English

The course provides the key economic concepts and tools for analyzing environmental and urban issues; introduces and explains the application of economic methods to the analysis of the built and natural environments; presents the ways in which sound economic analysis is critical to urban and environmental policy making; and encourages critical debate and reflection on the key environmental and urban policy issues. 

The course explores how the regional Catalan cinema (Catalan language productions), which encounters a disadvantage in the broader market dominated by Spanish-speaking audiovisuals, achieves distinctiveness, with a focus on the representation of women, social inequality, diverse minorities, and sustainability. Emphasizing the intersection of these issues, the course delves into the complexities of current Catalan social struggles on and off the screen. The course is divided into lectures, screenings, readings, discussions, group presentations, creative work in groups and field trips to filming locations and Catalan production firms.

This course reinforces students' previous knowledge of stress analysis, and extends this knowledge to more advanced theories and techniques, and to apply these to practical problems. Most of these are developments of methods which have been previously acquired but to more sophisticated problems. New areas of thermal stresses, plastic deformation and residual stresses are treated and a new technique of analysis using energy methods is also introduced and developed. 

This course dives into the complexity of globalization. It explores in-depth fundamental concepts such as multiculturalism, diversity, inter-culturalism, and superdiversity, highlighting their dynamic evolution and their profound impact on the business fabric. It offers a comprehensive analysis of disparities between countries, addressing crucial aspects such as political economy, country risks and diverse cultural and social heterogeneities. Class sessions introduce essential debates related to cultural construction, formal and informal institutions, economic development, and regional integrations.

This course is also referred to as International Dynamics and Cross-Cultural Negotiation: Global Environment.

Animals (and even insects) can communicate with each other, but man's way of communication is fundamentally different in that it is greatly facilitated by language, the structure of which seems species-specific. This course concentrates on this part of human language with special reference to its syntax, a set of rules that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. This course thus aims to discover principles that govern this essential aspect of human language and tries to tackle issues such as how child language acquisition takes place and how surface differences among languages may be explained by the notion of parameter.

This course focuses on the key issues in contemporary international relations., with the goal of learning the concepts and theories of IR useful to making sense of contemporary debates and developments in international politics. Focus is on the study of current events and the recent history that has shaped the international system, with specific attention devoted to foreign policy stances of big powers (the United States, China, and Russia), and to two topical international actors (the European Union and the United Nations). The second part of the course studies big trends and on-going international crises, including the rise of the Global South, the Ukraine War, and the Israel-Hamas conflict. This is followed by exploration of the four "Global challenges": energy security and climate change; migration; Africa's development; and digitalization and cybersecurity. 

This course introduces the concepts, tools and techniques of bioinformatics to understand molecular evolution, individualized medicine, and data intensive biology. The course includes a conceptual framework for modern bioinformatics, an introduction to key bioinformatics topics such as databases and software, sequence analysis, pairwise alignment, multiple sequence alignment, sequence database searches, and profile-based methods, molecular phylogenetics, genomic analysis and personal genomics. Lectures include hands-on inquiry using bioinformatics tools in the practical sessions. The course requires students to take a prerequisite of General Biology. 

This course covers the period between the Predynastic and the Middle Kingdom and includes: reliefs, statuary, architecture, and minor arts, illustrated with images. It focuses on learning how to look at and to analyze Egyptian art and to place it in its context. This course involves a significant amount of memorization to create a mental data-bank that is useful when putting excavated material in context and in analyzing Egyptian art. It includes field trips to the museum and to Giza and Saqqara.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.