Graduate Certificate
The Center for European Studies, cooperating with participating academic units, offers a Certificate in Modern European Studies in conjunction with the master’s and doctoral degrees. To obtain the Certificate, students at the master’s level need to complete 13 credit hours and students at the doctoral level need to complete 16 credit hours of courses with European content. Both master’s and doctoral students are required to complete a 1-unit Introduction to European Studies course. Given the critical role of languages to the comprehensive study of Europe all certificate recipients are required to complete at least one year of training at the 2000 level or above in at least one European language. However, in accordance with graduate school regulations no language courses below the 3000 level will be included within the certificate program itself. Those students with a high level of language training, however, may count up to a maximum of two language courses at the 3000 level or higher towards the completion of the Certificate in Modern European Studies. In all cases students must complete at least 9 credit hours of course work outside their home department or unit.
For more information about the various programs and activities of the Center, contact the Director, Center for European Studies, 3324 Turlington Hall, website http://www.ces.ufl.edu.
Graduate Certificate Curriculum
Click here to view the short description of the Graduate Certificate in Modern European Studies in the pdf format.
Note:
Refers to a course Offered in Fall 2008
Refers to a course NOT Offered in Fall 2008
EUS 6005 Introduction to European Studies
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Short Course Description:
The course is designed to introduce students to a broad variety of topics and approaches to European Studies employed across a number of different disciplines. The course is divided into five three-week sections. Each section focuses on a different broad category of European Studies. Within each section three topics will be covered. In some cases the readings and lectures will focus on Europe or the European Union as a whole. In other cases they will be more narrowly focused on a particular country or example. In either case, readings and discussions will be situated within the broader context of European studies. The organization of the course reflects its multidisciplinary character. Although a single faculty member will be the professor of record and in charge of organizing the course and scheduling speakers for all class discussions, a number of different European Studies faculty members will participate by selecting reading assignments and leading the related in-class discussions. The topics and materials studied within each sub-section are determined by the individual faculty member teaching that section, and will vary from year to year. This organizational structure provides students with the opportunity to meet and interact with a large number of faculty members from different fields that they might not otherwise have.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Amie Kreppel
EUH 5934 Russia, Soviet Union & the World
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Short Course Description:
This seminar will focus on the complex and evolving relationship of Russia and Europe, the Soviet Union and the World, from the 17th century to the present. The course will have both a thematic and chronological approach, investigating subjects including: Russia’s place between Europe and Asia, the multifarious ways in which Russia and the Soviet Union have been imagined; how Western Europe and America viewed Russia and Eastern Europe from early modern times through the Soviet period; Empire and nation, and the place of non-Russian nationalities in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in comparison with other European empires; the impact of Russia on European and world affairs; the Russian Revolution and European modernity; and the superpowers and the world during the Cold War.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Stuart Finkel
EUH 5934 Society and the Sexes in Modern Europe
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Short Course Description:
In this overview of European history since the eighteenth century we will concentrate on issues of gender with respect to politics, sexuality, class, science, imperialism, war, the modern nation-state, and the European Union.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Sheryl Kroen
EUH 5934 Cultural History of Capitalism
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Short Course Description:
In this course we will read a mixture of primary and secondary sources that will enable us to explore the cultural history of capitalism since the early modern period. Primary sources include seminal writings in political economy (by John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx), in sociology (by Max Weber), and in anthropology (by Karl Polanyi), as well as novels (by Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne), films (from the Marshall Plan era), and political writings during the postwar economic recovery (by T.H. Marshall, Ludwig Erhard, Jean Fourastié, Stanley Hoffmann, W. W. Rostow). Secondary readings offer different approaches to a cultural history of capitalism, highlighting in particular the use of political economy, fiction, and great exhibitions, and a cultural history of practices (in the theater, around credit, in relation to consumption).
