Reid Hall’s capacious premises is also an Assocation under French law that hosts a mosaic of American, British, and French member universities and research centers. Certain members have resided here since the beginning of the twentieth century, like the French Association of University Women (AFFDU). Other members have joined Reid Hall more recently, like the University of Kent (Great Britain).
REID HALL MEMBERS INCLUDE:
Academic Year Abroad (Director: Paule Schneersohn)
AYA is one of the oldest and most respected of study abroad programs. It is attentive to academic standards and offers students the opportunity to be immersed in another culture and to embark on university programs intellectually equivalent to the student’s home school. AYA offers direct registration at several of the finest universities in Europe: the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and the Institut Catholique in Paris; the Universidad Carlos III, the Universidad Complutense, and the Universidad Autonoma in Madrid; and the Università degli Studi of Siena. AYA programs, intended for first-rate, independent students, provide guidance from experienced on-site directors, who see to tutoring, home stays, and cultural activities and excursions. For nearly half a century, AYA has represented the standard in overseas study.
Association Française des Femmes Diplômées des Universités (AFFDU) (President: Evelyne d’Auzac)
Founded in the aftermath of World War I by women academics, AFFDU believes that women’s education is both a factor of peace and the key to women’s advancement. AFFDU is comprised of women graduates of higher education. In France and throughout the world,AFFDU is engaged in efforts to promote the education and professional advancement of women.
Bespoke (Director: Tim Levin)
Bespoke Education was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in New York City. Bespoke has offices in New York, Westchester, Los Angeles, and now Paris. We have over sixty tutors with exceptional academic backgrounds, and we work with students from elementary school through graduate school, giving them support in their school work and preparing them to excel on standardized tests.
Bespoke’s program in Paris includes test preparation courses held both at Bespoke’s office and at a number of Paris high schools for SAT, ACT, and SAT 2 exams. Bespoke’s expert teachers also help students one-on-one for IB, AP, and other English-language based courses, including math, science, history, and literature. Students can also use Bespoke’s experienced tutors for help with college applications and essays as well as for GMAT and GRE preparation. Mock testing and small-group classes are offered throughout the year at our Reid Hall office.
Dartmouth College (Director: Mathilde Sitbon)
The French Foreign Study Program provides students the opportunity to study French language, literature, and civilization at an advanced level in Paris. Special courses in advanced grammar and stylistics, modern French literature, art history, and modern history and politics are taught by French faculty and the Dartmouth faculty member.
The program aims to expose students to French culture and society through classroom study and readings, excursions and site visits, personal contact with families and firsthand experience with French. Students are expected to converse fluently with French people and to write on a variety of cultural topics with an accurate command of French vocabulary and idiom. Students will gain a perspective on their own culture through intimate experience with and understanding of French culture.
EuroPublicIslam (Director: Nilüfer Göle)
The EuroPublicIslam Project, hosted by the Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales and funded by the Conseil Européen de la Recherche, conducts its research workshops at Reid Hall. This project brings together different fields of knowledge and methods of analysis emerging from the interactions and confrontations in the public realm between Islam and Europe. It aims to go beyond the current paradigms of integration and security to better understand the dynamics underlying these interactions, exchanges, conflicts, and reciprocal transformations.
This project studies the religious symbolism, artistic productions, and political discourses that favor cultural and societal discord. It seeks to re-conceptualize in a transnational perspective the place of Islam in Europe, and the future of both.
EUSA, Internships program (Director: Julie Bitaud)
EUSA is an international, not-for-profit, internship organization in partnership with Boston University. Placing students in London since 1984 and Paris since 2002, EUSA now runs programs across Europe, placing nearly 2,000 students per year in academically directed internships.
EUSA works in partnership with universities, colleges, departments, and individual professors to design and implement high quality, customized academic internship programs that immerse our partners’ students in new professional, social, and linguistic cultures. Our work promotes the advancement of cultural understanding by integrating learning, working, and living abroad.
EUSA can offer both summer and full-semester programs using any combination of the following services in London, Dublin, Madrid, Paris, or Geneva:
• Internship/work placement
• Customized courses
• Accommodation
• Program management & safety
Hamilton College (Director: Martine Guyot-Bender)
Founded in 1957, Hamilton College Junior Year in France (HCJYF) offers an exciting academic and cultural program in France that provides orientation, individual advising, both small in-house courses and a large variety of courses in the Paris university system, comfortable homestays, and transfer of credits.
The Hamilton program in Paris attracts students of all academic disciplines considering careers in government and non-profit agencies, international business, foreign service, teaching, medicine, the arts, and law. Hamilton’s academic program gives students the best opportunity to acquire true linguistic proficiency and an in-depth knowledge of the many facets of life in France. The program allows semester students from affiliate schools to apply for a limited number of spots. It provides a well balanced curriculum that includes in-house courses and courses at various institutions of higher education in various fields in Paris (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Institut d’études politiques, Institut catholique, Ecole de Louvre, Paris VI).
Hollins College (Director: Audrey Stavrevitch)
Hollins was among the first colleges in the nation to offer an international study program, founded in Paris in 1955. Since then, Hollins has been nationally recognized for the quality of our study abroad programs.
