University of Bologna

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. EnrolLment is by permission of the instructor. This course presents to students the stylistic analysis of literature in English. In particular, students are guided through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of literature. This course proposes a mixture of theory and practice with the final aim to teach how to provide close readings of literary texts based on a stylistics approach. The aim of this course is to teach students the importance of style in relation to the meaning of a literature.

This course focuses on the general themes of Late Antique Archaeology: Issues of definition and periodization; Architecture, urban planning, and sculpture; Settlement dynamics and funerary practices; Iconography and visual culture; Structures of production and issues of economic-commercial exchanges; Relationship between Christianity and other religions in the Late Antique period.

By the end of the course, students know the definition of Late Antiquity and the issues related to periodization in that historical period, have a basic knowledge of the material evidence and are able to recognize the importance of the relationship between objects and contexts; they can find their way around the scientific literature and, through critical reading of the archaeological records, begin to understand the significance of artefacts, buildings, and figurative documents, connecting them to cultural, social, political, and religious phenomena. They have learnt to listen, understand, and debate respectfully with different viewpoints, and spot tie-ups among different disciplines.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course provides students the tools to address humanities research in general, and in particular in women and gender history. The specific focus is on methodological sources and sites of memory for women’s studies.

During their lives, women produced and received documents (e.g. letters, diaries and memoirs), which are preserved in several public and private archives. This material is particularly important to understand women's status and stories: marginalized in the private sphere, they enjoyed fewer rights than men, also for what concerned access to wealth. However, as the analysis of women's papers shows, they stood for themselves and negotiated the boundaries of the spaces and roles society assigned to them. The analysis of documents by women allows us to recover their voices and to clearly understand the importance of the ordinary in the wider societal context. By approaching women's documents from a theoretical and practical perspective, this course provides students with tools for research in the humanities, with a particular focus on women and gender history.

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 is mainly aimed at those who have not already done historical-linguistic studies and aims to provide an overview of the events of Italian linguistic history and the main problems of diachronic reconstruction: internal and external linguistic history, literary language and common language, relationship between the center and periphery, question of the linguistic norm, factors of Italianization. The course is divided into a general part, dedicated to some moments of linguistic history of Italian from its origins to the contemporary age through the analysis of exemplary texts, and in some lessons focused on the history of the teaching of Italian through the centuries.

The student enrolled in this course is expected to have just reached a moderate skill in Linguistics and Italian grammar. On successful completion of the course, the student will be able to learn and apply in practice the knowledge acquired, to use analyzing tools and to apply the methods of learning discussed in the course, in order to examine in depth and revise in complete autonomy his\her own knowledge. The student will be able to use the main instruments for the evaluation of a text, literary or not. He/she will be able to analyze any text and to relate it to the cultural and literary context in which it was produced, to its way of dissemination and reception, in a multidisciplinary perspective.

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 title of the course is "FEMMINISMS." Women’s thinking and movements, in Europe, in the Americas, in the Arab context, in southern Africa and in the Asian context are analysed in chronological order, but also showing the deep connections that were established between the various areas of the world. Alongside some thematic reconstructions, starting from the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the publication of the first "manifestos" of contemporary feminism, the lectures analyze particularly important texts and experiences still hard to define within the scope of “classical” history (centered upon the West and its successive “waves”) of the feminisms. At the end, the students understand the complexity of the females thinking and movements in their peculiarity and in a transnational and global perspective. Students acquire in-depth knowledge of the origins and development of women's movements in Italian Early Modern and Contemporary history, through methodological investigations which allow them to research autonomously.

This course provides an in depth overview of Data Mining, Commercial data, Administrative data, survey data, Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Predictive Models (decision trees, discriminant analysis, regression). The course content is delivered through theoretical lectures and practical laboratory works using SAS software; it focuses on the application of SAS programming for market research and consumer behavior analysis, combining statistical rigor with practical implementation. The curriculum emphasizes advanced techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), Discriminant Analysis, and clustering methods. Topics for this course include:

1. Advanced SAS Programming for Market Data
2. Statistical Foundations for Market Research
3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for Market Research
4. Clustering Methods for Market Segmentation
5. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) for Categorical Data
6. Discriminant Analysis for Predictive Modeling
7. Advanced Data Handling and Preparation
8. Capstone Project: CRM and Consumer Behavior Analysis

By the end of the course, students learn to define their research topic, edit the questionnaire, treat distortion effects generated by the opinion scale, build statistical models using the SAS software, and draft of research report. Students will conduct a psychographic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capstone project, which must apply the data analysis strategies addressed during lectures; they produce a final written report with clear and logical description of the analysis process and methodological choices. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Art and literature can be seen weaving around each other, influencing one and another, and being used as a tool to teach students about liberal arts and humanity; this course explores various ways in which words and images have interacted and shaped Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is divided into two modules.

