European Studies
Cultural knowledge and the awareness of being part
of a global reality involve the need to understand
individual cultural identities. Europe's history, its
myths, and ongoing realities have always been, and
still are, part of a complex process requiring the study
and the implications of disciplines that span from
the arts and humanities to the social sciences. These
courses encourage students from different ethnic
backgrounds and cultures to think critically, to develop
their individual creativity and research interests, and to
improve their writing skills. The courses serve to enrich
the students' knowledge of the liberal arts tradition
across the spectrum of European cultures. They may be
combined with courses required for students' majors or minors. Students with an interest in European and non-
European languages who are studying other fields—
anthropology, art, business and liberal arts, comparative
literature, economics, education, film and media studies,
history, Jewish studies, linguistics, political science,
sociology, women's studies, or world studies—can
broaden their perspectives and prepare themselves
for graduate study as well as future careers by taking
EURO courses.
Courses
EURO 120. Writing about European Literature and Culture.
3 hrs. lec.; 3 cr.
Prereq.: English 110.
EURO 120 fulfills the College Writing 2 requirement
and builds on the work of English 110 (College Writing
1), in order to teach the conventions of writing in the
discipline of European Literature and Culture. Students
will read, discuss, and write about authentic French,
German, Italian, Modern Greek, and/or Russian literary
and cultural materials. Students will develop analytical
and writing skills by performing close readings of
primary texts, contextualizing their interpretations
through discussions of secondary texts, and developing
their own original theses on European literary and
cultural productions. This course satisfies the College Writing 2 (EC2) Pathways requirement.
Faculty
Nora Carr is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a BA in History and French from NYU and an MA in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center. Her interests include 20th-century French, German, and Latin American literature.
Professor Cloarec was born in Martinique, French West Indies; he holds a French Baccalauréat degree, a Bachelor's in Political Science and English from Columbia University, and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College.
Cloarec is the recipient of the 2014 Queens College-Hanging Loose Translation Prize for Inside My Own Skin, his translation of the prize-winning non-fiction narrative Dans ma peau (2010) by Guillaume de Fonclare, the Director of the World War I Museum in Picardy, eastern France. His other current translation projects include:
- I, Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, a fake—but historically accurate—diary of the Third Century Arab Queen who defied Rome for two decades;
- The Banker and the Parrot, an also fake and also historically accurate diary of French-born sea-captain Stephen Girard who became America's first multi-millionaire;
- Dostoyevsky Should Burn in Hell by Attiq Rahimi, an Afghan exile living in Paris and writing in French, is a war-torn Kabul reenactment of Crime and Punishment: what is one more crime amid so much barbarity?
