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. The course offers students a multidimensional perspective on the dynamic links between human societies and the environment, using insights from environmental, resource and ecological economics. After presenting the historical background of the discipline, the course provides a broad overview of how economic theory conceptualizes the problems of optimal pollution control and the efficient use of exhaustible and renewable natural resources. Several key sub-fields of environmental economics are analyzed and discussed, including the valuation of environmental goods, the measurement of sustainability, the links between economic growth and environmental degradation, the role of technological innovation as well as the behavioral aspects of environmental protection. Climate economic modelling is the main applied focus of the course. At the end of the course, students have a comprehensive understanding of the most relevant research areas in environmental and resource economics.

Specific topics covered:

• Weak and strong sustainability; environmental and ecological economics
• Economic growth and the environment
• Measures of sustainability
• Static and dynamic efficiency
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Depletable resource economics
• Renewable resource economics
• Climate change economics
• Environmental policy
• International environmental agreements

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 organized in two sections:

Section A: lectures that introduce students to the key conceptual tools. This section analyzes the relationship between the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the international community within the framework of the prevailing development issues in the following periods: independence and the Cold War; Washington consensus; democratization; the third millennium; and the new international consensus on 'stability' and 'security'.

Section B: seminar classes for in-depth discussions of the Part A framework in view of a selection of country case-studies in sub-Saharan Africa, and for debating the new research questions that will come to light during classes. The main focus is the challenge of democracy in the 2000s: they are examined considering the local and international political priorities, the emphasis on security and the role of international cooperation policies.

At the end of the course, the student has acquired, in a critical manner and with reference to international academic research literature, a good knowledge of the political history of contemporary Africa in its international dimension. In particular, the student is able to: A) analyze and discuss the main elements of the political development and transformations of the political systems of contemporary Africa considering the internal, regional, and international context; B) analyze and discuss the main factors defining the role and location of Africa in contemporary global politics and international relations; C) analyze and evaluate empirically the development strategies and governance reforms, also in relation to the role of the international policies of the major donors; D) find and arrange documentary and bibliographic sources using libraries, databases, and websites, and organize, both verbally and by written essays, the knowledge acquired during the course.

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 content includes:

1) Introduction to the use of clinical interviewing for well-being interventions.

2) Attending and listening skills for clinical interviewing.

3) The use of questions during clinical interviewing.

4) Well-being interventions based on person-centered approaches: theoretical principles and methodological recommendations.

5) Conceptual and methodological principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).

6) Conceptual and methodological principles of Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT).

7) The Well-Being Therapy (WBT): the conceptual background, the methodological framework, and its main clinical applications.

8) An introduction to the Schema Therapy.

9) The clinician and the soul: an introduction to Logotherapy.

10) The inferiority feeling and striving for superiority: an introduction to Individual Psychology and Adlerian Psychotherapy.

By the end of the course, students: know evidence-based interventions aimed at improving well-being, their mechanisms of action, potential beneficial and adverse effects; are able to evaluate the efficacy of well-being interventions and plan research and intervention projects to reduce risk in populations with unhealthy lifestyle and promote adaptation and self-management in patients with chronic and progressive diseases.

This course primarily focuses on the identification of financial assets' fair prices. First, the course introduces the main theories of portfolio choice and risk-expected return trade-off in financial markets: the mean-variance portfolio choice, CAPM, APT, Fama-French models. Second, the course introduces the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Starting from basic concepts such as the yield curve, yield-to-maturity, duration, convexity, the course introduces portfolio hedging strategies based on duration-matching or asset liability management. The course is divided into four parts. First, the course introduces the students to the problem of managing a portfolio. Second, the course introduces the students to the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Third, the course introduces options pricing. Fourth, the course expose the students to the main behavioral finance findings in the current literature.

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 theoretical knowledge on museum studies, as well as the necessary practical skills to work with or in the museum sector. It is designed to prepare students both to the responsibilities they will overtake or/and to the academic work they will produce during their professional career. The course is divided into three modules. The first module provides a theory-based introduction to the museum sector and the research field of critical museology. The second module is dedicated to the new stakes and challenges of the museum in the 21st century. The last part of the course is conceived to provide concrete tools to think specifically about the publics of museums, and to implement adapted strategies to relevantly interact with them inside and outside of the museum. The course covers museum history from being an institutional container for a collection up to the idea of the modern archaeological museum with its complex organization; the rudiments of museum theory, legislation, and marketing; the application of the theoretical-scientific concept of Museology, in its various meanings and multi-functional sense, to the complex problems related to public enjoyment of the Archaeological Cultural Heritage.