Module 1: Literature and Visual Culture explores the relations between the Italian novel and comic strip fiction between the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the fundamental role played by comics in the personal formation and creative activity of some writers. Tracing the development and diffusion of comic strip fiction in Italy starting from the second half of the 20th century, this module focuses in particular on how much the experience of comic strip readers influenced the narrative and non-fiction production of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, shaping their imagery and writing methods. The module analyzes and discusses interpretations of comic book characters and serial stories, as well as the different ways in which comics are incorporated into their texts.

Module 2: Literature and the Arts provides students with themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and photography; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the visual turn and the pictorial turn; 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into these specific forms of interaction between literature and photography: 1) the photographer as a character; 2) photography as a theme in literature; 3) photography as a way of writing or the role of photographic gaze in literature; 4) phototexts. At the end of the course, students are able to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to nowadays, with a focus on painting. Students acquire knowledge on the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and they will be capable of analyzing critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts.

This course provides students with the fundamental tools to understand financial decision-making in the modern corporation. Topics include: capital budgeting/corporate investment, capital structure, corporate sources of funding, dividend policy, corporate contingent claims for financial risk management. The course frames these topics within the standard theories of risk and return, valuation of assets, and market structure.

The course focuses on the following topics:

• Financial Planning and Analyzing financial performance
• Capital budgeting (NPV, IRR and payback period)
• Capital budgeting and risk (asset beta and equity beta)
• Financing decisions and the firm cost of capital
• Capital issuing (seasoned equity offers, IPOs and venture capital)
• Corporate risk management

The course focuses on North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special emphasis on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and funding texts are compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have shaped the US and the Canadian realities, from the European colonization till the end of the 19th century. In this class, literature is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, inner/outer landscape constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. This course features a series of guest scholars to encourage the dialogue between literature and civic society so to widen our knowledge of learning and training opportunities available nationally or internationally. The list of featured guests will be available when classes start. Students learn the literary history of the period at stake; they acquire useful literary tools to analyze fictional productions and question them in relation to the complex and heterogeneous North American realities.

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 aim of the course is to illustrate the diversity of the world's languages and the implications of this diversity for a general theory of language and its use, discussing the main methods and results of the typological-functionalist approach and of the approaches developed in the pragmatic field. Through the comparison of different languages, belonging to the various families attested in the world, the theoretical and methodological bases for the analysis of structural, semantic and pragmatic diversity of human languages are discussed in detail, also in relation to cultural diversity. At the end of the course, students are able to trace different languages back to different 'linguistic types' and have an up-to-date knowledge of threatened and endangered languages; have a thorough knowledge of the notions of linguistic and pragmatic universals; be able to set up and carry out autonomously an interlinguistic comparison with respect to single linguistic and pragmatic phenomena; be familiar with the main techniques of data collection and linguistic documentation; and be able to orient themselves within the descriptive grammars of different languages.

The course is organized in five parts. For each topic, different perspectives and theoretical proposals are compared, in the light of the most recent scientific debate:

1. Introduction to linguistic diversity
2. The world's languages and their health status.
3. Analyzing linguistic diversity: data collection and methods of analysis
4. Linguistic typology: seeking order in chaos
5. Explorations of linguistic diversity

The topics addressed in the second part of the course are listed below. The list may be subject to change depending on the specific interests of the attending students.

• Different languages construct words differently: morphological types
• Subject and object in world’s languages: syntactic types
• The categorization of time and reality: languages without time markers, time and reality of nouns and adjectives
• Noun categories: genders (how many?) and number (beyond singular and plural...)
• Parts of speech: how are people, things, and events categorized? Are there languages without adjectives?
• The expression of gratitude in the world's languages: is saying 'thank you' a universal phenomenon or does it depend on education and culture?
• How to communicate misunderstanding? The expression of error and its repair in world languages
• Languages without AND and languages without OR: connectives beyond logical distinctions

A basic knowledge of general linguistics is required. Those who have never taken a basic linguistics exam will have to recover independently, by studying a basic manual (Berruto & Cerruti 2011 is suggested).