach their language to classmates, children, or adults while studying in Paris. Whether you're passionate about language acquisition or teaching, this course offers a dynamic platform for exploring the intricacies of human communication and the art of language pedagogy.

FirstBridge 2: EVOLUTION AND OTHERING, SCIENCE AND FICTION

Since the nineteenth century, theories of race have frequently claimed legitimacy based on Charles Darwin鈥檚听The Origin of the Species, sometimes to violent and discriminatory ends. Literature has at times been complicit in such cooptation, and at times sought to correct for the damage it has wrought. What did Darwin really say, though? How could his ideas have been so useful to people intent on dividing communities?听 The language of science has convinced generations that 鈥榬ace鈥 is a actual biological category, rather than the social construct that it is, justifying marginalization, slavery, and genocide.听Writers have often engaged in the work of telling stories that were cut off through racist or genocidal practices. By looking at both the history of science and the reparative efforts of literature, we will consider such current issues as why it鈥檚 interesting to capitalize the terms Black and White when speaking of race, what contemporary science can and can鈥檛 say about the origins of our species, and whether the Darwin Awards are true to the ideas of their namesake. Reproducible science and effective literature will guide us through misconceptions about and misuses of evolution.

AH 1099 FB2: ART AND HUMAN ORIGINS with Professor Slavkova

In 1898, the famous French painter Paul Gauguin finished a large canvas entitled Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?. Influenced by Polynesian culture, to the point that he settled in Tahiti and the Marquise Islands for the last decade of his life, Gauguin was preoccupied with finding a visual equivalent to some fundamental questions: what are the origins of humanity, what is the goal of our existence, what is our place in the universe, what happens to us after we die, what will remain behind us? In his attempt to answer these questions, the artist confronted diverse religious references, from Adam and Eve to pagan totems and Buddha, as well as diverse artistic traditions, from his native Western to Polynesian and Japanese. Gauguin鈥檚 work was not an exception; at the end of the 19th century, with the progressive recognition of prehistoric art and non-Western art and cultures, artists embraced essential ethic, scientific, philosophical interrogations revising their own beliefs and stereotypes.听

This course will explore how important questions such as what makes us human and why we are here are reflected in or expressed through visual representation. We will go back to prehistoric art and what it tells us about our ancestors, the first humans; we鈥檒l look at representations of the creation of the world and of humans in different cultures (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Christian medieval in Western Europe, Polynesian); we鈥檒l see how artworks reveal social attitudes towards the 鈥渙ther,鈥 people of different cultures and color, from the Renaissance to Gauguin; finally, we鈥檒l look at how art was used by the Nazis to answer these big questions through simplified images of the purity of the race suggesting the possible rebirth of a pure race and eventually justifying genocide.

HI 1099 FB2: SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND HUMAN ORIGINS with Professor Martz

Given that there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, why are some societies so obsessed with separating people into groups and referring to differences between groups as 鈥渞acial鈥? Humans have always identified some people as 鈥淯s鈥 and everybody else as 鈥淥ther,鈥 but the 鈥渟cientific鈥 discourse of race dates from the 19th century. After examining what science can say about the origins and evolution of our species, students will look at how racialized discourse came into use, how it came to justify slavery and imperialism, how it gave rise to eugenics, and how it can culminate in the ultimate denial of the kinship of humanity, genocide.