Hollins Abroad — Paris is a distinctive program combining outstanding classes, guided group excursions in Paris and other regions of France, and special academic options to provide a comprehensive French cultural experience. Our faculty includes scholars who have studied and taught at the Sorbonne and other renowned universities in Paris. We offer courses in French language, literature, art, theatre, architecture, film, economics, politics, and international relations. Classes are small and designed to take advantage of the rich resources of Paris; guided visits to the Musee d’Orsay and other museums are an important part of the course on Impressionism and architecture students travel around the city to study buildings and monuments.
Hollins Abroad-Paris is open to students at all colleges and universities. Most Hollins Abroaders are juniors, but qualified sophomores and seniors can also be considered.
Sarah Lawrence (Director: Monique Middleton)
The Sarah Lawrence Program in Paris offers an extensive range of classes, designed to give you the greatest possible freedom when making your course selections. You will take small seminar classes at Reid Hall with Sarah Lawrence faculty and have the opportunity to attend classes at some of Paris’s premier educational institutions. In keeping with the Sarah Lawrence philosophy of education, each course is complemented by weekly or bi-weekly conference work sessions, during which you will work individually with your professors, delving deeper into course material, preparing final projects, or developing personal research. The program also offers a wide range of visual and performing arts courses at various studios and conservatories in and around Paris.
If you specialize in the humanities, social sciences or the visual and performing arts, you may consider enrolling in one of our special intensive programs. Each of these unique programs provides a comprehensive curriculum that includes both academic courses and practical training or fieldwork. Enrolling in an intensive program allows you to complete more than half of your coursework in your chosen field of study.
You may choose from a variety of housing options, including homestays with French families, which can provide an excellent exposure to language and culture, chambre de bonne (small furnished rooms at the top of apartment buildings), studio apartments, flatshares, or the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (full-year students).
As a student in the French educational system, you will enjoy most benefits granted to French students. As a student in the program, you will benefit from many activities such as exhibits, lectures, cultural events, and excursions in Southern France.
Smith College (Director: Peter Bloom)
The Smith College Junior Year Abroad program in Paris was founded in 1925. With the brief exception of the war years, from 1939 through 1946, the College has continued to send students to Paris, under the direction of a regular member of the Smith faculty, for a full academic year. Students, whose interests range widely from Art History to Neuroscience, pledge to speak French throughout the year and study French language, history, culture, and more at the institutions with which we are associated in Paris: Universities of Paris IV and Paris VII and the Institut d’Études politiques (Sciences Po). They also take in-house courses at the Reid Hall Global Center in Montparnasse. A limited number of French students from our partner institutions in Paris are welcomed to the campus in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they generally pursue a one-year diploma in our unique American Studies Program. Smith’s programs abroad represent the College’s commitment to a globally engaged education “for women who will transform the world.”
Southern Methodist University (Director: Isabelle Roynier)
The SMU-in-Paris program was developed by Southern Methodist University in 1972 to offer its students a full French immersion experience in the center of Paris.
Our program is focused on a discovery of French and European culture through classes taught in French and in English at Reid Hall, and excursions. French, History, Art History, Political Science, Architecture, Fine Arts, Literature, Business and Cinema are among the subjects offered. Some classes combine a multidisciplinary cultural formation.
The material taught in the classroom is observed, discussed and practiced on site, during day-trips in and around Paris or study trips around France and sometimes abroad. Past trips include Normandy, Côte d’Azur, Lorraine, Languedoc, Flanders as well as Belgium and Luxembourg.
European and French culture comes alive as an integral part of our students’ education, which includes living with French families in order to better immerse into culture and practice French.
University of Delaware (Director: Viviane Akoka)
In our program, all courses are taught at Reid Hall. Although students of all majors are encouraged to apply for the program, students interested in art, art history, international relations, political science, and literature find the Paris Semester especially enriching. All instruction is in French. Classes are taught by French instructors associated with various local educational institutions. During the first of the semester’s two sessions, students take an advanced language course and a required course on contemporary France. During the longer second session, they take nine credits in courses selected from the Paris Semester’s multidisciplinary course offerings.
University of Kent, England (Director:Peter Read)
Launched in September 2009, the University of Kent at Paris (UKP) offers MA programmes in the Humanities which allow postgraduates to spend the autumn term at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus and the spring term at Reid Hall in Montparnasse. Students then write a dissertation on a topic of their choice, established in consultation with tutors, so as to achieve overall, in one year of study, an internationally recognised Master’s-level qualification.
Our MA programmes include Film Studies, Modern History, English and American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, Modern French Studies and French and Comparative Literature. All teaching and course materials are in English, except for the MA in Modern French Studies, but all students are offered optional French classes before and during their term in Paris. Our postgraduates come from all over the world and our graduation ceremonies take place at Canterbury Cathedral.
Vassar-Wesleyan (Director : Vinay Swamy)
Begun in 1969 the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris is run jointly by Vassar College and Wesleyan University and is based on a comprehensive or whole-life approach to study abroad. VWPP has three main goals:
- to help students to become near-native speakers of the French language
- to permit students to study all aspects of French civilization while simultaneously making progress towards completion of their respective majors
- to heighten cross-cultural awareness by exploring French society and thought, as well as further developing their understanding of the United States in relation to other cultures
All program activities are intended to bring students into contact with contemporary French life and attain those goals. Thus, they live with French host families and take courses in French universities. They participate in extracurricular activities, do internships and volunteer, and visit sites in Paris and France.
Students may participate in the program for either one or two semesters.