All courses satisfy distribution requirements unless otherwise indicated.
Students contemplating a junior year in Italy should elect an Italian course in the first semester of their first year.
ITAL-101 Introduction to Italian Language and Culture I
A foundational course tailored for beginners, focusing on the study of vocabulary and grammar within the context of contemporary Italian culture. The curriculum features interactive class activities and discussions, enriched by daily speaking exercises, online activities and projects. By the end of the semester, students will achieve a novice-to-high level of proficiency in understanding, speaking, and writing the Italian language and culture through active engagement.
ITAL-102 Introduction to Italian Language and Culture I
A course tailored for beginners who are familiar with ITAL-101 materials, focusing on deepening their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar within the context of contemporary Italian culture. The course curriculum features interactive class activities and discussions, enriched by daily speaking exercises, online activities and projects. By the end of the semester, students will achieve a novice-high level of proficiency in understanding, speaking, and writing the Italian language and culture through active engagement.
ITAL-115 Conversation in Italian I
This 2-credit course will improve your conversational skills and your confidence and will help you communicate more effectively in Italian. The course will cover a range of topics, from college life, to culture, fashion, social media, the home, and family. Materials include podcasts, short readings, and videos.
ITAL-201 Preparation for Advanced Studies in Italian Language and Culture
Preparation for Advanced Studies in Italian Language and Culture is designed to improve communicative proficiency in both the Italian language and culture. The course focuses on five skills progressing from intermediate low to intermediate high: speaking, listening, reading, writing, and cultural understanding and comparison. Through non-stereotypical cultural topics, interactive teaching methods, multimedia resources, and engaging projects students will consolidate their linguistic and cultural knowledge to progress for advanced studies in Italian.
ITAL-209 Italian Media and Culture
Italian Media and Culture is a course tailored for intermediate students. In this course, we focus on deepening our knowledge of contemporary Italian culture through original readings, media (podcasts and pop music), and current news. By the end of the semester students will have a high-intermediate/advanced knowledge of Italian.
ITAL-215 Conversation in Italian
This two-credit course will improve students' conversational skills and confidence and will help students communicate more effectively at an intermediate level in Italian. The course will cover a range of topics, from politics, to the professional world, to the environment, to college life, social media, and the arts. Materials include podcasts, short readings, and videos.
ITAL-221 Advanced Studies in Italian Culture and Literature
ITAL-221DM Advanced Studies in Italian Culture and Literature: 'Dante's Inferno Between Myth and History'
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is one of world literature's foundational works. In his 700-hundred years old masterpiece, Dante poses and confronts universal questions that are still at the core of our daily existence: God, love, ethics, gender relationships, politics, social harmony, literature, the afterlife, and the relations between human and nonhuman forms of life. In this course, we will read, analyze, discuss, and enjoy Dante's great poem by focusing on the first of its three parts, the Inferno. In particular, we will be covering Dante's take on mythology and history.
ITAL-221FC Advanced Studies in Italian Culture and Literature: 'Italian Food Culture'
This course explores food culture in Italian family and society. Food is essential for Italian culture, and the food industry is an important part of the Italian economy. We are going to explore and analyze the strong relationship between food, culture and business in modern Italian society, with examples ranging from Carlo Petrini's Slow Food movement, Eataly, food in ancient Roman times, food as autobiography, food in art, and the coffee revolution. We will read and discuss literary and historical texts, films, and cookbooks.
ITAL-295 Independent Study
ITAL-306 All in the Family
Starting with Ancient Rome, familial ties always played a strong role in Italian society. This course examines the concept of family through the centuries and through cultural, literary and historical changes. We will cover the Roman family, the idea of family in the Risorgimento, the Fascist family, the modern and post-modern family, Michela Murgia's idea of queer family, and more. Authors and directors include Murgia, Boccaccio, Goldoni, Manzoni, De Filippo, Franchi, Sfinge, Saraceno, Visconti, Scola.
ITAL-311 Advanced Topics in Italian
ITAL-311FA Advanced Topics in Italian: 'Fascism'
This course explores aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century culture in relation to Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship. From Italian Futurism and imperialism, to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's historic political victory, we will follow the development of fascism and neo-fascism and discuss literary trends, architecture, activism and visual arts with some of the authors who lived through it.
ITAL-311MA Advanced Topics in Italian: 'The Era of Machiavelli: Politics, Anxiety, and Dissimulation in the Italian Renaissance'
Often described as spaces that offered a safe harbor for generations of poets, artists, and intellectuals, Italian Renaissance courts were also a space of uncertainty and dissimulation, a political environment dominated by rules, a reality in which instability and manipulation were commonplace. Through the reading of works by Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione, three protagonists in the history of Italian literature between the end of the 15th and the first quarter of the 16th centuries, we will consider and analyze the Italian Renaissance not only as the cradle of extraordinary artistic, poetic, social, intellectual, economic, and geographic achievements, but also as a time in which the relationship between literature and structures of power reaches a crucial inflection point.
ITAL-341 Italian Topics Taught in English
ITAL-341ST Italian Topics Taught in English: 'The Italian Stage: Commedia dell'Arte, Social Mobility, Politics'
This course explores Italian theatre from the Commedia dell'Arte to Pirandello with particular attention to social mobility, politics, and class conflict. Authors include classics such as Isabella Andreini, Carlo Goldoni and Luigi Pirandello.
ITAL-361 Seminar in Romance Languages and Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar will focus on a comparative study of Romance languages or literatures. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Seminar discussions will be conducted in English, but students wishing to obtain language credit are expected to read works in at least one original language. Papers will be written in either English or the Romance language of the student's choice.
ITAL-361AV Seminar in Romance Languages and Cultures: 'About Vanguards and Revolutionary Ideas'
This course addresses cultural relations between Latin America and Romance languages and cultures through the concept of vanguard: the Latin American poetic vanguardias of the early twentieth century and controversies with the Italian and Spanish vanguardias; the influence of the Négritude anti-colonial movement in Latin American decolonial thinking and the political avant-garde movements and guerrillas of the '60s and '70s; the intersections between French surrealism and Latin American magic realism; and the emergence of the Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema (the vanguard of political cinema in Latin America) in the context of Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague.
ITAL-361LT Seminar in Romance Languages and Cultures: 'Romance Languages Translate'
This seminar explores Romance languages, literatures and cultures through the prism of translation. By comparing translations from Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian between each other and into English, we will map out the boundaries, intersections and middle grounds of this language family. Students will engage with the different traditions of translation studies in these languages and critically analyze translators' paratexts. Selecting an individual translation project in a Romance language of their choice, through a process of revision and collaboration, each student will produce both a polished translation and a commentary explaining challenges and choices.
ITAL-361MT Seminar in Romance Languages and Cultures: 'The Mind of the Traveler: Journeys, Expeditions, Tours'
Travel literature has always been a precious source for the study of culture, politics, arts, and last but not least, people. From Tacitus to Marco Polo, from Stendhal to Camilo Jose Cela, we will read and discuss authors who traveled for political, personal, and recreational reasons. We will also pay special attention to tales of emigration and immigration in the third millennium.
ITAL-395 Independent Study
