Italy

The course focuses on issues in applied ethics, the distinction between individual and public ethics, as well as the main debates in the field. Special attention is placed on the relationship between different approaches in moral philosophy (normative, virtue, and care ethics) and the multiple connections between moral reflection and cultural studies, political science, and humanities. Students are introduced to relevant literature in the field and the proper terminology in the field. The Spring 2022 topic is on Aristotle’s ethics, moral psychology, and, in particular, the physiology of moral development, the difference between natural and moral virtues, and the role of emotions in character formation.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course is based on the sociological analysis of a selection of films produced in Italy from the end of World War II to the ‘80s with the aim of using Italian movies as telescopes on the past and to reflect on the present of Italian culture, from both the historical and social point of view. At the end of the course, students have knowledge about: Italian cinema from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1980s; political and social transformations from the early 1900s to the 1980s; elements of Italian history from 1900 to post-war period; notions regarding sociological and anthropological models, necessary to interpret social transformations in Italy in the period under analysis. Some of the most important movies of Italian film history are screened such as 900, ROME OPEN CITY, LA DOLCE VITA, BREAD AND CHOCOLATE. This is a sociology course on Italian culture, in which movies are used as data as well as a stimulus for the debate. In addition, another level of analysis concerns the styles, the schools and the directors of the films selected, and the technical and social contexts that influence the different styles. In this light, students consider mass communication linguistic techniques (figures of speech, metaphors, analogies), to identify both clear and hidden messages in movies. The course includes traditional lectures, film screenings, and audiovisual materials.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students with adequate preparation. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course offers an overview of psycholinguistic research from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Special attention is placed on cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production. The first part of the course deals with theoretical issues from a psycholinguistic point of view (i.e. development and origin of language, research methods, biological bases of language, and the system of language processing) and the study of language from the point of view of cognitive science. The second part of the course addresses issues related to research on language from an interdisciplinary perspective and the study of language as interactional practice (i.e. pragmatic and communicative aspects of language and language as joint activity). Required reading includes PSICOLOGIA DEL LINGUAGGIO by C. Cacciari, USING LANGUAGE by H.H. Clark. Exchange students who are more comfortable studying in English may substitute the Cacciari text with PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: INTRODUCTION AND APPLICATIONS by L. Menn. Assessment is based on a written exam (essay format) on course materials, readings and class discussions. Students may also be asked to elaborate on a possible experiment connected to one of the topics of the course.

This course examines the key role of economic activities as a driver of climate change and how economic tools can be used to investigate this problem and to design climate policies. In order to deal with the problem of climate change, students have to rethink some key economic concepts such as efficiency, externality, intertemporal decision making under uncertainty, and welfare aggregation, from a new and more applied perspective. Students also become familiar with key tools for climate change and long term energy policy making: integrated assessment models. The general mechanism of these tools are learned through applications like the role of innovation in the energy sector, game theory and the (in)stability of international climate agreements, and how the inclusion of uncertainty affects optimal policies and investment decisions. The course discusses topics including and introduction to the climate change challenge, integrated assessment models, making decisions about the environment (cost benefit and cost effective analysis), who is the social planner? (Inter-temporal and social aggregation issues), modeling technological change and climate mitigation technologies, valuation methods (valuing the market and non-market benefits of avoided climate change), environmental policy making, and international environmental agreements.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the role of big data in modern life, as well as its uses as a tool for good or evil. The course highlights how big data can help us understand and explain social phenomena in a way that was unthinkable in previous generations. The course applies the R statistical computing environment to large-scale data sets, explores packages designed for use with big data (such as data.table and ff), and explores how parallelization can be used to analyze lots of data quickly. The course includes traditional lectures, a series of seminars, as well as visual material.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Courses in the LM in Business Administration degree program are typically not available to UCEAP exchange students. Enrollment in this course is by consent of the instructor. The course refers to the most important variables for international marketing and marketing mix investments in different markets. The course explores the following questions: what is the difference between managing a domestic market and a multinational portfolio of businesses; what are the methods to analyze foreign markets and consumers; what are success stories of international marketing strategies useful to companies that are internationalizing their business?

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on trading mechanisms in financial markets: the main challenges, the economic principles, and the statistical models for analyzing the data they generate. The course explores in detail the modeling of high frequency financial data. Special attention is placed on the structure of modern financial markets, the conceptual basics of trading, and the use of economic and econometric models in the high frequency domain.

The course discusses topics including space and cognition; geographical space; measurements of spatial knowledge; spatial knowledge acquired from maps; spatial knowledge acquired by navigation; the main neuro-cognitive structures involved in cognitive maps formation, landmark recognition, allocentric, and egocentric knowledge and switching between them; clinical conditions associated with spatial orientation and knowledge; weakness and challenges in spatial knowledge and representations; space and language; individual visuospatial differences in processing and representing spatial information; the relationship between individual visuospatial differences and environment learning using different modalities (maps, navigation and descriptions) with different methodologies; and spatial representations in motor activities and sport. The course requires prerequisite knowledge of introductory aspects of psychology (as perception, language, memory and learning), models of cognitive psychology, and individual differences.