European Studies

This course is designed for international students to help them develop an understanding of a new cultural setting. It explores aspects of contemporary Britain (20-21st century) revealed in newspaper articles, films, songs, documentaries, and scholarly texts. In classes and through coursework, students analyze these texts, and they acquire and practice study strategies that enable effective independent learning in a UK higher education environment.

This course provides students with a clear idea of the diversity of European social policies, their political background, and allows for the assessment of their performance. The course also provides an in-depth account of current welfare reforms, in the perspective of their historical development. The social science analysis concepts (de-/re-commodification, path dependency, Varieties of Capitalisms) are used in order to understand the issues at stake in recent debates concerning the welfare state and the trajectories of their reforms.

This course explores the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of Spain during the 19th century, contextualizing the historical evolution that took place and shaped Spanish society during that period.

This course focuses on how Europe was defined through war, military occupations, civil conflicts, and peace agreements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on examples of various conflicts, students discuss several major questions: How did international and civil conflicts shape European culture and politics? Why was the 20th century so violent? How did Europe become divided into “right” and “left,” and “East” and “West”? How are these conflicts and political extremes remembered or forgotten today?

This course introduces its participants to mass media systems and structures in Germany and Europe and provides them with the analytical tools and background knowledge to assess the ways in which the mass media and politics interact and thus shape each other. The course begins with an overview of the different structures of mass media (public/private) in Germany and selected European countries, including how they have historically developed and particularly which political ideas have shaped the frameworks in which media institutions and individuals operate. At the same time, the course takes a critical look at how the media in turn have shaped and are still shaping the ways in which the political process works and presents itself to the public. Historical and current case-studies are utilized to analyze the manifold points of interaction between media and politics. At the end of the course, students also have the opportunity to compare European and American media politics and to ask whether there may be trends and influences across the Atlantic that are shaping today's politics and mass media on both sides.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 188A and Bologna course number 78696, is associated with the LM in Language, Society, and Communication degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 188B and Bologna course numbers 29886 and 81714, is associated with the LM in Modern, Post-Colonial and Comparative Literatures and the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programmes.
This course examines languages as cultural features linking the human communities to their territories, history, and geopolitical evolution, with a particular analysis of the changes occurred in the spatial dimension of languages, in connection to acculturation processes and to linguistic policies. In this respect, the course deals with the regional division of the European languages and with the EU language policy both in respect to minority languages and to the process of linguistic education of its citizens. The relationship between linguistic diversity and biological diversity is also explored with a geographical focus on the issue of language death. The course examines the relationship between space/place and language from different perspectives. At the beginning of the course, the students explore the field of cultural geography and its main themes, concepts, and keywords. After having explored the differences between linguistic geography and geographies of languages, the course focus on the second and using both theories and empirical cases, looks at the interconnections between culture, cultural geography, and language geography; language as cultural phenomenon; toponyms and culture; and semiotics of space. Moreover, the course observes how the relationship between geography and language expresses itself in different configurations of bodies and spaces: digital and media spaces, literary spaces, migratory fluxes, terrorism discourses and place-bound semiotics, tourism performance, and cultural and intercultural spaces.