Course Schedule

ITAL 101 – Elementary Italian I

Listening, speaking, reading, and writing; introduction to the basic structures and vocabulary of Italian. (Does not count toward the Italian major or minor.)

ITAL 102 – Elementary Italian II

Listening, speaking, reading and writing; an introduction to the basic structures and vocabulary of Italian, continuation. (Does not count toward the Italian major or minor.)

ITAL 150B1 – The Holocaust in France and Italy

The course examines the origins, development, and implementation of discriminatory racial policies in France and Italy as well as their impact on Jewish citizens during and after World War II through the study of historical texts, survivor testimonies, war memoirs, memorials, commemorations and film.

ITAL 160B1 – Italian Perspectives: Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

This course surveys Italian culture from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. Topics include perspectives on law, religion, commerce and trade, communal politics, family structure, and history of everyday life. Taught in English.

ITAL 160D1 – Food for Thought in Italian Culture

Food has always been an important thread woven through the fabric of Italian culture. Italian cuisine, as diverse and heterogeneous as it is inside the country from North to South, largely contributed to the building of a strong Italian identity, as testified in recent times by the worldwide success of large-scale marketplaces such as Eataly. This course will investigate food's role in shaping Italian society and its cultural practices by looking at images of food in visual art, literature and film. Our historical review will focus on the many symbolic meanings circulating around the representation of food in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the 20th and 21st centuries. Food will be a lens through which we will read the political, social, and economic changes that have affected Italy in its millennial history.

ITAL 201 – Intermediate Italian I

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

ITAL 202 – Intermediate Italian II

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

ITAL 230 – Introduction to Italian Culture

This gateway course introduces students to Italian thought and culture through multiple perspectives and disciplines including history, philosophy. literary traditions and cultures, arts and architecture, film, cultural studies and geography. By the end of the course, students will have acquired a broad historical understanding of Italian culture and a deeper sense of the interdisciplinary perspectives that contribute meaning to individual and collective Italian identities. Taught in English.

ITAL 231 – Fashion and Culture in France and Italy

The study of fashion is an important conduit for the expression of social identity, political ideas, and aesthetic taste. This course considers the history of style, fashion and dress in France and Italy from a cultural and fashion studies perspective. After a general introduction to models of interpretation and conceptual terms, FREN/ITAL 231 surveys topics in French and Italian fashion design and history from the 1300s to the present day

ITAL 250C – Intermediality: Italian Theatre, Opera, and Film

How did the Italian historical context and theatrical spaces impact the creation and reception of theatrical texts? How did these texts shape the context of the Italian society? What is intermediality? How do media re-narrate, re-interpret, and adapt literary texts? How do media cross linguistic, space/time, and cultural borders? What gets lost in the translation of texts across different media? What is produced instead? These are some of the questions we will explore to improve our understanding of intermediality, or the relations among different media (theatre, opera, film), using the humanist's tools and methodologies (historical and social contextualization, close reading, critical analysis, scholars' production).We will engage with the history of Italian theater from 16thto 20thcentury, contextualizing, reading, and analyzing plays and libretti by Machiavelli, Da Ponte, Goldoni, Mascagni, Pirandello, Fo, and Ginzburg. We will combine a traditional approach to canonical texts of the Italian theatrical tradition with an interdisciplinary methodology that compares literary and visual texts.

ITAL 301 – Advanced Italian Conversation through Media

Course emphasizes advanced speaking and listening skills in Italian by analyzing different media.

ITAL 310 – Italian Encounters: Spoken Italian in Context

Course emphasizes advanced spoken language through the study of Italian popular culture, which can include history, music, media studies, cultural studies, literature, the visual arts, and everyday Italian life.

ITAL 330B – Once Upon a Time In Italian American Cinema

What role did cinema play in the encounter between Italian and American culture? How are aesthetic goals such as economy, coherence, and implied perception, and methods such as montage, ellipsis, and points of view being pursued in films that represent the Italian American Experience? To answer these questions, every week we will watch a film made by and/or dealing with the Italian American community. Students will engage with issues of migration, gender, family relations, cultural conflict, and ethnic identity formation by exploring works by directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, and Stanley Tucci. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.

ITAL 420 – Framing Italy

Course is an advanced seminar on historical, geographical, social, and artistic aspects of Italy.

ITAL 498H – Honors Thesis

An honors thesis is required of all the students graduating with honors. Students ordinarily sign up for this course for two sequential semesters. The first semester the student performs research under the supervision of a faculty member; the second semester the student writes an honors thesis.