Italy

This studio course introduces the principles of painting and develops skills in composition, observation, and the use of color. The course includes sessions on technique, brushwork, color theory, and the use of different media.  During the first half of the course assignments concentrate on developing different skills and building techniques, using traditional and experimental approaches to painting. During the second half of the course, students use these skills to develop their own work. Students explore the history of art in Florence in the many galleries and museums and use this knowledge to inform their own work. The course covers the technical developments of the Renaissance, including the study of perspective, line, and form. Through guided instructional sessions, students cultivate their unique artistic styles and engage in individual research, which may involve integrating themes and techniques from both modern and contemporary art. This study is the basis for developing painting skills through engaging with, and responding to, the works and artists they study. The course also has a focus on developing skills for self and peer criticism to discuss the development of the work. Students create a final piece supported by an Artist's Statement, a research breakdown outlining the evolution of the project's concept, and technical development. 

Consultants offer their professional advice to client organizations by leveraging their knowhow in the fields of management. Consultants often assist clients in the change process, and in some cases act as key characters in the implementation phase. Today, more than in the past, consultancy has become a viable professional development alternative, typically offered to young students from graduate or undergraduate degrees. The course focuses on the process side of the relationship between clients and consultants. The course also deals with the characteristics of the industry and with some key features of the profession. 

This course primarily focuses on the identification of financial assets' fair prices. First, the course introduces the main theories of portfolio choice and risk-expected return trade-off in financial markets: the mean-variance portfolio choice, CAPM, APT, Fama-French models. Second, the course introduces the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Starting from basic concepts such as the yield curve, yield-to-maturity, duration, convexity, the course introduces portfolio hedging strategies based on duration-matching or asset liability management. The course is divided into four parts. First, the course introduces the students to the problem of managing a portfolio. Second, the course introduces the students to the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Third, the course introduces options pricing. Fourth, the course expose the students to the main behavioral finance findings in the current literature.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course provides theoretical knowledge on museum studies, as well as the necessary practical skills to work with or in the museum sector. It is designed to prepare students both to the responsibilities they will overtake or/and to the academic work they will produce during their professional career. The course is divided into three modules. The first module provides a theory-based introduction to the museum sector and the research field of critical museology. The second module is dedicated to the new stakes and challenges of the museum in the 21st century. The last part of the course is conceived to provide concrete tools to think specifically about the publics of museums, and to implement adapted strategies to relevantly interact with them inside and outside of the museum. The course covers museum history from being an institutional container for a collection up to the idea of the modern archaeological museum with its complex organization; the rudiments of museum theory, legislation, and marketing; the application of the theoretical-scientific concept of Museology, in its various meanings and multi-functional sense, to the complex problems related to public enjoyment of the Archaeological Cultural Heritage.

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 focuses on the main theoretical and methodological tools of global and intercultural perspectives for the study of the medieval world including religious phenomena and dynamics. This course shows how to critically identify the socio-cultural matrix of religions, as well as connections, developments, persistence, and transformations of religious phenomena with a critical approach to periodization and can address and solve issues related to the management of cultural and religious pluralism. With a focus on the medieval Mediterranean and the routes to Asia from 1000 to 1500, this course analyzes patterns of religious, commercial, and intellectual communication between Latins, Eastern Christians, Arabs, and Mongols, with attention to the sociopolitical implications of interaction between groups in complex societies. The first part of the course provides the main theoretical tools for a history of cross-cultural encounters in pre-modern times, looking in particular at the Mongol Empire and the Mediterranean Sea as connecting spaces. Afterwards, the focus is on a series of case studies, based on which the class empirically observes patterns of interaction, representation of otherness, and circulation of goods, peoples, and ideas across linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries and on different scales. Specific attention is devoted to the plurality of representations of the “Orient” produced or circulating in late medieval Europe, regarding them as crucial objects of cultural and religious history. The course discusses how non-Latin and non-Christian peoples fit into Western categories of representations, and what knowledge about Near- and Far-Eastern regions was actually available in the West. By examining specific cases, based on Eastern and Western sources, the course explores the different ways in which medieval travelers took otherness into account, whether internal or external to Christianity, and examines how these accounts fit into precise intellectual schemes and political and religious agendas.

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 information, in the fields of Indology, history, religious studies, and anthropology, indispensable for critically analyzing South Asian intellectual history in colonial and post-colonial times. The course provides in-depth analysis to the following themes: Discourse on religion and religious conflicts in colonial and postcolonial India; the debate on historiography in post-colonial India; the criticism of "secularism" in postcolonial India; representations of social marginality in contemporary South Asia. The course also provides high-level knowledge of intellectual transformations and history of thought in modern and contemporary South Asia, specifically during the colonial and post-colonial period. The course covers in depth the issue of religious and social reforms and the main theoretical positions emerged in the current debate on the historiographical and anthropological representation of the development of South Asian society. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. In Spring 2024, the course offered a special focus on the literature, photography, and illustration at the beginning of the 20th century: The collaboration between Henry James and Alvin Langdon Coburn. In analyzing this case study from the point of view of the genesis of the images and of the editorial context, this course reflects on the relationship between writing and visual culture, literature and photography, word and image within the framework of the technological, social, and cultural transformations that have marked the turn from the 19th to the 20th Century: from the rise of what Walter Benjamin has called the "technological reproduction" to the development of tourism and the emergence of a new imagery of space and places. The course provides the theoretical tools for interpreting literature in the new framework of visual culture which emerged at the threshold of modernity. Students acquire a deep knowledge of the relationships between verbal and visual texts in their multiple manifestations, and are familiar with the main theoretical categories and methodologies which have been elaborated by visual studies and have crossed (and transformed) literary studies themselves.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course develops critical knowledge of the fundamental institutes of Food Law with particular attention to the new profiles that the discipline presents and to European and international regulations of specific relevance. The approach to the subject is interdisciplinary, not only theoretical but also practical-operational, enabling students to acquire mastery and awareness in the use of legislative, jurisprudential, and contractual practice tools. The course content includes: principles and rules of European and global food law; right to food; food security; food safety; food sovereignty; global food law trends; European food law rules; food sustainability; food law and antitrust rules; and contract farming. At the end of the module, the course covers the regulation of national, European, and international agrifood markets, with particular emphasis placed on agrifood security, producer responsibility, and competition policies; and how to handle different sources of agrifood law, how to be familiar with bodies issuing specific regulation in the sector, and how to contribute to organizational policies to this regard.