Italy

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 carries out a comparative study regarding the main current European legal systems. In particular the focus is on civil law and common law in order to reconstruct the origins of a common legal culture with particular reference to private law and specifically to the law of obligations and contracts. In this context, the course investigates the persistence of rules and principles of roman law in the present system, working backward in search of the common legal bases that are the basis of the unification of the private projects in contemporary law. The aim of the course is to provide knowledge of European legal traditions, their origin in Roman and Medieval law and their subsequent development in two distinct areas: common law and civil law. At the end of the course, students are able to: understand the basis of the European legal tradition and distinguish it from that of other regions; know the origins of contracts and their differences in various national contexts.

This course focuses on understanding how the interconnected world economy and the global economy emerged historically and how globalization transformed economies and societies around the world. The course learns that globalization has not been a one-way street and that modern history witnessed periods of both increasing and diminishing globalization. The course provides students with the tools for understanding economic and social change in a historical and global perspective. The teaching material helps students develop critical thinking and narrative skills. The course examines how the global economy emerged in the past and how globalization transformed macro regions of the world. The first part of the course traces the connection between western expansion and the rise of the global economy from the 16th to 19th centuries and explains what factors - social, cultural, and technological - limited early globalization. The course studies how growing prosperity in Europe compared with the development of other world regions. The second part of the course discusses globalization and deglobalization in the industrial age and the shifts of global economic power they brought about. The course discusses modern economic history in a global context and focuses mainly on non-European regions. 

This course discusses topics including a general framework and short historical overview of affective neuroscience; features and functions of some fundamental brain areas/structures involved in emotional processing; research methods in affective neuroscience: strengths and limitations of animal models and neuroimaging techniques; the neural basis of fear, reward, and aggression; and the neural networks implicated in anxiety disorders, depression, and psychopathy. This course requires knowledge of the structure and functions of central and peripheral nervous system, and on general psychopathology, as a prerequisite.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course provides a general overview on business strategy main concepts and definitions. These concepts are discussed under critical lights by relating them to real world cases. Specific topics regarding the cultural and creative industries are addressed during the classes, and the boundaries between standard industrial contexts and the cultural ones are explored in depth. The classes cover the following topics introduction: what is a business strategy; the external perspective on strategy; the internal perspective on strategy; competitive advantage; competition analysis; partnerships and strategic alliances; innovation in cultural and creative industries; business models in creative and cultural industries; and intermediation in cultural and creative industries.

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. This course offers an understanding of the different systems of attainment, transfer, and conservation of knowledge in ancient societies all over the world. The course focuses on the methods and procedures for exchanging and archiving wisdom in different cultures and offers a comparison with regard to specific aims and effectiveness in storing knowledge and information, with attention to material aspects. Emphasis is also placed on recently established databases that aim to collect data and texts of ancient authors and literary works, and to carve out new tendencies in the conception of modern storage systems on the basis of a widened perspective regarding the classification of cultural memories. Highlights of the course are the recent developments in Digital Papyrology and interdisciplinary and intercultural connections, as well as the application of different scientific approaches. The course focuses on how different ancient cultures across the world, from Greek-Latin to Indian, Chinese, Meso-American and the like, have faced and solved the problem of the organization and transmission of written data, both in the documentary field (the texts of everyday life and of administration: letters, accounts, contracts, lists) and in the literary field (books). Particular attention is placed on how, within different pre-modern cultural systems, people conceived and organized their archives. The preferred methodological approach is that of archiving as a social practice, which in turn allows for a cross-cultural comparison of phenomena beyond the European and modern idea of archive. Among the points to be explored are the difference between documents that can be discarded or that must be preserved (short or long term); the different ways of organizing the material writing support and – where possible – the physical place where the texts are stored; finally, the course refocuses attention on the activities of non-elite players and generally stresses the diffusion of archival practices throughout societies. Special attention is devoted to the implications of this methodological approach to the digitalization of ancient archives.

This is an advanced 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. There are three versions of this course; this course, “GEOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177B and Bologna course number 95931, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme. One of the other versions, “GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177A and Bologna course number 81952, is associated with the LM in History and Oriental Studies degree programme. The final version “GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT,” UCEAP Course Number 176 and Bologna course number 19695, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme.
Climate change offers the opportunity for a multidisciplinary analysis. The course discusses various aspects of the topic through a primarily geographical approach. The course is structured into three parts. Part one introduces climate change as a global phenomenon, with its natural and anthropogenic root causes. Students discuss and reflect on the socio-spatial inequalities inherent in the climate crisis. Part two analyzes climate governance, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Post Kyoto adaptation and mitigation strategies. In addition to the policy-making process, the course critically examines theoretical frameworks of adaptation, notions of climate justice, and intersectional approaches to addressing the climate crisis and its colonial roots. Part three concerns climate change and mobility. The course examines the complex interconnections between climate change and (im)mobility. Empirical examples are drawn from the #ClimateOfChange [https://climateofchange.info/publications-press/] interdisciplinary research project to contextualize the climate crisis as it is manifested, resisted, and understood from diverse locations across the globe. At the end of the course students show understanding of some of the global challenges the population of the planet has been facing since the second half of the twentieth century. Among these, the critical relation with the natural resources and with the concept of development and, above all, climate change, with its connections to territorial development, ecological risk, food security, and the consumption of natural resources. At the end of the course, the students have acquired the theoretical and empirical tools to critically analyze the global strategies of climate resilience and cooperation and the relation between climate change and tourism.

This is a special studies course with projects arranged between the student and a faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student's project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student's special study project form.

This course investigates race/class and gender implications of the media generated immigration discourse in Europe, and Italy in particular, as a whole. That is, how individuals in Europe perceive immigration and distinguish among different movements of people. The course analyzes how what people perceive is generated and communicated, and in what way meaning is attributed and reacted with counter-narratives to that which is perceived. From the past to the present, through colonial and modern times to post WWII massive intra-European migrations, images and symbols of immigration remain political. How and why do they become so? Does theorizing the visual require a “grammar” of its own? How do images limit and enable securitization? How do figurations and discourses relate to and shape one another? Drawing upon examples from the last century as well as current media related discourses of asylum and migration in Europe at the continental, national and urban level, students participate in a group project that attempts to connect media politics to the concept of “community” in Rome. To this end, students’ analytical focal point is placed upon the city and suburbs of Rome where the presence of diverse immigrant communities offers opportunity for first-hand exploration of how effectively they and their second-generation individuals have been challenging the Italian political, economic, cultural mainstream and ultimately the same idea of citizenship from within the city. Students therefore experience first-hand how the Eternal city has changed in the past thirty years and how it is still changing beyond tourist stereotypes through a continual process of immigration and alteration.

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 gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts. Notions of identity and otherness, difference and diversity are analyzed with specific reference to the politics of the body. The course intends to favor the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, visual). 

This course covers literary texts, with specific reference to speculative fiction, and discusses diverse politics of the body in black feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, posthuman, and trans* studies. In particular, the course tackles the historical and discursive construction and "framing" (J. Butler) of the non-human: how it has been culturally appropriated; but investigates also different forms of resistance as well as transversal and transcultural (and trans-species) forms of alliances, questioning the possibility of imagining an episteme that expands the very category of the human, not only to those subjectivities that have never had complete access to it (R. Braidotti), but also to a series of new "bodies" that have never been associated with the idea of human, and therefore of life.