English

This course provides a foundation in both leadership and business administration, emphasizing various leadership styles and their application in organizational settings. Students from diverse disciplines — including sociology of work, economics, business administration, communication, and the arts — develop the skills needed to lead and manage organizations effectively by addressing the challenges of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling (POLC). Key topics include the evolution of management thought, business ethics, organizational culture, and social responsibility. A strong focus is placed on the ethical responsibilities of leadership, with real-world case studies examining how leaders navigate moral dilemmas and foster ethical practices within organizations. These case studies include examples from industries where leadership plays a crucial role in balancing business goals with broader cultural, environmental, and societal concerns. Students also explore how leadership can address issues like diversity, sustainable development, and the global impact on business operations. This course is ideal for students interested in management, economics, business administration, sociology of work, and communication, offering valuable insights into leadership, management, and the role of ethics in decision-making, with particular relevance to sectors connected to art, food, and society in Rome and Italy.

This course introduces the theory and practical skills of near-distance microphone techniques for a variety of acoustic and electric/electronic instruments. This course covers basic Pro Tools skills, and overdub techniques. Students are required to complete at least five multitrack sessions independently during the semester. This course requires a prerequisite.

This course explores the characteristics of manufacturing technologies to acquire basic knowledge for designing and planning implements. The course covers an introduction to material processing; creation of materials; forming processes; machining and finishing processes; joining processes, and surface treatment and modification processes. 

The course examines the appeal of science fiction and fantasy as a serious fictional engagement with consensual sense of reality. It addresses fantasy, speculative fiction, and science fiction as forms of narrative engaged in “world-building” and “word-shaping,” studying such fictional constructs as forms of sociological and anthropological knowledge. It also examines the relation between the “strange” and the “real” in terms of the shared and the antithetical elements that relate s/f to realism.

This course is an introduction to communication technology. Students learn about the adoption, use, applications, effects, and implications of communication technologies. More specifically, we discuss communication processes and dynamics in various contexts (e.g., social media, gaming, online communities) and at different levels (e.g., intrapersonal, interpersonal, group), as well as their psychological, societal, and ethical implications. Throughout the course, we read relevant literature selected from academic journals, reports, and articles targeting the general public, and watch pertinent videos. 

In this course, students examine the concept of health, discuss health promotion and disease prevention, and delve into the world of understanding and changing lifestyle behaviors. Students analyze how psychological factors, environments, policies, culture and even corporations shape human behaviors. These insights allow students to design powerful lifestyle interventions. Students gain foundational knowledge and skills necessary for understanding and improving the lifestyle behaviors of populations.

Finance is the study of mechanisms on asset transactions, risk management, and investment decisions. After reviewing the basics about financial markets, such as who trades what instruments and how they trade the instruments, this course covers the major finance theories, such as mean-variance portfolio theory, capital asset pricing model (CAPM), arbitrage pricing theory, multi-factor models of risk and return, and efficient market hypothesis. The course also investigates several empirical studies for understanding whether the existing theories can explain the reality of the markets.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of Jordan’s culinary traditions and their connections to culture, history, and identity. The course combines a historical/anthropological approach with an overview of contemporary practices around food in Jordan to understand evolving notions of cuisine within its national culture (lifestyles, techniques, media, and representations). While Jordan’s cuisine once aggregated local and imported traditions as national in nature, it has seemingly undergone a reverse process since the start of the twenty-first century, diversifying into multiple contexts (and recipes) under the pressure of factors such as affordability, politics, and social media. This course fosters a comparative approach around the preparation of food and related rituals, offering direct experiences of Jordan cuisine as it is thought about, prepared, served, and received.

This second-year course introduces students to the fundamental principles of interactivity for them to be applied to designing interactive art, media, or design projects. Students learn an overview of modes of interaction, the core elements of interactivity, input, processing and output, and their relationship with each other. The course explores examples of interactive projects and analyzes the concepts behind them as well as their semiotics and aesthetics. Students gain practical experience in applying this knowledge in developing their own interactive project. This course provides a foundation for more advanced studies in interactive design projects. 

This course offers a study of the theoretical foundations and calculus rules of Probability Theory. Topics include: probability and random phenomena; random variables; common distribution models; jointly distributed random variables; properties of expectation; limit theorems.