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Sheryl Kroen
EUH 5934 War and Culture in Europe
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Short Course Description:
This course surveys war in the modern era, its impact on European society, and the corresponding cultures of victory and defeat. Four conflicts will be examined in depth: the defeat of Napoleon, the victory of Germany over France in 1871, World War I and II.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Peter Bergmann
EUH 5934 Modern European Revolutions: 1789-1989
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Short Course Description:
Revolutions are among the most dramatic and significant events that have touched the lives of Europeans in the past two centuries. This course traces the historical development of European revolutions beginning with the great French Revolution of 1789 and ending with the East European revolutions of 1989. We begin with a discussion of the concept of revolution in an effort to answer such questions as: How do we define a revolutionary event? And what are the identifying traits of a revolution? Next we shall examine the background and successive stages of the French Revolution, 1789-1799 (and Napoleonic epilogue). Part II. deals with two further examples of European revolution: The Russian Revolutions of 1917-1921 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939. In the closing weeks of the course we shall examine the "revolutionary" impact of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Central/Eastern Europe from 1989 onwards.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. George Esenwein
EUH 5934 War and Culture in Europe
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Short Course Description:
The course traces the tension between nationalism and the concept of Europe. The course explores how a European identity arose along with the emergence of nationalisms during the Reformation, the wars of religion, and the Enlightenment. The course examines on the rise and fall of the Napoleonic system; the German bids for hegemony under Bismarck, Wilhelm II, and Hitler; and the success of European integration after 1945.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Peter Bergmann
EUH 5934 Modernism: Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe
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Short Course Description:
The central theme is modernism. Its antecedents and emergence are examined through the crisis of romantic revolutionism in Russian thought, the turn to realism in Darwinism and Marxism, and in the Nietzscheanism of the avant-garde. The unfolding of modernist culture in the first decades of the twentieth century is treated in Max Weber’s effort to play off Marx and Nietzsche, Viennese modernism on the eve of 1914, the modernist explosion in World War I and the modernism of Berlin in the 1920s. The crisis of modernism is explored through fascist and leftist varieties of Existentialism. Post-modernist cultural trends are examined through readings on “Americanization,” feminism and the thought of Foucault. In the last weeks of the course, students will be working on a seminar paper of their own choice. Since the class readings have a strong Central European emphasis, topics on different cultures are welcome.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Peter Bergmann
EUS 6930 Auteur After Life: Krysztof Kieslowski
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Short Course Description:
This course explores the cinema of internationally renowned Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. Specifically, we will approach Kieślowski’s cinema as a productive site for investigating late transformations of the auteur in European cinema. The title of this course, “Auteur After Life,” is intended to signal 1) the ways in which Kieślowski’s own feature films are born out of the death of documentary filmmaking, 2) the ways in which his cinema has functioned as a new lease on life for the European auteur, as a “reanimation” of the auteur after the “death of the author,” and 3) the ways in which Kieślowski himself has continued uncannily, after his own death, to “direct films,” to direct his own screenplays via other filmmakers (Tykwer, Tanović, Stuhr). As a cinema haunted by doubles, ghosts, and parallel lives, a cinema in which authorial figures, both human and demiurgic, both living and resurrected proliferate, Kieślowski’s films are uniquely configured to stage these questions. We will trace Kieślowski’s own interrogation of the figure of the auteur via a focus on the contradictory impulses of his cinema, a cinema torn between a fidelity to the profilmic event and a preoccupation with editing, between an “Eastern” humanism and “Western” psychoanalysis, between a fascination with providential/demiurgic authorship and a concomitant fascination with the uncanny productivity of chance. Screening two full-length films (or the equivalent thereof) per week, we will examine the bulk of Kieślowski’s documentary and feature work, as well as look at selected films by auteurs in dialogue with Kieślowski, such as internationally active Polish filmmakers Krzysztof Zanussi and Agnieszka Holland as well as West European directors Tom Tykwer and Lars von Trier.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Chris Caes
EUS 6930 European Anthropology: Migration and Trafficking
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Short Course Description:
This course considers how contemporary welfare and labor regimes, claims on citizenship rights, immigration rules, public debates, and interethnic and racial experience inform the movement of people by controlling their bodies, subjectivities, social life, health, and labor. We examine these issues through the lens of gender, yet without falling into a common misconception of equating gender only with women. A particular attention is paid not simply to "women" but to the set of social meanings attributed to sexual difference as a central organizing principle in the study of migration. Our focus is therefore on the institutions, practices, and ideologies that immigrants use to organize their lives before and after migration, and more specifically those of the family and the labor market. We include the topic of trafficking of women. The course aims to incorporate various theoretical approaches and empirical evidence to migration, including transnationalism, diaspora studies, world-systems approach, deterritorialized nation-states, the recuperation of overseas populations into cultural nationalist framework, the questions of borderlands and movement across borders.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Maria Stoilkova
EUS 6930 State Building in Modern Europe
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Short Course Description:
The modern state is of central interest to students of comparative politics, international relations, and American political development. Whether condemned as an instrument of repression or elevated as an engine of economic development, the state is inarguably the fundamental unit of national political organization in the world today. This course will examine the processes that produced the modern state in the region where it first appeared, Western Europe, and then analyze attempts to transplant this singular institutional innovation to Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, as well as the United States. We will address the following questions: what is the modern state? In what historical circumstances did it originate? Can state-builders in late-developing nations reproduce the institutional forms of the modern state, or are these institutions inevitably altered in transit? When does state-building fail and why? Finally, in an era of economic globalization and emerging supranational institutions such as the European Union, are some states undergoing fundamental redefinition?
