University of Bologna

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 content includes:

1) From health-related quality of life to dimensions of psychological well-being: the conceptual framework and their process of assessment in clinical psychology.

2) The unifying concept of euthymia and its psychological evaluation.

3) The science of clinimetrics and clinimetric criteria for Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).

4) Clinimetric approach to the definition and clinical assessment of psychological distress.

5) The experience of psychological suffering: the concept of mental pain and its clinimetric evaluation.

6) The concept of demoralization and its detection based on clinimetric criteria.

7) The Hamilton Rating Scales and the clinical assessment of depression.

8) Somatization, illness denial and the clinimetric domain of psychosomatics.

9) The clinimetric domain of clinical pharmacopsychology.

By the end of the course, students know the theoretical paradigms of mental health as a multidimensional construct and are able to use the appropriate rating scales for a comprehensive assessment of mental health according to clinimetric criteria.

The course investigates the relationship between twentieth-century political-social movements and the artistic imaginary that these contribute to create, disseminate, transform and by which they are in turn influenced. Each artistic expression (from painting to design, from theater to music, from architecture to literature) has its own specific relationship with the historical conditions in which it was born and which in turn it contributed to create. The course presents a series of specific conjunctions between artistic forms and political-social events of the last 150 years. By the end of the course, students are expected to know the history of Italian and international social movements of the last century; how to analyse the cultural and artistic forms of these movements; how to relate the political transformation to the production of the artistic imagination; and to recognize the influence of social movements on contemporary art forms.

This course explores the 19th- and 20th-century development of crime fiction, with a double focus on the subgenres of detective fiction and of the psychological thriller, which flourished in relation to the relevance psychoanalysis acquired as an interpretative paradigm of the human. Its aim is to illustrate the complexity of a genre that was reductively considered in the past as structurally formulaic and critically uninteresting, but which has recently obtained increasing attention and recognition as a significant literary phenomenon.

This cross-media genre is explored as a ‘field of tension’ in order to study the changing status of both detection/detectives (due to the development of forensic science) and of crime/criminals (due to the continuous reshaping of laws and social norms). The course investigates the interplay between aspects of the detective such as mind and body (thinking machines versus vulnerable detectives), intellect and emotions (how do these apparently opposed dimensions concur to the personality of fallible and infallible detectives?). Students also utilize the critical category of gender to investigate authorial issues and characterization.

Upon completing this course, students acquire an in-depth knowledge of the history of English literature. They obtain critical insight into a selection of literary works and can evaluate their literary qualities, analyzing them with the help of precise critical metholodogies. They acquire the theoretical tools needed to recognize the formal, thematic and stylistic components of the works included in the syllabus, relating them to their historical and cultural contexts. Students discuss, translate, and relate the contents of these works from a linguistic, historical, and philological viewpoint.

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 analyzes different aspects of global political networks in the context of entangled history. The main focus of this course concerns visions of international order after empire in the twentieth century. The five modules deal with: 1) Framing Global Visions; 2) Colonial and post-colonial networks; 3) Nationalism, self-determination and world-making; 4) International institutions; 5) International and Global Ideologies.

The first part of the course concerns an introduction to the category of the ‘global’ in historical studies in order to provide an analytical framework to ideologies and ideas of world order. The second module of the course focuses on colonial and post-colonial networks through migration, economics, and law. The third module discusses nationalist and federalist visions for global order, analyzing the relations between nationalist movements and international political spaces. The topic of the fourth module is the idea of international institutions in the twentieth century.

At the end of the course, students have acquired an understanding of the concept of entangled history centered around global political networks. Students also have familiarity with the ways in which global visions have emerged in the twentieth century, and with their critiques. Students will have gained knowledge of the ways that influential ideas and ideologies have shaped historical events and processes on global scale. Students will have identified the relevance of different traditions of global thinking including internationalist, liberal, anti-imperialist, and federal approaches. On successful completion of this module, students will be expected to have constructed a solid theoretical framework within which specific research interests could be developed.

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 with the advanced knowledge to the field of network analysis and its usages in other fields of research. At the end of the course, students gain knowledge on the Web as a socio-technical system involving specific processes, entities, and behaviors, using interdisciplinary methods that blend computer science, sociology, ethnography, economics, linguistics, etc. The students are able to analyze the Web phenomena similarly to typical objects from natural sciences, distinguishing between data and applications, agents from computationally generated profiles, and addressing the characteristics of networks of entities emerging from the informational, physical, social, and conceptual spaces constituting the Web.

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.