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 the main theoretical and methodological tools of global and intercultural perspectives for the study of the medieval world including religious phenomena and dynamics. This course shows how to critically identify the socio-cultural matrix of religions, as well as connections, developments, persistence, and transformations of religious phenomena with a critical approach to periodization and can address and solve issues related to the management of cultural and religious pluralism. With a focus on the medieval Mediterranean and the routes to Asia from 1000 to 1500, this course analyzes patterns of religious, commercial, and intellectual communication between Latins, Eastern Christians, Arabs, and Mongols, with attention to the sociopolitical implications of interaction between groups in complex societies. The first part of the course provides the main theoretical tools for a history of cross-cultural encounters in pre-modern times, looking in particular at the Mongol Empire and the Mediterranean Sea as connecting spaces. Afterwards, the focus is on a series of case studies, based on which the class empirically observes patterns of interaction, representation of otherness, and circulation of goods, peoples, and ideas across linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries and on different scales. Specific attention is devoted to the plurality of representations of the “Orient” produced or circulating in late medieval Europe, regarding them as crucial objects of cultural and religious history. The course discusses how non-Latin and non-Christian peoples fit into Western categories of representations, and what knowledge about Near- and Far-Eastern regions was actually available in the West. By examining specific cases, based on Eastern and Western sources, the course explores the different ways in which medieval travelers took otherness into account, whether internal or external to Christianity, and examines how these accounts fit into precise intellectual schemes and political and religious agendas.

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 provides information, in the fields of Indology, history, religious studies, and anthropology, indispensable for critically analyzing South Asian intellectual history in colonial and post-colonial times. The course provides in-depth analysis to the following themes: Discourse on religion and religious conflicts in colonial and postcolonial India; the debate on historiography in post-colonial India; the criticism of "secularism" in postcolonial India; representations of social marginality in contemporary South Asia. The course also provides high-level knowledge of intellectual transformations and history of thought in modern and contemporary South Asia, specifically during the colonial and post-colonial period. The course covers in depth the issue of religious and social reforms and the main theoretical positions emerged in the current debate on the historiographical and anthropological representation of the development of South Asian society. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. In Spring 2024, the course offered a special focus on the literature, photography, and illustration at the beginning of the 20th century: The collaboration between Henry James and Alvin Langdon Coburn. In analyzing this case study from the point of view of the genesis of the images and of the editorial context, this course reflects on the relationship between writing and visual culture, literature and photography, word and image within the framework of the technological, social, and cultural transformations that have marked the turn from the 19th to the 20th Century: from the rise of what Walter Benjamin has called the "technological reproduction" to the development of tourism and the emergence of a new imagery of space and places. The course provides the theoretical tools for interpreting literature in the new framework of visual culture which emerged at the threshold of modernity. Students acquire a deep knowledge of the relationships between verbal and visual texts in their multiple manifestations, and are familiar with the main theoretical categories and methodologies which have been elaborated by visual studies and have crossed (and transformed) literary studies themselves.

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 develops critical knowledge of the fundamental institutes of Food Law with particular attention to the new profiles that the discipline presents and to European and international regulations of specific relevance. The approach to the subject is interdisciplinary, not only theoretical but also practical-operational, enabling students to acquire mastery and awareness in the use of legislative, jurisprudential, and contractual practice tools. The course content includes: principles and rules of European and global food law; right to food; food security; food safety; food sovereignty; global food law trends; European food law rules; food sustainability; food law and antitrust rules; and contract farming. At the end of the module, the course covers the regulation of national, European, and international agrifood markets, with particular emphasis placed on agrifood security, producer responsibility, and competition policies; and how to handle different sources of agrifood law, how to be familiar with bodies issuing specific regulation in the sector, and how to contribute to organizational policies to this regard.

This course provides students with tools to think critically and autonomously about economic ideas and public policy. The course develops the skills to elaborate a map of the successive interfaces between economics and policy, and to understand the major controversies surrounding the development of positive and normative economics. Economists think and write about the world in order to understand the way economic systems function, but also – sometimes – in order to transform them. This course provides an in-depth understanding of the role of economists in public policy since the end of the 19th century. The course is structured in three parts: 1) a description of the different regimes of the interventions of economists in policy. This part explores the evolution of the role of economists and the status of economic knowledge, from the margins to the core of policymaking, following the successive regimes of intervention. Then it analyzes the changing nature of economists’ role in policy after the Great Depression and post-war deregulation movement; 2) a series of case studies focused on institutions. This part is devoted to a series of historical case studies focused on the development of policies aimed at tackling poverty, inequality, and discrimination. The use of economics is explored in specific institutions; 3) an exploration of conflicting values through the history of public economics. The last part is about the practice and the scholarship on public policy. It investigates the history of the fields of welfare and public economics since the 1930s and the treatment of conflict between the positive and normative approaches in economics.