University of Bologna

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.

This course introduces modern Turkish literature, by addressing its origination, formation, and impact on the cultural milieu. It focuses on the making and predicament of modernity, its innate contradictions, and the implications of nostalgia, anxiety of influence, and globalism. It studies Turkish authors (particularly novelists), as caught between a past that was read, misread, or misunderstood, and a present that has a large body of challenge, attraction, and difference. They fathom the cultural underpinnings of the Ottoman past and non-western legacies while negotiating a western legacy of many facets. The course reads criticism in line with novelistic production, the role of the novelist as public intellectual (terms and applications are defined and set in ethnic, national, social, and cultural terms and contexts).

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in History and Oriental Studies. The course is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on neoliberal political economy and its social impacts on local contexts. Emphasis is placed on a critical approach to the aid industry as a key issue for understanding global governance processes. Students create a research project and bibliography autonomously on a topic related to the course. Since the end of the cold war and the triumph of a neoliberal order, Africa has faced a huge number of conflicts and devastating social effects. Starting with the analysis of selected ethnographic cases (Congo, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leon, etc.), the first part of the course explores the etiology of contemporary African wars focusing on the link between local violence and global economic and political processes. Special attention is placed on the relationship between youth and war and the social imaginary. The course explores topics including neoliberalism and inequality, the African State, globalization in Africa, African conflicts, war economy, young people and children in Africa, witchcraft in contemporary Africa, and development enterprise. The course includes traditional lectures and group discussions. The instructor focuses on the general topics in order to introduce the various scholarly debates. Specific examples are discussed in order to give a concrete idea of the different topics. Students are encouraged to work autonomously, comment, and ask questions. The course includes visual resources (i.e. documentaries, maps and photos).

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. The topics vary each term, access the University of Bologna Course Catalog for the current topic.

The course offers an introduction to Italian culture and history and focuses on both the city of Bologna and Italy as a nation. The course emphasizes basic knowledge of crucial aspects of the Italian cultural heritage across different disciplines and an awareness of the complexities of Italian history and society. The course is interdisciplinary in nature with weekly guest lectures on a variety of topics. The course is graded pass/no pass only.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, the student has a deep knowledge of industrial applications that benefit from the use of machine learning, optimization, and simulation. The student has a domain-specific knowledge of practical use cases discussed in collaboration with industrial experts in a variety of domains such as manufacturing, automotive, and multi-media. The course is primarily delivered as a series of simplified industrial use cases. The goal is to provide examples of challenges that typically arise when solving industrial problems. Use cases may cover topics such as: anomaly detection; Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation; RUL based maintenance policies; resource management planning; recommendation systems with fairness constraints; power network; management problems; epidemic control; and production planning. The course emphasizes the ability to view problems in their entirety and adapt to their peculiarities. This frequently requires to combine heterogeneous solution techniques, using integration schemes both simple and advanced. The employed methods include: mathematical modeling of industrial problems; predictive and diagnostic models for time series; Combinatorial Optimization; integration methods for Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning; integration methods for constraints and Machine Learning; and integration methods for combinatorial optimization and Machine Learning. The course includes seminars on real-world use cases, from industry experts. The course contents may be (and typically are) subject to changes, so as to adapt to some degree to the interests and characteristics of the attending students.

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 aims at developing an encompassing knowledge of the outcomes that social mobilizations have at the level of politics and policies. At the end of the course, students are able to: critically discuss the main approaches related to the outcomes of social mobilizations at the level of politics and policies; compare the political effects of social mobilizations across different countries and different territorial levels; and valuate specific cases of social mobilizations with regard to their intended and unintended political effects. The course focuses on both theories and practices related to the political effects of social mobilizations.

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 focuses on the theoretical skills necessary for placing twentieth-century Italian poetry within the context of European history of thought and ideas. Special attention is placed on the appropriate methodology for analyzing modern and contemporary poetry. The course emphasizes the role of rhetoric, stylistics, and linguistics and favors intertextual and interdisciplinary comparisons. The topic for the Spring 2018 semester is: Origins, Poetry, Verticality, and Perception. This course focuses on a selection of Italian poetry from the second half of the twentieth century that highlights the idea of origin, and in particular the feelings of unbridgeable distance, and loss. The idea of distance and loss is also analyzed through the formal choices that shape the texts as well as their friction and opposition to the literary codes of the time. Prerequisite for the course is basic knowledge of twentieth-century Italian literature at the undergraduate level. Poetry selections are from the following sources: ORAMAI and DICIASSETTE VARIAZIONI SU TEMI PROPOSTI PER UNA PURA IDEOLOGIA FONETICA by Emilio Villa, LA BUFERA E ALTRO and SATURA by Eugenio Montale, LABORINTUS and POSTKARTEN by Edoardo Sanguineti, IL SEME DEL PIANGERE and IL MURO DELLA TERRA by Giorgio Caproni, SU FONDAMENTI INVISIBILI and PER IL BATTESIMO DEI NOSTRI FRAMMENTI by Mario Luzi.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students only. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on how a conflict as an “event,” along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian,” “the oppressed,” or “the oppressor,” “the victim,” or “the perpetrator,” “the bystander," and “the implicated subject,” thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself. The course focuses on how conflicts – their regulation, repression, and particularly their visual representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience, but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicization linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity. Focus is given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.