Rice Global Paris Summer Program | 2026 Course Listing
HART 327 Making Modernity in the
Streets of Paris: Art, Architecture, Film
SESSION 3 | Monday, July 6 - Friday, July 24, 2026
Instructors: Graham Bader & Lida Oukaderova
Paris Summer Session 3
Monday, July 6 - Friday, July 24
| Move-in July 5 | Move-out July 25
(Summer 2026)
Course Description
Making Modernity in the Streets of Paris will study the central role of Paris—as place, instigator, and site of contestation—in the development of modern art, film, and architecture since 1870. Students will be introduced to a broad and complex history through precise focus on Parisian spaces, buildings, institutions, and events through which it took shape. Working through a selection of key films, works of art, built structures, and cultural debates, we will explore defining issues in the development of modern culture by utilizing the city of Paris as our primary focus and site of inquiry. This focus—realized in site visits, walking tours, and conversations with artists and curators—aims to animate and make relevant the complexities of cultural production and contestation, in 1870 just as today.
The six-credit seminar will be divided between the classroom (where we will discuss readings and central themes) and on-site visits to museums, neighborhoods, architectural sites, and artists’ studios. The class consists of three primary sections, organized chronologically. We will begin with “Industrial Modernity and the Rise of the Modern City”; next will be “Culture, Colonialism and the Shadow of War”; closing the course will be “Colonial Reckonings: Culture After World War II.” These three sections will span diverse topics across 150 years of modern European culture, united by their common unfolding in the streets of the French capital.
Credit Hours
This course is 6 Rice credit hours.
Note: This is the only 6-credit course offering for the 2026 Paris Summer Program. All other courses are 3 Rice credit hours.
Does this course have prerequisites?
No, but students who already have credit for HART 627 cannot register for this course.
Does this course fulfill a Distribution Requirement?
No
Additional Funding for HART COURSES ONLY:
The Department of Art History may have funding to support students taking HART courses on the Paris Summer Program. Please email arthist@rice.edu for more information.
Application Deadline
Applications close at midnight on February 1, 2026.
Questions?
For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).
For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.
Graham Bader, Professor of Art History
Professor Bader's research and teaching focuses on postwar European and American art and the avant-gardes of early twentieth-century Europe, particularly Germany. Uniting Professor Bader's work on these topics is a desire to better understand the complex interrelations between works of art and the social and political fields in which they take shape: to ask why aesthetic objects come to look how they do when they do, and what this process can tell us about art and history alike. Seeing works of art as a kind of "materialized theory" rooted in specific historical conditions, Professor Bader seeks to ground his work equally in formal analysis, historical research and theoretical inquiry, understanding these three to be inseparable from one another.
Lida Oukaderova, Associate Professor of Art History
Lida Oukaderova is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice. She teaches courses on European and global cinema and is particularly interested in interactions between film and urban and architectural histories. Dr. Oukaderova specializes in the history and theory of film, with particular focus on European and Russian cinema.