Italy

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in Cultural Anthropology. The course is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the history of visual anthropology and on the use of video and photographic techniques in ethnographic research. Students develop a critical view of ethnographic representation related to the use of such techniques. Through the lens of a Cinema of Anthropology, the course offers the instruments necessary for analyzing the content of the visual representation on the one hand, and on the other, the context in which visual representations are produced and received. Examples of context include: who has filmed whom, and why, and how; with what means of production; what is the role of the “director” and of the “spectator” in the filmed/screened reality; and who views these representations and how do they view them. After an introduction to specific cinema genres, the course focuses on questions of production, direction, and visual communication, within the framework of an “aesthetic of resistance” focusing on the visual representation of culture and society, through the screening of documentary films and fiction. The course reflects on the theme of the representation of diversity and on the different cinematic representations associated with anthropology (ethnographic films, documentaries, indigenous cinema). Each lecture focuses on different themes and concepts and is followed by the screening of films, videos, and clips which are then analyzed as a group. Students are encouraged to be active participants in the course through role playing, presentations, and discussions. Students are required to write a 5,000 word essay analyzing a film of their choice (with the consent of the instructor), which can then be presented in the class also as a team project. The thesis must include the concepts of the essential course texts. Students will be expected to demonstrate knowledge of the assigned texts during the final oral exam session. Alternatively, students can choose to present a short ethnographic film accompanied by a 3,000 word essay which explains the filmmaking approach and relates the ethnographic film practice to the content of the course. Finally, another option is to present a film essay - a critical analysis of one or two films that is developed through a visual presentation, with analysis of film clips in a cinematic approach. Further information on the assessment process is provided during the course. The course relies heavily on film, videos, and clips which are screened in class.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course introduces students to the vast field of behavioral economics, an interdisciplinary area that employs the employs concepts from economics and psychology to gain a deeper understanding of individual behavior. The theory has important applications to finance, the organization of human resources and the labor market, consumer behavior, marketing, health, and the associated public policies. The course relies on basic notions of microeconomics and game theory, and makes use of simple algebra and calculus. The course is split into four main topics: individual decisions; behavioral Game Theory; social preferences; and behavioral macroeconomics and behavioral finance.

This course is for students who have already studied Italian and can easily express themselves on familiar topics. It runs at the B1/B2 level according to the CEFR level. This communicative course develops oral skills in Italian.

The course provides an overview of the fashion system and an in-depth understanding of the strategic, organizational and managerial features of fashion companies, both in the high end and in the mass market. Main topics addressed in the course are: what is fashion, which are the fashion related sectors, and what are the differences between fashion and luxury; how creativity and management do integrate in fashion and luxury companies; how to carry out an industry analysis: strategic features of fashion companies and main business models in fashion and their evolution; the role of the textile sector and the origin of trends: where do they come from and how do they spread; fashion history and country branding: why France, Italy and US became leaders and which are the new centers for fashion; customer segmentation: how to engage the customers from new senior to generation Z; brand positioning in fashion: how to become a lifestyle brand; and key processes and main roles in fashion: product strategy and merchandising, distribution and omnichannel management, and communication and PR in the digital era. This course recommends background knowledge on some basic concepts on corporate and competitive strategy (such as industry analysis, consumer segmentation, growth strategies, and SWOT analysis) as a prerequisite.

The course focuses on Modern British Literature, and in particular the relationship between literary texts and their historical, linguistic, and artistic context. Special attention is placed on the critical methodologies useful for interpreting and analyzing literary texts. Students are expected to be able to elaborate complex analyses and formulate independent reflections on specific research topics. Students who write a research paper on a pre-approved topic are awarded 1 extra unit for the course. Maximum units for this course are 8. The course has two parts (A) and (B). The Spring 2022 topic is: Wilde in the Nineties: (PART A) PROSE and (PART B) POETRY. The course examines the various masks of the Oscar Wilde, the various fields in which he worked (poetry, theatre, novel, non-fiction, etc.) in an effort to determine if recent critical approaches obscure or illuminate his figure. The 1890s, caught between a dying Victorianism and a still uncertain Modernism, are the stage on which Wilde moves and acts, representing the contradictions of his era.

Tuscany is a world-renowned producer of fine quality wine, olive oil, and a wide variety of typical food products. Over the last few years, a growing number of Tuscan food entrepreneurs have embraced the principles of sustainability, through the introduction of business practices designed to minimize the consumption of natural resources, reduce emissions, and, ultimately, protect the environment for future generations. Sustainable productions, alongside iconic rural landscapes, farms, and vineyards, attract visitors from all over the world and thus make a positive contribution to the tourist industry and the local economy as a whole. This course focuses on Tuscany's food industry and its commitment to sustainability, as well as its relationship with tourism. It specifically explores how sustainability has impacted the food supply chain, inbound tourist flows, and food firms' competitiveness. The course analyzes a wide range of academic and managerial issues in connection with real-world business situations, thereby linking theory and practice.

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. The course focuses on the main tools used by economists and statisticians in machine learning and statistical learning to analyze large/huge data sets coming from several domains. The course highlights how to apply key aspects of machine and statistical learning, such as out-of-sample cross-validation, regularization, and scalability. Special attention is placed on the concepts of supervised and unsupervised learning, classification, regression, and clustering analysis as well as the detection of association rules. The course also focuses on the main learning tools such as lasso and ridge regression, regression trees, boosting, bagging and random forests, principal components, mixture models and the k-means algorithm. The course places emphasis on the application of the techniques discussed using dedicated open-source software packages on training datasets. Course topics: introduction and overview of statistical learning; linear regression as a prediction tool; binary and multinomial classification: logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis and k-nearest neighbors; resampling methods: cross-validation and the bootstrap; linear model selection and regularization: ridge regression, the lasso, and principal components; moving beyond linearity: regression splines, smoothing splines and general additive models; tree-based methods: CART, bagging, boosting, and random forests; support vector machines and neural networks; unsupervised learning: hierarchical and k-means clustering. The relevant theory will be applied to each topic and subsequently the analysis will move to its empirical application in the R language. Special emphasis is placed on the economic interpretation of the results. The course focuses in several empirical analyses and replicates the results of a few case studies using the statistical software R and several of its packages.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course is intended for students who have a strong background in political science. The course focuses on political communication with emphasis on the relationship between political systems and media systems, political language, political marketing, new media and politics, and media and populism. Special attention is placed on the strategies of effective political communication used in political campaigns both in Europe and the U.S. and the role of mass media in the public sphere and its effects on public opinion. The course also an analysis of the principal forms of online political communication. Required readings include: COMUNICAZIONE POLITICA: LE NUOVE FRONTIERE by D. Campus, MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS: A CHALLENGE FOR DEMOCRACY? By G. Mazzoleni and W. Schultz. The course includes lectures and a series of guest speakers. Assessment is based on a written exam that includes multiple choice and essay questions.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The student acquires historical and literary knowledge of women's popular culture with specific reference to travel literature and critical utopias, within a gender perspective. The course analyzes the strategies of representation of female identity, women's social role and agency in women's travel accounts such as letters, diaries and novels, from the 18th century to the present. It also investigates the double diversity of women travelers as different both from male travelers and from more socially conformist women. The course also explores to what extent these texts subvert or reinforce the position of women within the patriarchal social order and in the domestic sphere. For this reason, the texts chosen for the course are examined within their original cultural and social contexts, and in their interconnection with class, race, and gender discrimination.