English

The study offers a study of poetry in English from various cultures and periods designed to promote an understanding of how poetry works and competence in practical criticism.

This course provides a study of cultural anthropology: the anthropological definition of culture, approaches to the study of society from a cultural perspective, and ethnographic methods for cultural studies. Other topics covered include: conventions of social order, rituals, and myths; schools of contemporary anthropology from a cultural perspective; relationship between ethnomethodology and cultural studies; anthropological analysis of micro-rituals as a cultural analysis of daily life; case studies as a method for cultural studies.

This course explores European art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century with a particular focus on the travels of artists between urban centers like Florence, Rome, Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Berlin. The aim is to analyze how mobility contributed through the centuries to shape local identities as well as European cultural traditions common to different countries. The course presents iconic moments of the history of the arts in Europe by drawing a special attention to episodes of cultural exchanges and hybridization that arose from traveling artworks as well as from artists' travels. From the impact of Flemish art in fifteenth century Italy, to the stays of artists like Raphael and Michelangelo in early sixteenth-century papal Rome; from the rise of genre painting in the Flanders and the Dutch Republic of the Age of Explorations, to the “painters of modern life” in nineteenth-century Paris, and the European network of the Avant-gardes of the 1910s-1920s, students analyze the artworks and their authors in relation to the different historical contexts and the places of their creation. Recurrent is the focus on the complex interplay between artists and patrons, between local traditions, individual creativity and the broader social, political, and cultural contexts in which artworks were produced. Students gain understanding of the main art movements and relevant artists from the Renaissance to the postwar period and the special role played by travels in giving shape to a European cultural space. For the onsite program only: Visits to the outstanding collections of Berlin museums allow the participants to study original artifacts and to learn how to look closely at works of art.

This course investigates the representation of illness and disability in performance. It focuses primarily on contemporary performance and live art practices by artists with illnesses or disability but is contextualized by the history of disability performance, e.g. in the Victorian freak shows. Students are introduced to ways of understanding discourses of disability and illness, and the ways in which they become manifest in performance. Students discuss issues of representation, lived experience, and agency as they relate to disabled and unwell bodies in performance.