Women’s & Gender Studies

This course critically examines the production of masculinities in the contemporary world, with a historical perspective situated in the West and Latin America; as well as from the individual and collective experiences of each student.

This course analyzes the place of gender in world politics. It introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of gender in international relations, and reviews different fields of research, focusing on security studies, with cutting-edge literature. The course examines how both the practice of international politics and the academic discipline are gendered. It takes its starting point by reflecting on international relations theory to understand why the mainstream of international relations has traditionally had difficulties in engaging with feminist critiques. It looks at the early feminist debates and turns to themes of international relations such as war, conflict, militarism, and security through a gender perspective. It analyzes the role of bodies in international relations and their complex intersecting identities to understand how gender is intertwined with categories such as race, class, and sexuality. The question of how these complex identities give subjects possibility for agency runs throughout the modules. The course emphasizes how gender, security, and politics are discursively constructed through both language and images. To shed light on these discursive constructions, the course conducts several case studies.

This course concerns the status, roles, and representation of women in medieval Irish and Welsh society. The student is introduced to primary material which can inform us about the socio-legal position of women in these societies as contrasted with that of men, including legal tracts, literary texts, historical texts and didactic writings, the originals of which were written in Irish, Welsh, and Latin (but read in English translation). The importance of marriage and other kinds of union in the lives of women is examined, and the impact these unions had on women’s social status will be assessed. Various literary texts are read, with a view to considering how femininities and masculinities are constructed in them, and the characters of prominent literary women are examined and analyzed. The question of women’s agency in society, especially in the area of learning, as well as the factors that wrought change on women’s social position, is also addressed.

This course critically examines the topic of gender violence including historical dimensions, how and why it happens, and the diversity of social and institutional responses that have sought and seek to eradicate it. 

How can we understand the relationship between gender and environment? And what can feminist thinking contribute to debates on the current ecological crisis and the needed sustainability transition? Drawing on feminist and gender scholarship the course introduces students to key theories and debates including ecofeminism and feminist political ecology. Over the course of the seminar we look at early critiques of the women-environment nexus to more recent debates on care politics or posthumanism. Through diverse empirical examples of topics such as agri-food regimes, climate change, natural resources and environmental activism this course addresses the gender dimensions of environmental issues.

This seminar is designed to offer students a first insight into the broad range of writings during the Romantic period. It explores a number of the many authors, genres, and thematic facets of the Romantic period, from responses to the French revolution in essays, poetry, and fiction to programmatic turns towards a new kind of poetry, issues of Romantic nature writing, and the Romantic imagination (also in the visual arts). Travel narratives, the concern with science, and finally the socioeconomic contexts of publishing is also addressed. Thus, the literary versatility and (cultural) politics marking the Romantic period comes to the fore within their broader contexts; almost inevitably, gender as a critical category plays a key role.

This course develops an intersectional understanding of gender and media research, examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Interrogating a broad range of media forms, it introduces key concepts within gender and media scholarship and equips students with the theoretical and methodological tools for undertaking independent research projects. Responding to key debates and events in current popular media culture, topics can include the shifting constructions of femininity, masculinity, transgender, and LGBTIQ+ subjectivities; feminist approaches to media production; industry appropriations of empowerment ideals and "woke capitalism"; and emerging trends of celebrity feminisms. 

This course explores feminist and queer methodologies, which have been attracting attention in the social sciences in recent years. This course is divided into the following four sections to understand the distinct but overlapping nature of feminist and queer methodologies: (1) feminist epistemology/methodology; (2) qualitative and quantitative feminist methods; (3) queer epistemology/methodology, and (4) qualitative and quantitative queer methods. Given the instructor’s expertise, a substantial amount of class time will be spent on queer quantitative sociology (queer demography). Through this course, students will learn that any social research method can be used from a feminist and queer perspective and articulate the interrelationship between theory, methods, and practice. 

The course is dedicated to the comparison with current themes of the history of women, such as: participation in political and social life, inclusion and exclusion, the role of women in the family, education, and violence against women. Group work and group readings are planned in class to debate different viewpoints. The course investigates the history of women as a fundamental aspect of Ancient History, with special reference to the roman period, with the awareness of the specificities of the female condition in each period and of the transformations carried out over the period under consideration. Issues connected with ancient source analysis do not require knowledge of Greek and Latin, since a translation in Italian is always be provided. A basic knowledge of classical languages is however recommended. The course discusses topics including: gender history and some of the main aspects relevant for classical studies: work, culture, religion, and marriage; the condition of women from the Roman Republic to the Early Imperial period; the legal status of women; women's wealth; the (public?) space of women in roman imperial courts; stereotypes in womens’ stories: the need to identify interpretative categories, structures, and models through the analysis of historical and historiographical sources; inclusion and exclusion: women and work, case study: work at home, work outside; and case studies: women, body and sex, and abortion and the violence on women (from Lucrezia to Metoo).

Through the lens of gender and sexuality, this course analyzes how knowledge, history, policies, and norms are produced, configured, mediated, and governed. It examines some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives of studies on women, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, this course discusses a set of thematic areas that hold an enduring, if shifting, place within the field as a whole and that are also key to the regulation and transgression of gender, sexuality, and intersecting axes of difference.