Because no other MFA program in the world has the city of Paris as its home, AUP dedicates a whole course to thinking, feeling, writing and discussing (in) the City of Light.
Pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at AUP means experiencing writing and city life in ways unlike any other program. Over 12 weeks, this immersive discussion-based seminar will bring students to gain new perspectives on the city through the eyes of five faculty members taking the city as their field for research and five Paris-based writers and artists.
While the seminar will be customized each year, AUP’s experienced faculty have many exciting projects and scopes of work to contribute the seminar. Students could, for example, be connecting wine and literature with food studies expert Professor Elizabeth Kinne. With Professor Geoffrey Gilbert, they may write the streets of Paris (and perhaps contribute to Gilbert’s Instagram project that poetically maps the streets in alphabetical order); they may grasp the realities of young immigrant students in the banlieues with Professor Rebecca Rast; may dive into the archives of famous writers with specialist of Beckett and Proust, Professor Dann Gunn; and may attend meetings of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and theorists with Professor Russell Williams.
With this MFA, we want to tie in the avant-garde tradition and encourage experimentation within the chosen genre.
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Professor Biswamit Dwibedy
With everything that Paris has to offer, from creative reading and spoken word series Paris Lit Up to exhibition spaces and bookshops that real writers go to, such as the Red Wheelbarrow or the Abbey Bookshop, this seminar will take students beyond AUP’s campus to experience first-hand all the ways literature and language weave the city landscape. And it will be up to students to build and question their own relationship with it—no matter the genre they choose.
“With this MFA, we want to tie in the avant-garde tradition and encourage experimentation within the chosen genre,” shares Co-Director Biswamit Dwibedy.
Discovering and discussing the work in the creative communities across Paris may lead to collaborative projects or creative processes that combine writing with other media or resources from other disciplines, in the liberal arts tradition.
Through an embodied experience of the city that relies as much on the senses as on intellect—and thanks to discussion and debate amongst themselves and with professors and guest lecturers—students will gain an appreciation for the diverse, multicultural and multilingual cityscape that they have chosen to immerse themselves and evolve within.
The curriculum draws on the city's rich literary history as in this lecture by Professor Geoffrey Gilbert.
Events like the Center for Writers and Translaters Cahier Series launch bring authors to campus, here Professor Dan Gunn speaks with Marina Warner.
