Paris: Sacred and Profane, Imagined and Real

Paris has been called the capital of modernity, the capital of the nineteenth century, and the capital of the black Atlantic. This course explores how Paris grew from a small settlement into a vast city with an enormous global impact. Covering the settlement of the Celtic Parisii in the mid-third century BCE through the present, the course investigates the dynamic relationship between urban space, public activism, racism, and colonialism. It also considers who has been excluded from the city’s complex mythology and how these myths impacted experiences of the “other” (including people of color, low-income people, Jewish people, and women).