Academic Programs
The Paris Global Center partners with French and regional institutions to engage students, faculty, alumni, and the public across borders and disciplines. Our academic programs serve Columbia students at the undergraduate and master's level, and also welcome students from other U.S. colleges through the Columbia in Paris program.
Reid Hall has served as a Franco-American educational center since the end of World War I, initially hosting the American University Women's Club. During World War II, it was occupied by the École normale supérieure des jeunes filles de Sèvres, after which American leadership resumed in August 1947. In the following years, Reid Hall served as a residential facility for university women worldwide, a cultural and social club, and a study-abroad center. In 1964, Helen Rogers Reid gifted 4 rue de Chevreuse to Columbia University. Columbia’s undergraduate programs at Reid Hall began in 1972, followed in 1986 by the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities: New York / Paris program. The university's first and only master’s program conducted entirely in Paris was founded in 1993 as the M.A. in French Cultural Studies, now the M.A. in History and Literature.
Credit-Bearing programs
These programs, which draw a large and diverse student population, are at the heart of the Paris Global Center. They reflect Columbia's historic commitment to the value of studying abroad at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Many are devised in collaboration with leading French institutional partners such as Sciences Po, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the universities of Paris 1, Paris 4, and Paris 7.
Columbia University’s M.A. in History and Literature is an innovative program that explores the interconnections and intersections between history and literature, both as categories of cultural production and as scholarly disciplines. In the past thirty years the boundaries between history and literature have become usefully blurred. Furthermore, the dialogue between the two has taken many different forms. Several thriving and inter-related fields like literary history, the history of the book, intellectual history, and the history of science are now history and literature hybrids. The M.A. in History and Literature capitalizes on this propitious intellectual moment.
The program is held at the Columbia’s Global Paris Center, located at Reid Hall in Paris. Students are taught by eminent scholars in history and literature from Columbia University, and also choose from a wide variety of courses at France’s two top-tier graduate schools in the humanities and the social sciences: the Ecole normale supérieure and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales.
The Columbia in Paris Program, located at historic Reid Hall in Paris, offers summer, semester, and year-long study abroad opportunities in France, with a wide selection of curricular and public programming in partnership with the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
The French Immersion Program immerses students in the language through coursework and daily life. Students take at least one required language course at Reid Hall and select the rest of their courses from Columbia in Paris electives and offerings at French University partners.
The English program allows students to take courses taught in English at Reid Hall and the Paris campus of Sciences Po, a world-renowned institution in the social sciences. Depending on goals and interests, students choose from a broad range of options in the social sciences and humanities.
Students have several program options available to them in the summer: Art and Music Humanities, the French & Francophone Studies Program, an independent research project, and more.
The Shape of Two Cities: New York/Paris Program is for undergraduate students and recent graduates from colleges and universities around the world. The program’s goals are to introduce the fields of architecture, planning and preservation; encourage their exploration in the contexts of history, theory and practice; and identify and analyze their interrelationships, especially in regard to the making of cities. The in-depth course of study is suited to students without previous academic experience in design who are interested in architecture, planning or preservation as a career, students in the liberal arts who are interested in approaching urban and historical issues from an architectural and urban planning perspective, and students with previous design experience who would like to develop additional studio skills in preparation for application to graduate school. All classes are conducted in English.
Research Opportunities
In 2009, the Ville de Provins and Columbia University established a cooperative relationship for the use of the city’s archives and municipal library by Columbia faculty and students and by affiliates of the Columbia Global Centers | Europe at Reid Hall in Paris. Columbia researchers studying the collections can access them outside the regular opening hours and stay in housing provided by the City of Provins. Since the signing of the agreement, scholars from Columbia have visited the fonds ancien in Provins nearly every year.
Dedicated to exploring the key ideas of contemporary thought, this research grant is offered in partnership by the Columbia Global Paris Center and Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). This collaboration began in September 2025 with the launch of the Jean Baudrillard Program. Baudrillard—an incisive thinker of modernity and a central figure in French Theory— deposited his personal library at Reid Hall and entrusted his archives to IMEC.
Founded in 1988, IMEC is located at the historic Abbaye d’Ardenne, near Caen in Normandy, and preserves a vast and unique collection of literary, intellectual, and artistic archives. Its holdings span publishing houses, journals, and key figures from the intellectual and cultural life of the 20th century—writers, philosophers, historians, editors, translators, and designers. IMEC’s mission is not only to conserve these materials but to make them available for critical inquiry and creative research.
Workshops and Residencies
In addition to its long-term academic offerings, the Paris Global Center welcomes Columbia students and faculty for intensive seminars and workshops during the year and in the summer months. The Center has worked with the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the School of the Arts (SOA), the Alliance Program, the Mailman School of Public Health, the School of Professional Studies (SPS), and the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP).
