English

The course focuses on the domestic politics of the states of the modern Middle East. It applies the major concepts of political science and adopts a thematic approach to offer a large survey of the region, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, from World War One to the present day. Topics include colonialism, identity politics, political economy, state institutions, political ideology, democratization and civil society, gender and youth, leadership, and regime change.

This course examines peace bulding and conflict resolution in the 21st century, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. This course considers violence, truce, justice, trauma, peacekeeping, reconciliation, anomie, truth, healing and resolution, with special attention to those situations where peace processes have consistently failed to achieve their goals.

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the students' research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in the USA.

This course describes the physical mechanisms behind fatigue, and the methods that are used in design against fatigue. Course content includes cyclic deformation and crack initiation, fracture mechanisms, fracture mechanics treatment of fatigue cracks, fatigue crack growth in ductile and brittle materials, short fatigue cracks, contact fatigue, fatigue and environments, corrosion fatigue and high temperature fatigue, life estimates, and dimensioning against fatigue. Assumed prior knowledge: Materials Engineering or Advanced Material Technology, Solid Mechanics, Basic Course.

This course is an upper-division introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and to what characterizes human language and makes it different from other animal communication systems and other human cognitive systems. The course introduces the different components that human language is made of and how linguists investigate them. In particular, it looks at sounds (and signs) and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to words (phonetics, phonology, and morphology); it looks at words and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to sentences (syntax); finally, it looks at how words and sentences can be used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). While doing so, it emphasizes the innate cognitive aspects of human language but also touches on those aspects that are sensitive to culture and society and determine some of the variation and differences among human languages. Some of the question the course addresses include: what is a language and what does knowledge of a language consist of; are human languages fundamentally different from other systems of animal communication; are some languages better than others; what's a dialect and how does it compare to a language; how do children acquire language, does our knowledge of language derive entirely from experience, or do humans come “hardwired” with certain innate capacities for language; how do languages develop and change over time? For practical reasons, English is the primary source of data and examples for the course for practical reasons as the lingua franca. Still, data from other languages are presented throughout the course, with special attention to Italian, other languages (aka "dialects") spoken in Italy, and languages spoken by the students in the course.

This course addresses the concept of gender in Islam from historical, socio-political, and legal perspectives. A broad range of topics including contemporary debates on identity, feminism and sexuality are covered. The areas of Islamic law pertaining to women’s legal rights is another topic of discussion. The changing discourse regarding construction of gender identities is explored through studies of women’s movements in Muslim majority countries. 

Ecophysiology is the study of physiological adaptations of organisms in relation to the environments in which they live. It has become an increasingly important science, because an understanding of the relationship between organism and environment is essential in order to predict the effects of man-made environmental change. The physiology of an organism incorporates many of its most important adaptations to the environment in which it lives. This course considers the variety of environmental pressures imposed on organismal physiology. It examines the often ingenious solutions that evolve in response to these pressures, and how different organisms and groups of organisms have evolved different physiological means of dealing with the same problem. The course focuses both on the abiotic environment (e.g. issues related to climate, gas exchange) and the biotic environment (e.g. how digestive physiology is adapted to plant toxins). Towards the end of the course, students look at Conservation Physiology, one of the practical applications of ecophysiology. There is a particular focus on the physiological adaptations of animals. Although BIO2004 General Zoology is not a prerequisite for this course, the course is recommended before taking Ecophysiology.