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Conor O’Dwyer
EUS 6930 EU Environmental Policy
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Short Course Description:
Most Americans know little about the European Union (EU), even less about its environmental politics, and seldom regret it. However, the EU has become a powerful presence and a creative policy innovator—often a policy initiator--in global environmental affairs. Most importantly for Americans, the EU is a significant player and growing influence in both U.S. domestic and international environmental policymaking. This course is a primer on internal and external environmental policies of the EU—and why they are inseparable. It focus upon the three crucial dimensions of EU environmental policymaking: the domestic politics of EU members, politics among EU members, and the EU’s regional and global policies. This means a discussion of institutions (formal policymaking structures), policy process (the politics of policy), and several major substantive policies. You will be asked to select an EU member or candidate state and to prepare a series of short ‘briefing papers” that illuminate that nation’s environmental policymaking. The briefing paper is your opportunity to take an excursion in depth into the policymaking structure of a single nation.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Walter A. Rosenbaum
EUS 6930 Speaking of Events
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Short Course Description:
We speak of events - things that happen like walking, smoking of a cigarette, jumping, rain - with the same ease we speak of people like you, your cat and various objects like the paper on which this syllabus is printed. In the last five decades (at least since the work of Donald Davidson), events, what they are, what role they play in human language and thought, have been the focus of many debates among philosophers, linguists, psycholinguists, and the results of these debates have also been applied in first and second language acquisition studies, for example. This interdisciplinary course explores some of the most influential work done in these domains. The first part of the course outlines the basic features of Davidson’s account of the logical form of action sentences, and an overview of the main approaches within Davidsonian event semantics in recent philosophical and linguistic literature. The second part of the course focuses on the link between events and language by examining applications of the event concept in semantics and linguistic analysis. The topics will mainly revolve around aspect in Slavic languages, and comparisons will be drawn to aspectual systems in other languages with which students are likely to be also familiar: e.g., English, German, Romance.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Hana Filip
FOT 6809 Translation for Diplomacy, Law, and EU Issues
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Short Course Description:
The purpose of the course is to develop the practice of translation skills in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural domains specific to diplomacy, comparative/international law, and legal issues typical of the European Union (EU). The curriculum focuses on the acquisition of translation skills while highlighting the terminology and cultural problems that characterize translation in such sensitive forums of world affairs. Translation is presented as a problem-solving discipline. Translation assignments cover a wide variety of text types and genres, such as, political speeches, legal documents from different state, national, and international legislatures, EU official texts on a variety of legal issues (for instance: employment, women’s rights, environmental issues, export-import regulations, and taxation policies).
For more information, please contact the instructor: Bernadette Cesar-Lee
FOT 6809 Translation for Diplomacy, Law, and EU Issues
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Short Course Description:
The purpose of the course is to develop the practice of translation skills in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural domains specific to diplomacy, comparative/international law, and legal issues typical of the European Union (EU). The curriculum focuses on the acquisition of translation skills while highlighting the terminology and cultural problems that characterize translation in such sensitive forums of world affairs. Translation is presented as a problem-solving discipline. Translation assignments cover a wide variety of text types and genres, such as, political speeches, legal documents from different state, national, and international legislatures, EU official texts on a variety of legal issues (for instance: employment, women’s rights, environmental issues, export-import regulations, and taxation policies).
