Italy

The first part of the course introduces the concepts of evolution and adaptation applied to an animal and human behavior and the fundamental principles for the study of development, evolution, and genetics of behavior. Then follows the eco-ethology that deals with the ecology of behavior in natural environments, from territorial, predatory, alimentary, sexual, and social behavior both in animals and in humans. In the third phase, topics of sociobiology are explored. The adaptive value of sociability, sexual behavior, and reproductive strategies (both in animals and humans) is further explored. Wedding strategies such as polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy is investigated. The course compares the underlying genetics to the ecology of animal behavior and introduce evolutionary psychology. The course compares the underlying genetics to the ecology of animal behavior and introduce evolutionary psychology. The course requires students to have basic knowledge of genetics and biology as a prerequisite.

The course offers an introduction to Italian culture and history and focuses on both the city of Bologna and Italy as a nation. The course emphasizes basic knowledge of crucial aspects of the Italian cultural heritage across different disciplines and an awareness of the complexities of Italian history and society. The course is interdisciplinary in nature with weekly guest lectures on a variety of topics. The course is graded pass/no pass only.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, the student has a deep knowledge of industrial applications that benefit from the use of machine learning, optimization, and simulation. The student has a domain-specific knowledge of practical use cases discussed in collaboration with industrial experts in a variety of domains such as manufacturing, automotive, and multi-media. The course is primarily delivered as a series of simplified industrial use cases. The goal is to provide examples of challenges that typically arise when solving industrial problems. Use cases may cover topics such as: anomaly detection; Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation; RUL based maintenance policies; resource management planning; recommendation systems with fairness constraints; power network; management problems; epidemic control; and production planning. The course emphasizes the ability to view problems in their entirety and adapt to their peculiarities. This frequently requires to combine heterogeneous solution techniques, using integration schemes both simple and advanced. The employed methods include: mathematical modeling of industrial problems; predictive and diagnostic models for time series; Combinatorial Optimization; integration methods for Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning; integration methods for constraints and Machine Learning; and integration methods for combinatorial optimization and Machine Learning. The course includes seminars on real-world use cases, from industry experts. The course contents may be (and typically are) subject to changes, so as to adapt to some degree to the interests and characteristics of the attending students.

What is the relationship between a city’s structure and the way it is represented? This course investigates this question by analyzing Florence’s urban history and its visual representation in paintings, frescoes, maps, photographs, and films from the 1200s to today. As the city has been in turn the site of a proud communal society, the main center of the Medici and then Lorraine rule, the capital of newly unified Italy and the repository of national and international cultural and ethical (and touristic) values, we examine how Florence has been both shaped by and represented according to different political and cultural agendas, and how the city’s structure and its representation have constantly affected each other. Special emphasis is devoted to the emergence of photography and cinema and the radical visual and conceptual shift that these media have produced in the city’s image. Some of the issues this course explores are: the role of linear perspective as a scientific and political tool for representing, conceptualizing, and controlling urban space; the ways in which the city has been reconfigured and portrayed by foreigners from the 1600s on; and photography’s and cinema’s potential for addressing compelling urban issues such as the contrast between memory and urban modernization, the elusive relationship of past preservation and mass tourism, and the enmeshment of notions of tourism and surveillance. 

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale Program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course aims at developing an encompassing knowledge of the outcomes that social mobilizations have at the level of politics and policies. At the end of the course, students are able to: critically discuss the main approaches related to the outcomes of social mobilizations at the level of politics and policies; compare the political effects of social mobilizations across different countries and different territorial levels; and valuate specific cases of social mobilizations with regard to their intended and unintended political effects. The course focuses on both theories and practices related to the political effects of social mobilizations.

This course examines and unpicks the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust from the Italian perspective. Through a combination of class lectures and discussions, film screenings and readings, and site visits, students connect decisions taken in Fascist Italy with the end result of forced labor and mechanized killing that occurred principally outside of the country’s borders. The course explores pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy’s relationship with its Jewish population, the repressive nature of the dictatorship, its involvement in the Second World War, and its alliance with Nazi Germany to gain a thorough grounding how scholars have sought to explain Italy’s Holocaust. Having established the history of the Jews in Italy and the processes and practicalities by which they were rounded-up and deported from occupied Italy, the course reflects upon debates surrounding guilt and how this has been used to excuse or deflect responsibility for the deportation and murder of religious and political prisoners. The memory, or otherwise, of the Holocaust in Italy has been heavily influenced by domestic identities, politics, and culture and the course examines this through film. As arguably the most important artistic medium of modernity, cinema allows one to construct and deconstruct many myths and identities. This course analyzes some of the most relevant Italian film productions relating to the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust in Italy, primarily as socio-historical documents. Instruction consists of a series of lectures and class debates around assigned readings and film analysis.

