This year AUP is offering a unique travel study course entitled Conflict and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. Co-led by Professors Brian Schiff and Philip Golub, this Psychology course will explore various dimensions of what the historian of ideas Itzvan Hont calls “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind”: the enduring tension/contradiction between our mixed belongings: our cosmopolitan belonging as natural and moral beings to humanity, on the one hand, and our segmented and conflicted socially constructed belongings (the nation and ethnicity, most notably), on the other. It explores this problem through philosophical investigation (moral philosophy, thick and thin cosmopolitan theory); theoretical and historical studies of nationalism, mass violence and inter-group conflicts; and the role of collective memories in the perpetuation or transcendence of conflict. Ex-Yugoslavia will be the core empirical focus of the course, which will be held alongside the international conference Re-inventing/Reconstructing Cosmopolitanism in Contested Spaces and Post-Conflict Zones in Cres, Croatia, organized in partnership with George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. Students will participate in the conference and will then have the unique opportunity to hear from and dialogue with leading ex-Yugoslav psychologists, historians and social scientists. 

Practical details:

  • This course begins in Paris and then students travel together to Cres, Croatia to take part in the conference.
  • May 21-May 23, 2022: Students attend class on AUP’s campus in Paris, France
  • May 24, 2022: Students and faculty travel together to Cres, Croatia
  • May 25-May 28, 2022: Students take part in the Re-inventing/reconstructing cosmopolitanism in contested spaces and post-conflict zones conference in Cres, Croatia
  • May 29, 2022: Students and faculty return to Paris, France together
  • Housing in Paris through AUP Housing is available upon request for an additional fee. In Cres, all participants will be housed at the Moise Palace included in the program fee. Travel between Paris, France and Cres, Croatia is included in the program fee.
  • We will accept applicants to this program who are undergraduate students in their second year or above or graduate students.
  • The application deadline for this program is April 10, 2022.

Tuition and Fees:

  • Tuition for this 4-credit course is 4,024 EUR and the course includes a program fee of 1050 EUR to cover travel and lodging in Cres, Croatia.
  • Housing in Paris through AUP Housing is available upon request for an additional fee.

For more information, please write to admissions@aup.edu.