For more information, please contact the instructor: Bernadette Cesar-Lee
EUS 6930/EUH 6289 Nationalism and the Idea of Europe
View Sample Course Syllabus| Fall 2008 Schedule
Short Course Description:
The course traces the tension between nationalism and the concept of Europe. The course explores how a European identity arose along with the emergence of nationalisms during the Reformation, the wars of religion, and the Enlightenment. The course examines on the rise and fall of the Napoleonic system; and the success of European integration after 1945.
For more information,please contact the instructor: Dr. Peter Bergmann
GEW 6726 Literature and Culture in the Third Reich
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Short Course Description:
This course analyzes major literary and nonliterary works of Nazi period. Furthermore, it appropriates German literary tradition, examines Nazi theater and film, and discusses literature of the so-called inner emigration.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Nora Alter
GEW 6900/FOT 6810 Other Europe: Translation Problems & Questions of European Identity
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Short Course Description:
The foundation of Europe rests on translation. In the founding moments of modernity, such as Cervantes’s /Don Quixote/ and Shakespeare’s /Merchant of Venice/, to Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Benjamin, Heidegger and Derrida, Europe has been imagined or reflected upon as a space where translation of its own alterity, of the “Other,” (be it the Muslim, Jewish, Greek, Roman—pagan/Latin or Catholic, Messianic or Marxist) takes place. The taking place of the Other in these moments of translation is in effect what constitutes Europe. The foundational texts of the theory of translation will be discussed (Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of Translator” in particular) as well as other texts that will confront us with the difficult and urgent questions: How and why the cradle of Western civilization, Europe, create from within its own demonic and destructive Other? How does what we call a nation state rely, in its configuration, on the annihilation of other nation states or in its founding moments of the repression or translation of the Other? And how and why does Europe, especially now, at the end of the Millennium, and the entrance to new one, create spaces inhabited by violence and destruction in the name of Europe and national identity?
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Dragan Kujundzic
INR 6213 Politics of the European Union
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Short Course Description:
This course is designed to acquaint you with major theoretical perspectives on the European Union (EU), and to facilitate your undertaking original research relating to an EU topic of your choice. This is a seminar requiring substantive presentations and discussion by members of the class. Individual success in the course will depend on keeping abreast of the suggested reading and informed participation throughout the semester. You are expected to attend each meeting of the seminar.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Leann Brown
LIN 6571 Structure of Slavic/Czech
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Short Course Description:
This course is a linguistic examination of Czech language.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Hana Filip
MMC 5306 World Communications Systems: A European Perspective
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Short Course Description:
Since the early 1990s the world’s media systems have wrestled with the challenges and consequences of changing geo-political relationships, an increasingly interdependent global economy, and the emergence of digital technologies. These challenges include significant increases in the availability of distribution channels and content, new forms of content, such as interactive media, and controversies surrounding such issues as intellectual property, access to information, and consolidation of media control. In this course we will look at the history and role of communication systems intended for audiences in other countries, and at communication systems in several other countries.
We will look most closely at events in the European Union. Digital broadcasting, broadband, e-platforms, and other technologies are being developed and implemented. In some cases laws, customs, and national objectives clash with the unifying goals of the EU. In other cases there are tensions between trade policies of European governments and those of the United States. In this course we will examine the status of electronic media in the EU, and laws and policies designed to promote and protect them.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. David Ostroff
POS 6933/EUS 6930 EU in Comparative Context
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Short Course Description:
This course is designed to accomplish two primary tasks. First it will introduce students to the history, development and current state of the European Union (EU) and in particular its political institutions. The first part of the course will be dedicated to accomplishing this task through extensive reading and discussion of the existing EU-specific literature (books and articles). In the second part of the class we will turn to the remaining goal: the development of an understanding of the European Union and its political instructions, development and structure in comparative context.
