Italy

This course introduces students to the grammatical structures and vocabulary necessary to understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases in Italian. Students learn to express themselves using verbs in the present tense. They introduce themselves and others and ask and answer questions about personal details such as where they live, people they know, and things they own. They engage in simple interactions as long as the other person talks slowly and clearly. They ask for or pass on personal details in written form and produce short and simple texts like postcards, greetings messages, isolated phrases, and sentences. Attention is given to the correct pronunciation of the language. All four abilities (writing, speaking, listening, reading) are developed in the class, also with the support of authentic audiovisual materials such as Italian movies, short videos, tv programs, and songs. The course uses a communication-based approach: students engage in daily role-plays, group activities, games, and class discussions. Out of class activities are designed to take advantage of the opportunities for interaction and language practice, as well as immersion in Italian culture, that the city provides.

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 offers a series of advanced analytical tools necessary to understand European economic development as well as economic policies related to EU integration and expansion, their political and economic prerequisites, and their impact on member states. The course focuses on models of political economy, institutional economics, and economic analysis in order to critically evaluate the process of economic integration in Europe in the trade, monetary, and financial areas. The course explores the economic integration of the European Union (EU) and its role in the global economy. Attention is placed on basic concepts and theory in order to understand the economic dynamics between EU member states as well as between the EU and the rest of the world. A special section of the course is devoted to evaluating current events and the debate on Europe’s economic future against the backdrop of changing dynamics in global markets.

The course deals with basic themes, concepts, and thinkers in international relations. The purpose is to provide students with essential conceptual and linguistic tools for understanding the underlying structure and fundamental features of international politics, as well as its material and immaterial changing aspects. The objective is to explain the dynamics through which men and women understand international politics as well as to achieve a coherent capacity to think about international life, both in its theoretical and practical dimension. The course covers seven specific topics: The first part of the course is dedicated to theory: international relations as a field of western knowledge; a fundamental theoretical framework: realism/idealism; war and ways of peace; beyond domestic analogy; justice and order in world politics The second part is dedicated to practice with the analysis of specific cases: the international political space; homogeneity, heterogeneity, and conflict; the global age and international relations.

The course discusses theoretical knowledge, research methods, and innovative techniques to study, design, and evaluate human-computer interaction (HCI). The targeted knowledge is such that makes the resulting HCI effective and efficient, and the user experience simple, pleasant, and overall satisfactory. The skills acquired pertain to the domain of HCI and cognitive ergonomics; more specifically: user-centered design; basic principles of cognitive ergonomics; user experience evaluation and products usability; visual communication and data visualization; accessibility and universal design (e.g. design for older adults); and social computing and social ergonomics.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in Sciences and Management of Nature. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on the distribution of human biodiversity in the world and on the main adaptive processes that have influenced it through patterns of phenotypic and molecular variation in human populations. The course explores how the different and changing environments have prompted ecological and cultural shifts that have introduced new selective pressures that have impacted the human genome. Special attention is placed on cases in which ecological and cultural contexts have changed so rapidly in the modern era that they have trigger adaptive traits that were previously shaped by natural selection and now are shaped by maladaptive selection. The course also provides elements useful for understanding the evolutionary causes of differential susceptibilities to complex diseases in human populations. The course presents the main theoretical models developed so far to describe the processes by which human populations have biologically adapted to a variety of environmental conditions. Moreover, it describes patterns of molecular and phenotypic variation that underlie some of the most well-studied human adaptive traits. Finally, evidence supporting dis-adaptive processes undergone by present-day human populations due to rapid changes occurred in their environmental and/or cultural contexts is presented. The course is organized as follows: evolutionary principles, processes enabling human biological adaptation to environmental settings, contextualization of human adaptive traits in the overall landscape of human biodiversity, case studies describing adaptive processes of human populations in response to environmental stresses, and case studies describing dis-adaptive processes of human populations due to rapid environmental/cultural changes.

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 basic constructs of general psychology and the main methods in the study of human behavior. The course discusses on the basic skills necessary in analyzing cognitive and emotional processes. The course includes an experimental part linked to a laboratory that focuses on emotion and perception. Specific topics include: perception-attention, learning, memory, and emotion. Students participate actively in class discussions and carry out group work on specific topics. The course includes slides and power point presentations.

This course is an introduction to the history of Africa South of the Sahara from the 19th century to the 1990s. To balance historical breadth with depth, the course analyzes some selected case-studies to highlight major historical trends and see their effects on the local level. The first lectures are an introduction to the history of the continent. The course discusses the idea of “Africa without history,” the evolution of the historical studies on Africa and the sources that Africanists have at their disposal. The course then analyzes the slave trades - local, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean- and highlights their economic, social, and political effects on the African societies involved. The course continues with the origins of imperialism, to see how Western scientific and technological discoveries, the European political and economic situation, the 19th-century racism as well as the work of missionaries and explorers, put the basis for the scramble for Africa. The course then sees the reactions of African societies to the colonial occupation and analyzes the different forms of colonialism. Particular attention is given to the early developments of African nationalism. The course investigates the participation of Africa in WWI and WWII and the development of international movements, especially panafricanism and négritude. The course then considers the most important phases of the decolonization process, from the independence of Ghana in 1957 to the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The last part of the course focuses on specific case-studies to provide examples of the political and economic choices of the leaders of post-independence Africa. The course discusses some of the most prominent political leaders, such as Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, and Nelson Mandela, and their writings. The course investigates the impact of colonialism on independent African countries and analyzes the relationship between history, nationalism, and the formation of the post-colonial state.

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 course offers a general view of the history of Medieval and Renaissance art. Students learn to develop a general vision of the history of Medieval and Renaissance art. On one hand, students learn how to use the skills necessary to become familiar with the artistic production of the period, and on the other, they learn to analyze some of the main works of the history of Medieval and Renaissance art using specific methodologies, and relate these to one another appropriately. Classes are divided into three sections. The first section introduces students to medieval and renaissance history and to the different approaches to a work of art (style, techniques, iconography, etc.), and discusses the most important methodological issues about them. The second section offers, in chronological order, the main lines of Italian artistic history between the beginning of Middle Age and early XVI century: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Barbaric Art, the medieval revivals (Carolingian and Ottonian), Romanesque Art, Gothic Art, the Early Renaissance, and the High Renaissance. The third section focuses on a specific topic, which varies each year. The fall 2023 topic is "Luca Signorelli and the young Michelangelo: two great artists between the 15th and 16th c."

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. This course discusses specificities that characterize contemporary Italian history and in particular of the social, political, economic transformations, in addition to those related to the mentality and customs, of Italy in the twentieth century. The course examines the methodological competences necessary for reaching an adequate level of critical and interpretative awareness in the field of contemporary Italian history.