European Studies

This course introduces the language, culture, and society of Catalonia and builds basic linguistic and cultural competence. It offers practical notions of the Catalan language, as well as general information about the culture and society: traditional festivals of Catalonia, customs, and distinctive characteristics of this autonomous community, which has its own language and culture.

This course focuses on the history of Central and Eastern Europe during the mid-15th to mid-17th centuries. Topics include the Holy Roman Empire, The Ottoman Empire, the protestant reformation, Scandinavia, and Russia at this time. Furthermore, it explores the complex relations between these states after the Middle Ages and the creations of the states that would continue into the contemporary era.

Set as a new objective of the European Union (EU) by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) has since proven to be one of the most dynamic EU policy-making domains. It now encompasses key individual policies addressing fundamental concerns of European citizens: police cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters, border management, visa and asylum policies etc. This course analyzes the progressive development of the AFSJ by providing insights on three main considerations: who are the individual and collective actors contributing to that policy domain; which theories and concepts help us to understand the creation and evolutions of the AFSJ; and what are the key reforms, debates, and controversies of the individual AFSJ policies. 

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe brought democracy to the region for the first time in over forty years. Academics now had a new wave of democratization and intense political change to study. This provided scholars with an almost unique opportunity to apply existing methods of political analysis to newly established democratic states. Even so, no country can escape its past and previous experience and structures can continue to exert an influence long after they have been officially swept away. Now, after more than two decades of democratic rule in the region institutions and practices have been established and are ripe for study. What can existing theories of party development, electoral behavior and executive-legislative relations tell us about politics in Central and Eastern Europe? Have the specific democratic trajectories of countries in the region generated new or modified theories for political science? Are there similarities in comparative political developments across the region that lead us to believe there is a peculiarly "Central and East European political science"?

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course will help students to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to present, with a focus on painting. The course discusses the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and analyzes critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts. In addition to the interactions between literature and the arts, the module introduces students to the following themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and the visual arts; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the "visual turn" and the “pictorial turn;” and 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into the intermedial influence of the visual arts (painting, illustration, and photography) and the reflection on the gaze in some works by Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati in the last decades of the 20th century.

The Nordic countries have often been regarded as model societies, famous for their high levels of economic prosperity, social equality, and political stability. Students discuss the historical roots of this distinctive Nordic experience and how it has changed since the end of the Cold War, as the Nordic countries have needed to adopt to new regional, Europewide, and global developments. The historical introduction is followed by a thematic examination of contemporary Nordic societies in a comparative perspective, looking at the varied legacies of the Nordic model. Topics include Nordic foreign and security policy, domestic politics and the rise of the populist right, immigration and integration, crime and justice, gender equality, environmentalism and Nordic co-operation. It should be noted that a focus on the Nordic countries also provides a new perspective on some of the most important developments affecting the whole of Europe over the last 30 years. 

This course gives insight into the making of European policies and their consequences for its citizens. The course uses both a bottom-up and a top-down perspective and focuses on the forces that speed up or slow down European integration, the formal and informal procedures by which European policy is made, and the effects of European decision-making for politics, society, and citizens. The course uses theoretical perspectives from public administration and political science. The knowledge gained from these insights is assessed using a written exam. Special attention is paid to: Brexit; the role of the EU in the financial crisis; the role of the EU in the refugee crisis; euroscepsis; enlargement of the EU and its consequences; what are the formal and informal venues for lobbying? What is the most effective strategy to influence decision-making on this issue? theoretical and practical insights will come together in a paper that you write on a case of lobbying in Europe; a case selected by yourself by either a civil society actor or governmental actor. Questions addressed in the paper include: how does EU decision-making work in this issue area and what is a realistic lobby strategy?

This course provides an exploration of the relationship to Eastern European Jewishness, both secular and religious, from the end of the 18th century to the present, marked by profound social, economic, political, and cultural transformations. The complex relationship between all of them reflects on the evolutions of Jewish singularity, paradigmatic to other minorities. This interdisciplinary course introduces a modern encounter between Jews, societies, and States, both in culture and politics, including the consequences of the Holocaust and its legacy in the present. It offers a precious key to understand the diversity of contemporary debates on singular versus universal rights, traditions versus modernity, rural versus urban cultures, religiousness versus secularity and beyond that, the condition of modernity in Europe. Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel Prize-winning book, THE BOOKS OF JACOB, is the focus of reflective, historical, and creative work throughout this course. The creative cartographies produced are presented to and potentially commented on by the author.

This course provides a conceptual and historical approach of nations, states, and nationalism in Europe from the late 19th century to the present. It examines the transnational dimension of European political frameworks and considers current political issues in the light of European history. The course fosters analytical distance and questions the nation-centered view of the world, familiarizes with the academic debates on nation-building and nationalism, and examines the historical processes and steps that have led to the success of the national category.

This course studies European democratic developments in the twentieth century by considering the fluctuating nature of democracy as a fundamentally historical phenomenon, whose reputation has been judged in changing ways over time. It develops a historically grounded and argued understanding of the question of changes in democracy.