PARIS—Thomas Dodman, a graduate student in History, returned to France to study the curious 19th-century medical diagnoses—sometimes linked to fatal diseases—known as “epidemics of nostalgia.”
But from his research office at the University’s Center in Paris, he also finds himself helping faculty members organize conferences on topics like “Freud in the 21st Century” and “Marx in the 21st Century.”
He meets with and learns the work of graduate students from across the academic spectrum, from art to sciences to politics, and from a wide swath of universities. In the five years since its founding, the University of Chicago’s Center in Paris has become a magnet for bilingual and English-speaking scholars in the area.
And Dodman, a Social Sciences Collegiate Division Lecturer, inevitably rubs elbows with groups of undergraduates from Chicago—here to delve into evolutionary biology, economics, European civilization—analyzing the finer points of the Metro and nearby boulangeries.
“Students come here and mingle,” he told visiting scholars and members of the College Visiting Committee last weekend, in the Center’s book-lined conference room. “They exchange stories about the Kafkaesque wonders of French bureaucracy, a favorite topic, or about the Epicurean delights of French cuisine, even more of a favorite.”
The Center celebrated its fifth anniversary over the weekend with hardly a touch of nostalgia. Its founders and supporters spent their time looking ahead at how the unusual approach pioneered here can become a model for the University’s engagement around the world—what it means for proposed centers in China and beyond, how it can collaborate with existing campuses in London and Singapore.
Cross-disciplinary Approach Thrives
Though the University’s roots in Europe are deep, much of its international collaboration through the 20th century rested on the work and relationships of individual scholars.
Then in 2003, based on the success of its Civilization Abroad programs, the University made a series of decisions with scant precedent among American foreign study programs.
It bought classroom, office, and meeting space gathered around a courtyard in the 13th arrondissement, in a former no-man’s-land between industrial sites and a rail yard along the left bank of the Seine.
And it eschewed the common model for study abroad, which frequently involves sending students off to study language and local culture in somebody else’s programs. Like Civilization Abroad, the Center would bring Chicago faculty to France to teach Chicago undergraduates and graduate students across the disciplines. Some classes would be taught in French, some in English; all would share the same standards for intellectual rigor and creativity as courses taught in Hyde Park.
Now the 13th arrondissement has become a hot new academic hub in Paris, with thousands of students attending the adjacent Université Paris Diderot, also known as Paris 7, the anchor for a neighborhood that also includes schools in architecture and Asian languages and the French National Library.
The University of Chicago’s Center in Paris draws more than 200 undergraduates each year, while serving as a home away from home for dozens of graduate students, faculty members, and beginning this year, visiting scholars from elsewhere in Europe. It has hosted 74 conferences and roundtables sponsored by 28 different entities, on topics ranging from astrophysics to non-governmental organizations.
“It’s been really quite stunning,” says John Boyer, Dean of the College and head of the committee that oversees the Center. “If I had known how successful we were going to be here, I would have argued for building three times as much space.”
Students and Faculty Flock Abroad
While the Center is in Paris and colored by Paris, it is not primarily about Paris. Next fall Jennifer Cole, Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development, will take up residence to teach a course in African Civilization. She thinks the location, together with visits from French scholars, will bring abstractions to life in a different way than is possible in Chicago, or even Africa.
“To teach African Civilization in Paris means to be able to directly experience both the cultural/social/historical world of the colonizers and—because of the current waves of contemporary African immigration to France—the formerly colonized,” Cole says. “It will enable us to show students in very direct ways what it means to work in colonial archives, or visit the immigrant neighborhoods of Paris.”
Martha Merritt, Associate Dean for International Education in the College, says that intellectual opportunity, in a community that spans all levels of scholarly experience, makes it easy to recruit faculty who want to take their teaching on the road.
Once here, faculty and students are together most every day, in the classroom, on excursions, and over the coffeemaker in the Center’s kitchen.
Mara Goodman, a fourth-year, came to Paris last year to study Economics, one of her majors. The other is Romance Languages and Literature, and she returned to the Center this fall to take European Civilization in French. She is studying the Middle Ages with Robert Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of French Literature.
“My professors know me a lot better here,” Goodman said Saturday, before giving tours of the Center. “If you are here, you are going to see a lot of them.”
Anna Zelivianskaia, a third-year here to study primate and human evolution, says that in her first week at the Center, she already had bonded over trips to the Louvre and other sites, as well as around a cultural touchstone of Paris: cheese-tasting.
The flavors may be different elsewhere, but proponents hope that the lessons of the Center will help the University transplant its distinctive approach to teaching and research in other parts of the globe.
“Everybody wants to figure out what makes the Center in Paris work, and why does it work so well,” says Morrissey, who helped found the Center and now sits on the faculty committee that in 2008 recommended opening a center in Beijing. “The Paris Center is the model.”
By Steve Kloehn