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 the theoretical skills necessary for placing twentieth-century Italian poetry within the context of European history of thought and ideas. Special attention is placed on the appropriate methodology for analyzing modern and contemporary poetry. The course emphasizes the role of rhetoric, stylistics, and linguistics and favors intertextual and interdisciplinary comparisons. The topic for the Spring 2018 semester is: Origins, Poetry, Verticality, and Perception. This course focuses on a selection of Italian poetry from the second half of the twentieth century that highlights the idea of origin, and in particular the feelings of unbridgeable distance, and loss. The idea of distance and loss is also analyzed through the formal choices that shape the texts as well as their friction and opposition to the literary codes of the time. Prerequisite for the course is basic knowledge of twentieth-century Italian literature at the undergraduate level. Poetry selections are from the following sources: ORAMAI and DICIASSETTE VARIAZIONI SU TEMI PROPOSTI PER UNA PURA IDEOLOGIA FONETICA by Emilio Villa, LA BUFERA E ALTRO and SATURA by Eugenio Montale, LABORINTUS and POSTKARTEN by Edoardo Sanguineti, IL SEME DEL PIANGERE and IL MURO DELLA TERRA by Giorgio Caproni, SU FONDAMENTI INVISIBILI and PER IL BATTESIMO DEI NOSTRI FRAMMENTI by Mario Luzi.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students only. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on how a conflict as an “event,” along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian,” “the oppressed,” or “the oppressor,” “the victim,” or “the perpetrator,” “the bystander," and “the implicated subject,” thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself. The course focuses on how conflicts – their regulation, repression, and particularly their visual representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience, but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicization linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity. Focus is given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.

Please note that the course extends into January, available for year students only. The course focuses on the following topics: the geological evolution of the planet earth and the formation of sea basins; the physical and chemical characteristics of the water masses; physiography and geomorphology of the seabed, genesis, and characteristics of rocks and sediments; sedimentological processes and distribution of benthic environments; the interactions between marine organisms and the abiotic environment; the main types of marine ecosystems and their functional characteristics; and the processes of formation of populations and their distribution in space and time. The course is divided into lectures and practical sessions, in the field and/or in the laboratory, with collection and analysis of samples/data and interpretation of results. Visits to the ISMAR (Institute of Marine Sciences) of the CNR of Bologna where the tools used in oceanographic and marine biology campaigns and the principles and techniques for the analysis and interpretation of the acquired data are presented. Visit to the Environmental Sciences Laboratories, of the Master's Degree in Marine Biology, at the Ravenna Campus.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course covers molecular, cellular, and “-omics” aspects of the following topics (considering both theoretical and methodological points of view): 1) Cell-cell communication in bacteria (quorum sensing): basic principles and components of quorum sensing (QS); role of the QS in microbial pathogenicity, genome plasticity (horizontal gene transfer), stress response, and microbial interaction with the host; and application of quorum sensing circuits in biotechnology and synthetic biology of single bacteria and microbial communities. 2) Microbial biofilms: distribution and diversity of biofilms; mechanisms of biofilm formation and persistence; microbial metabolism and physiology in biofilm; role of QS in biofilm formation; biofilm resistance and tolerance; in vitro systems to grow and study the microbial biofilm; and the role/importance of biofilms in medical and industrial fields. 3) Bacterial second messengers: molecular mechanisms of the nucleotide second messenger (NSM)-based intracellular signaling in bacteria; the different components involved in the NSM-based signaling; and essential and emerging roles of NSMs in bacterial sensing and cellular response, biofilm formation, and microbial interactions. 4) Signaling and interactions within microbial communities: “-omics” to study microbial communities and microbial interactions; and designing and construction of synthetic microbial communities for the application in medical, industrial, and environmental fields.