Italy

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 students the tools to address humanities research in general, and in particular in women and gender history. The specific focus is on methodological sources and sites of memory for women’s studies.

During their lives, women produced and received documents (e.g. letters, diaries and memoirs), which are preserved in several public and private archives. This material is particularly important to understand women's status and stories: marginalized in the private sphere, they enjoyed fewer rights than men, also for what concerned access to wealth. However, as the analysis of women's papers shows, they stood for themselves and negotiated the boundaries of the spaces and roles society assigned to them. The analysis of documents by women allows us to recover their voices and to clearly understand the importance of the ordinary in the wider societal context. By approaching women's documents from a theoretical and practical perspective, this course provides students with tools for research in the humanities, with a particular focus on women and gender history.

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 is mainly aimed at those who have not already done historical-linguistic studies and aims to provide an overview of the events of Italian linguistic history and the main problems of diachronic reconstruction: internal and external linguistic history, literary language and common language, relationship between the center and periphery, question of the linguistic norm, factors of Italianization. The course is divided into a general part, dedicated to some moments of linguistic history of Italian from its origins to the contemporary age through the analysis of exemplary texts, and in some lessons focused on the history of the teaching of Italian through the centuries.

The student enrolled in this course is expected to have just reached a moderate skill in Linguistics and Italian grammar. On successful completion of the course, the student will be able to learn and apply in practice the knowledge acquired, to use analyzing tools and to apply the methods of learning discussed in the course, in order to examine in depth and revise in complete autonomy his\her own knowledge. The student will be able to use the main instruments for the evaluation of a text, literary or not. He/she will be able to analyze any text and to relate it to the cultural and literary context in which it was produced, to its way of dissemination and reception, in a multidisciplinary perspective.

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 title of the course is "FEMMINISMS." Women’s thinking and movements, in Europe, in the Americas, in the Arab context, in southern Africa and in the Asian context are analysed in chronological order, but also showing the deep connections that were established between the various areas of the world. Alongside some thematic reconstructions, starting from the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the publication of the first "manifestos" of contemporary feminism, the lectures analyze particularly important texts and experiences still hard to define within the scope of “classical” history (centered upon the West and its successive “waves”) of the feminisms. At the end, the students understand the complexity of the females thinking and movements in their peculiarity and in a transnational and global perspective. Students acquire in-depth knowledge of the origins and development of women's movements in Italian Early Modern and Contemporary history, through methodological investigations which allow them to research autonomously.

The course provides students with the conceptual and theoretical framework surrounding valuation issues and the practical tools to address such topics in real-life situations. The main methodologies of corporate valuation are analyzed and the approaches commonly used by practitioners (financial analysts, investment and merchant banks, consulting firms) are critically discussed. Examples focus on corporate valuation issues using DCF, stock market and deal multiples completed by industry-specific as well as case-specific valuation techniques. Prerequisites: knowledge of basic financial accounting and basic corporate finance.

This course provides an in depth overview of Data Mining, Commercial data, Administrative data, survey data, Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Predictive Models (decision trees, discriminant analysis, regression). The course content is delivered through theoretical lectures and practical laboratory works using SAS software; it focuses on the application of SAS programming for market research and consumer behavior analysis, combining statistical rigor with practical implementation. The curriculum emphasizes advanced techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), Discriminant Analysis, and clustering methods. Topics for this course include:

1. Advanced SAS Programming for Market Data
2. Statistical Foundations for Market Research
3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for Market Research
4. Clustering Methods for Market Segmentation
5. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) for Categorical Data
6. Discriminant Analysis for Predictive Modeling
7. Advanced Data Handling and Preparation
8. Capstone Project: CRM and Consumer Behavior Analysis

By the end of the course, students learn to define their research topic, edit the questionnaire, treat distortion effects generated by the opinion scale, build statistical models using the SAS software, and draft of research report. Students will conduct a psychographic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capstone project, which must apply the data analysis strategies addressed during lectures; they produce a final written report with clear and logical description of the analysis process and methodological choices. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Art and literature can be seen weaving around each other, influencing one and another, and being used as a tool to teach students about liberal arts and humanity; this course explores various ways in which words and images have interacted and shaped Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is divided into two modules.

Module 1: Literature and Visual Culture explores the relations between the Italian novel and comic strip fiction between the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the fundamental role played by comics in the personal formation and creative activity of some writers. Tracing the development and diffusion of comic strip fiction in Italy starting from the second half of the 20th century, this module focuses in particular on how much the experience of comic strip readers influenced the narrative and non-fiction production of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, shaping their imagery and writing methods. The module analyzes and discusses interpretations of comic book characters and serial stories, as well as the different ways in which comics are incorporated into their texts.

Module 2: Literature and the Arts provides students with themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and photography; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the visual turn and the pictorial turn; 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into these specific forms of interaction between literature and photography: 1) the photographer as a character; 2) photography as a theme in literature; 3) photography as a way of writing or the role of photographic gaze in literature; 4) phototexts. At the end of the course, students are able to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to nowadays, with a focus on painting. Students acquire knowledge on the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and they will be capable of analyzing critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts.

This course provides students with the fundamental tools to understand financial decision-making in the modern corporation. Topics include: capital budgeting/corporate investment, capital structure, corporate sources of funding, dividend policy, corporate contingent claims for financial risk management. The course frames these topics within the standard theories of risk and return, valuation of assets, and market structure.

The course focuses on the following topics:

• Financial Planning and Analyzing financial performance
• Capital budgeting (NPV, IRR and payback period)
• Capital budgeting and risk (asset beta and equity beta)
• Financing decisions and the firm cost of capital
• Capital issuing (seasoned equity offers, IPOs and venture capital)
• Corporate risk management

Social media is an important part of our everyday lives, for better or worse. It has the power to bring people together but also to threaten democracy. This course looks at social media through an economics lens, analyzing how it shapes the incentives of users, platforms, firms, news organizations, politicians, and governments. To do so, it reviews basic models of individual and firm behavior, borrowing tools from the most “rational” economic frameworks but also covering important psychological biases from the behavioral economics literature. Armed with this toolkit, the course reviews frontier empirical literature, studying questions such as: How can we incentivize the production of “good” content and mitigate harmful content? Are the incentives of platforms aligned with users’ interests? What are the consequences of social media algorithms optimizing for engagement? Do algorithms cause echo chambers? What are the political effects of social media? Does it harm users? This course contributes to the education program by showcasing how to apply economic knowledge to answer some of the most pressing challenges in our society.

The course focuses on North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special emphasis on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and funding texts are compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have shaped the US and the Canadian realities, from the European colonization till the end of the 19th century. In this class, literature is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, inner/outer landscape constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. This course features a series of guest scholars to encourage the dialogue between literature and civic society so to widen our knowledge of learning and training opportunities available nationally or internationally. The list of featured guests will be available when classes start. Students learn the literary history of the period at stake; they acquire useful literary tools to analyze fictional productions and question them in relation to the complex and heterogeneous North American realities.

The course provides foundational knowledge of adult psychopathology, clinical psychology, and clinical interviewing, with a specific focus on a set of practical issues, such as the impact of cultural differences, the development of key intrapersonal skills (e.g. perspective taking, mindfulness, epoché, empathy) and interpersonal skills (e.g. communication strategies, setting, interventions and techniques). The course introduces the concepts of culture and identity, nomality, deviance and psychopathology through the framework of social constructionist theory. During the whole course, in-depth analysis of various topics may vary according to students' requests and previous knowledge. Classes consist of traditional lectures as well as interactive and student-centered activities aimed to foster an active learning process, such as group work, class debates, role play, and presentations.