English

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

The course covers the last generation of the Roman republic, primarily focusing on the political and military events between 88 and 43 BCE. It traces the process which led to the replacement of the traditional system of shared aristocratic government by a hereditary monarchy. Central themes include the rise of the late republican dynasts, above all Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, the role of the army in politics, the gradual destabilization of domestic politics, and the challenges posed by the expanding empire as well as its socio-economic impact. The current debate about the nature of the "fall" of the republic – accidental or inevitable - is also analyzed and placed in a wider historiographic context.

This course explores the use of music in Hollywood Cinema up to the present day.  The focus is on how music has worked to both support and undermine the dominant ideology of Hollywood Cinema. Students discuss the concept of the Classical Hollywood Score and how it has functioned in partnership with the Classical Hollywood Narrative. 

The Cold War is never dead. It’s not even the Cold War, to paraphrase Faulkner. We are told that we are about to enter Cold War 2.0, or that we might already be living in it. We are often confronted in the media with Cold War parallels: the language of liberty, rivalry and other Cold War neologisms are everywhere on the rise. Not least, Cold War historians themselves are among the most vocal in reminding the public of the contemporary relevance of their expertise. On the face of it, this makes the historical category of analysis we call “the Cold War” a rather flexible one. What is being analogized here? Why can we not see the present day as something new under the sun, and therefore call it something new? And ultimately, what politics is this historical thinking answering to? And of course, the very fact of that plasticity calls into question not just the current usage of the historical term in its second reincarnation, but in its first incarnation as well. What, ultimately, was the Cold War? Can it be both the old traditional era, as well as the new one at the same time? Should it demarcate the whole of the history of the second half of the 20th century? Or should it be used as a rather more discreet term delimited to the bilateral relationship between two nations, as the term was initially used?

This course will concern itself mostly with those analytical questions. In other words, rather than reviewing a history of crises and high political stakes we unquestioningly term the Cold War, the course, while delivering the bare bones of this history, will concern itself with the analytical category itself. Historians are a fractious bunch, but historians of the Cold War have been especially quarrelsome. What were their arguments with one another about? Can we read history politically? How about culturally? Does using the “Cold War” as the encompassing historical category it has become illuminate more than it obscures? And what ultimately was the Cold War?

This course examines challenges posed by poverty affecting a billion people in low-income countries across the world as targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals and taking an economic approach to conceptualizing those challenges, their causes, and solutions. The course provides theoretical frameworks to understand, measure, analyze, and discuss themes within the development economics literature focusing on poverty, its consequences, and its alleviation. Key questions discussed during the course include: What is the state of progress towards relevant SDGs? What is life like when living with under a dollar a day? Are famines unavoidable? Is child labor necessary? Is education and health key to lifting people out of poverty? Does growth help the poorest of the poor? And, does aid matter for development? What is the relationship between environment and development, and how does climate change affect them? What role do sustainable food systems play in addressing both climate change and food insecurity? The course includes the following thematic topics: poverty and inequality; economic growth and development; health and education; agricultural transformation; aid; poverty, conflicts, and corruption; environment and development; sustainable food systems. 

This course explores anthropological approaches to large-scale matters of concern. Looking at, for example, the wars in Syria and Ukraine, the pandemic, climate change, and emerging authoritarianism, it analyzes intensifying and interconnected critical states and investigates their local implications. It does this by examining the concept of crisis within anthropology and questioning how critical aspects of power, politics, and globalization affect our contemporary world. The course is divided into 14 seminars with the following thematic orientations focused on the anthropology of emergencies, crises, and chronicities; conspiracy; authoritarianism; pandemics; climate change; migration; de-, post, and neo-colonialism; extractivism. 

This course provides an integrated approach to the understanding of the biology of the cell, from understanding the molecular mechanisms that underpin cellular processes through to how such processes allow cells to function in their physiological context (i.e. in tissues and during development); to teach both "classical" and leading edge experimental approaches to cell biology research. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course content includes:

1) From health-related quality of life to dimensions of psychological well-being: the conceptual framework and their process of assessment in clinical psychology.

2) The unifying concept of euthymia and its psychological evaluation.

3) The science of clinimetrics and clinimetric criteria for Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).

4) Clinimetric approach to the definition and clinical assessment of psychological distress.

5) The experience of psychological suffering: the concept of mental pain and its clinimetric evaluation.

6) The concept of demoralization and its detection based on clinimetric criteria.

7) The Hamilton Rating Scales and the clinical assessment of depression.

8) Somatization, illness denial and the clinimetric domain of psychosomatics.

9) The clinimetric domain of clinical pharmacopsychology.

By the end of the course, students know the theoretical paradigms of mental health as a multidimensional construct and are able to use the appropriate rating scales for a comprehensive assessment of mental health according to clinimetric criteria.

This course examines city and regional economics in relation to the practice of city planning. It covers a range of key economic concepts and models that shape urban land uses, and urban housing and labor market systems. It encompasses the following main areas: micro/macroeconomic processes that drive urban land use, governance and planning systems; market failures as the source of urban planning problems; development feasibility; and the economic theories of urbanization, gentrification and technological transformation.