Since its inception the European Union (and its predecessors the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community and the European Community) has been referred to in the literature most often as sui generis. Use of this term to describe the EU implies that it is in a class by itself, and thus not an appropriate topic for the approaches and/or tools of comparative political analysis. This course is designed to question this assumption by explicitly attempting to evaluate the history, development, current status and likely future of the EU in an explicitly comparative context. This is accomplished through a review of some of the basic theories in comparative politics on institutions and institutional development and an evaluation of the applicability of these theories (with and without revisions) to the EU case.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Amie Kreppel
POS 6933 Post-Communist Politics
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Short Course Description:
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union represents a dramatic turning point in contemporary political history. Not only did it mark the end of the Cold War, it sent over two dozen states on a path of political, economic, and social change. While some states have transformed themselves into democratic states with relatively stable market economies, others have made little progress, often overwhelmed with political corruption and economic instability. This seminar will expose students to the practical issues of regime change in an area of the world where states have little to no prior experience with democracy and where important requisites associated with successful democratic transitions (e.g., a market economy, a well-developed civil society, and well-established state borders) were largely absent. While the primary geographic focus of the course is Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the theoretical questions are broadly comparative in nature and the seminar will consistently seek to tie research on the post-communist region to other regional settings. For example, to what extent does the post-communist context differ from other post-authoritarian contexts? What lessons do the transitional experiences in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union provide to scholars of Comparative Politics? What issues should we be aware of when making comparisons between post-communist Europe and the rest of the world?
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Bryon Moraski
SPN 6735 Family Resemblances: Cross-linguistic & historical explorations of Romance grammar
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Short Course Description:
With the formation of the European Union, the cultural ties between speakers of erstwhile Latin varieties, such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Catalan, are growing ever tighter. At the same time, language-based nationalism, inspired by the looming prospect of language loss under the globalization of English, provokes newfound feelings of unique linguistic and cultural identities. Along with this sociocultural rapprochement and heightened transnational sentiment, linguists studying the formation of grammar are concurrently evermore intrigued by the benefits of crosslinguistic analysis. Cross-linguistic work with natural data, facilitated by large computer-based corpora of historical and modern language, can help linguists understand the unique aspects of each variety they study, to visualize the dynamic process of language change, and, most importantly, to uncover some of the universal tendencies in human linguistic efficiency and creativity.
This course will cover the following topics: a) language policy and linguistic conflict in the European Union; b) functionalist models of language, including grammaticization theory; c) corpus design and quantitative methods for studying natural data; and d) case studies of variation and change, focusing on modern Romance varieties spoken in the European Union. Students will utilize freely available large, electronic corpora to carry out their own cross-linguistic and/or historical studies, thereby gaining a more intimate understanding of the relationship between and the unique history of the language(s) they have chosen to study.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Jessica Aaron
SYA 7933/EUS 6930 Immigrant Issues and the Politics of Immigration in Europe
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Short Course Description:
This graduate seminar is designed to convey a sense of the current position of immigrants across Europe and the differentialist immigration policies in the host societies. Therefore, the emphasis is equally topical and geographic. The theme of the course will be explored in a multidisciplinary perspective and from an interactive approach: the aim of this seminar is to examine the changing profile of European societies from the standpoint of both new settlers and ‘established inhabitants’ via major theories and empirical studies. We will delve into the specificities of immigration policies in major immigration countries such as Germany, France, Great Britain and Italy, but we will also devote ample space to political responses and public reactions in new immigration countries like the Czech Republic and Hungary. European immigration takes up its contemporary understanding and delimitation as a socio-economic and political issue after the Second World War, with the delineation of state boundaries and marked economic and ideological disparities between sending and receiving countries. However, European immigration of the past 15 years is different in nature from that of the post-war period: following the downfall of communism, recent population flows are part of a wider context of increased globalization of capital and labor. EU member states gradually realized that cooperation in the area of immigration policies is necessary, and that the project of “fortress Europe” is not only impracticable but also against the international human rights laws. With the eastward expansion of the European Union to a part which was once its nemesis, all ‘old,’ ‘new’ and future member states appear to be working together to contouring a common immigration policy.
For more information, please contact the instructor: Dr. Alin Ceobanu
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