Paris 8 University

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University of Paris VIII
Université Paris-VIII
Established 1969
Type Public
Undergraduates 14,070
Postgraduates 6,259
Location Paris, France
Affiliations University of Paris, UNIMED
Website Website (English)

The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (French: Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris. Once part of the federal University of Paris system, it is now an autonomous public institution and is part of the Academy of Créteil. Most undergraduate degrees (except modern languages) are taught in French.

It was founded as a direct response to events of May 1968. This response was twofold: it represented a sympathetic response to student demands for more freedom, but it also represented the movement of students out of central Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, where the street-fighting of 1968 had taken place.

History

Founded in 1969, the new experimental institution was named "Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes" (C.U.E.V.) in Vincennes. In 1971, it gained full university status, thus allowing it to award its own degrees, and renamed "Université Paris VIII".[1] Since moving to Saint-Denis in 1980, the university has since become a major teaching and research centre for humanities in the Île-de-France region.

Tumultuous years

As soon as it opened, Vincennes became the venue for a continuation of 1968, being occupied almost immediately by student radicals, and being the scene of violent confrontations with the police.

It became particularly notorious for its radical philosophy department, assembled and then headed by Michel Foucault, who in this stage of his career was at his most militant, on one occasion participating in a student occupation and pelting the police outside the building with projectiles. The scandal of this department emerged not around this incident, however, but around one of the philosophy professors, Jacques Lacan's daughter Judith Miller, who was not only a committed communist, like most of the faculty, but indeed a Maoist as well. The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus. (Miller was subsequently fired by the French education ministry after saying in a radio interview that the university was a capitalist institution and that she was trying to make it function as badly as possible.)

Recent reforms

Since the turmoil in the late 1960s, the University has endorsed a far more mainstream academic life and has brought in new departments, new professors, and national rules to effect this change. In 1980, the University was relocated to the suburb of Saint-Denis. The University's capacity of 24,000 students per year makes "Paris VIII" an important university with internationally recognized departments in Political Sciences, Cinema Arts, Communication Studies, and Feminist Studies.

Academics

The university offers over a hundred undergraduate, graduate and diploma courses.[2]

Affiliations

Paris-VIII has partnerships with several universities around the world. They include the UC Berkeley, the Beijing Film Academy, Boston University, and the University of Berlin.[3]

Renowned faculty members

Philosophy

Psychoanalysis

Politics and international relations

Economics

  • Kostas Vergopoulos

Communication sciences

Psychology

Hypermedia, new media and cyberculture

  • Ghislaine Azémard
  • Claude Baltz
  • Maurice Benayoun
  • Jean Clement
  • Pierre Lévy
  • Imad Saleh
  • Jean-Louis Weissberg
  • Khaldoun Zreik
  • Jean-Pierre Balpe

Anthropology

Sociology

Arts

Ethnomusicology

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Paris VIII: History". www.univ-paris8.fr. 
  2. ↑ "Paris VIII: Educational Programmes". www.univ-paris8.fr. 
  3. ↑ "Paris-VIII in figures". www.univ-paris8.fr. 
  4. ↑ (French) Info archive on musicaitalia.free.fr (DOC file)

External links

Coordinates: 48°56′41″N 2°21′48″E / 48.94472°N 2.36333°E / 48.94472; 2.36333

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