Course Schedule

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

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.)

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.

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.

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

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.

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

This course investigates the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy, a time of great tumult with events such as the 100 Years War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Black Plague of 1348. The course focuses on the great writings of the age, for instance, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's lyric poetry, Boccaccio's Decameron, as well as the first women writers in Italy. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian or Italian Studies (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.

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.

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.

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.

Comprehensive study of images of Italian women in literary, historic, religious texts, the visual arts, and their effects on the cultural productions of women writers and artists. We will examine issues of gender, education, social class, desire, religion, law, and the family. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian or Italian Studies (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.

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

This course examines Dante's masterpiece, "The Divine Comedy", the poet's life and other works. The primary focus is on "The Divine Comedy" and its influence on European literature and culture. Other texts will be included.

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

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.)

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.

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.

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

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.

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

Through multiple interdisciplinary approaches, this course focuses on the dynamics between Italian folklore, or materials that are produced outside of the authoritative and sanctioned Culture, and their depictions in 20th-21st-century popular culture. It will explore the oral narratives (fairy tales, legends, saints' legends) and customary crafts of ordinary Italians and Italian Americans, their variations through the transmission process and their depictions in contemporary media. To better understand folkloristics materials, we will situate them in their cultural contexts: specifically, the culture of the historical Italian peasantry and working-class people as well their geographical placements (North, South, and the implications thereof).

This course investigates the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, a time when renewed interest in the Classical past completely altered Western Culture: the arts flourished, the sciences developed, and philosophers re-conceived of the value of the individual. This course focuses on the great artists and writers of the age, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian or Italian Studies (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.

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.

Course emphasizes advanced written language as found in Italian culture through a variety of genres, which can include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, opera, cinema, music and history.

This course examines how artists dealt with the Italian armed resistance against Fascism particularly during the last two years of World War II, and its continuing importance in post-war Italy. The course analyzes how the representation of the Resistance in literature, art and film have evolved and why, with reference to numerous artistic, literary, and cinematic works. The course aims also at inspiring reflections on the relevance of rethinking the history of that period in light of present political developments in Italy and Europe.

Course is an advanced seminar on Italian narratives, either visual or literary.

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.