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 an overview of the structure and main features of EU financial regulation, along with an in-depth examination of some of its main pillars. Topics covered by the course are the regulation of securities offerings, investment firms and investment services, investment funds, and securities markets. At the end of the course unit, students will possess an in-depth knowledge about the legal regime applicable to financial operators and relevant swap transactions, against the background of the applicable international and supranational legal instruments; they are thus able to understand financial operators’ behavior in a given political and economic context, and to envisage its impact on the regulatory framework concerning the functioning of financial markets.

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 a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.

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's main emphasis is on cultural heritage; it offers a bridge between the past and the future by means of the present. The course investigates the formation of the concept of cultural heritage in historical perspective and the European geographical spectrum. It also dwells on the cases of destruction of cultural heritage occurring throughout history. Starting from the shaping of urban landscapes through the ages, the course also addresses the heritage values of urban space, which are overall values derived from the integration of different components. The course provides: an understanding of the significance of urban environments through the transformations that occurred over time in relation to various political and institutional phases; a comparative view between Italian and European cities through specific examples; an ability to use sources such as aerial photos of urban settlements to identify the stages of their development from antiquity to the present; and recognition of the reasons for the shaping of Europe's cultural heritage and in particular its historical urban landscape.

This course covers the essential lines of food history in an economic, social, and cultural perspective, based on reading documentary, narrative, literary, and scientific sources, by way of examples of document interpretation and an introduction to proper historical work. The course introduces the use of original documents, narratives, and literary and scientific sources as starting points for historical research. The course provides the general outlines of food history and food cultures, with special emphasis on Italian and European history between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Its 15 lectures are structured in such a way that each includes a theoretical part and an analytical part discussing sources relevant to the topic covered in part 1. Topics include: the birth of Food History as a discipline, methodology, birth, and evolution of dietetic science in the West, food in Antiquity and Middle Ages, food in Europe, food production and land management, city supply and markets, eating behaviors, food and social identities, birth of written cookbooks, dissemination of European gastronomic cultures, the Colombian Exchange, Italian identity in the kitchen, and history and myth.

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 advanced knowledge of the different moments of international relations and the development in Latin America from the 19th century to the present. The course provides the ability to: a) identify and compare the different interpretations of the history of development and international relations in Latin America; b) detect and analyze the features of continuity and discontinuity in the dynamics of the western hemisphere, in relation to changes in the international system; c) discuss, from a global perspective, the development models in Latin America from the 19th century to the present. The course presents the principal issues in the history of development and international relations in Latin America from independence to the 21st century. Starting from the analysis of the consequences, for the Latin American area, of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the course analyzes the international dimension of the processes of state building and, subsequently, of nation building, the inclusion of Latin American countries in the dynamics of the first globalization, the consolidation of the export-led growth strategy model, the transition to mass democracies and, in some cases, the structuring of populist regimes, the definition of the ISI development model, the evolution of the Pan-American system and, then, the inter-American diffusion of the dynamics of the Cold War, the diffusion of the Washington Consensus, of forms of regional integration and, later, of nationalist movements.

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 in-depth knowledge of how the Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance evolved, with particular reference to the texts that profoundly influenced the subsequent literature and culture, so confirming the canon. The course explains how to best analyze texts, reading them with a critical eye and relating them to various temporal and social-cultural periods. Specifically, this course focuses on the works of Dante Alighieri, which are a landmark of both the Italian and the European medieval literary canon, and have exercised a paramount influence on the Western cultural tradition as a whole. The course introduces a selection of crucial themes and episodes from the Commedia and other minor works. Lectures and seminars explore the context of late medieval Italian culture and society in which Dante's oeuvre has been produced, and examine its afterlife and significance for modern literature and visual culture.

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 analyzes the genealogy of the relationship power-opinion-public-democracy, which is constituted in political modernity, observing its genesis, its aporias, its theoretical and historical transformations. At the end of the course, the student: is familiar with the political authors who have contributed to the reflection on this relationship; is able to understand the dialectic it establishes with other concepts of political modernity, such as domination, representation, freedom, both with respect to the crisis and to the new potentialities that the articulation of power-public-opinion-democracy is experiencing in the era of the digital revolution; is able to apply these categories to the analysis of the present . The course examines the nature, structure, and critical role of public opinion and its relation with political and social institutions in the 19th century. It includes readings by some of the most important political thinkers on the relationship between democracy and public opinion, like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. The course analyzes the social and political transformations enabled in public opinion by the process of democratization during 20th century with the help of authors like Tarde, Bentley, Lippmann, Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. During the second part, the course uses authors like Adorno and Marcuse, Lazersfeld and Kaplan, Debord, Habermas, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu to understand the new political configurations of the public opinion in the age of mass democracy; finally, the course analyzes the crisis of public opinion in the age of globalization, the age of information, the show society age, the post-truth and fake news age, and the possibility for public opinion in contemporary democracies to gain (or not) a new political role.

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 topics for this course differ each term. In spring 2024, the course focused on a close reading of selections from Niccolò Machiavelli’s major works. This course focuses on the major topics, ideas, problems, and authors of Western Political Philosophy and its history. The course introduces an advanced level of reading, analyzing, and deep understanding of key themes and concepts in the Western tradition of political philosophy. The course develops strong skills in critical reading, including describing and analyzing the conceptual framework of and the specific historiographical debates on some of the major texts in the field, in their historical and cultural context. The course also focuses on Machiavelli's historical background and influence. The course pays particularly detailed attention to the questions of power, violence, ontology’s relationship with politics, and Machiavelli’s reading of his classical and medieval sources.

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 topics for this course differ each term. In spring 2024, the course had special emphasis on black women writers. Black Britain is a diaspora space (Avtar Brah): its literature and cultural productions are not only concerned with displaying experiences of insertion and adaptation within British society, but also with exploring and expanding the borders of a multi-layered identity that implies, even in its situatedness, transnational and transcultural routes. The course focuses on the literary and artistic production of some black British women writers from the second half of the 20th century up to the present. On one side, complicating the use of the lens of “migration” to read this production, the course deals with the question of being both black in Britain and black and British; on the other side, by taking an intersectional approach, blackness will be analysed not as singular and homogenous, but as crossed by heterogeneous, and at time opposing, movements – and especially in a constant dialogue with a series of other categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, education, equity, oppression, and violence (both “external” and “internal”). The course provides in-depth knowledge of English women's literature, using practical methodologies for the analysis and the interpretation of the literary text.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. By the end of the course, students know the brain processes underlying maturation, plasticity and aging and the associated changes in cognitive and emotional functions across the life span. The course is designed to provide advanced knowledge of the neural basis and functional mechanisms of human behavior, affective and cognitive processes and their alteration in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders, drawing on both theoretical and methodological contributions of current literature, and integrating different methodological approaches, with practical examples in the areas of brain health, well-being and social neuroscience. The course involves 2 modules, which include: Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience (physiological measures, brain stimulation, functional imaging and neuropsychological approach); Brain maturation; Processing emotional and social information: Theories of emotions, perceptions of emotions, fear conditioning and empathy; Healthy aging: changes in behavioral and neuroanatomical substrates.