Exploring literary texts and films that foreground the benefits, but also the ordeals of transnational migration and the traffic in peoples, goods, and ideas throughout the Mediterranean region, with particular stress on contemporary works and issues. Particular attention will be paid to women's experience of the Mediterranean as a realm of adventure as well as the subjection imposed by patriarchal customs, war, and colonization.

The focus of this course will be on Italian women writers from the early 20th century to the present day. We will work with a mix of voices from the established canon, such as Grazia Deledda and Natalia Ginzburg, and those emerging in more recent years and who write from a culturally and linguistically hybrid perspective, such as Igiaba Scego and Ornella Vorpsi. Though the bulk of the translation will be out of Italian, we will also consider published English translations of these authors and revert them into Italian for the purpose of deepening the understanding of linguistic structures and more nuanced questions of translation.

Further study of Italian grammar and syntax with increased emphasis on vocabulary, reading, and practice in conversation. Skills in speaking and writing (as well as understanding) modern Italian will also be further developed. Students will deepen the study of grammatical functions through the analysis of Italian culture and civilization.

Italian 102-7 is an intensive double credit course designed to help students develop an active command of the language by improving upon the five skills of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural competency in the interpretative, interpersonal, and presentational modes. The course emphasizes communication and grammatical structures through use of various forms of texts (literary, artistic, musical, cinematographic, etc.) in order to refine students' literacy.

This course is an intensive beginning and intermediate language course that provides an introduction to the Italian language and culture. It covers the material presented in ITA 101 and ITA 102 and prepares students to enroll in ITA 107 or ITA 108. Activities and interactions provide the opportunity to develop intermediate speaking, listening, and writing skills using language of a concrete, conversational nature.

Working at the crossroads of American influences and the tradition of political songs, Italian cantautori merge popular appeal and literary sophistication. For at least three generations, their songs have provided an engaged soundtrack to Italy's turbulent social, political and cultural transformations in the post-WWII years. As lyrics on the page, as music to be listened to, and as performances recorded in video, Italian canzoni d'autore are part of Italian history and identity today.

This course covers the study of the entirety of Dante's "Commedia" in connection with Dante's other poetic and prose works in the vernacular. Highly interactive seminar, taught in Italian.

This course will introduce students to the basic trends and problems of Renaissance literature as the main source of our civilization. The major literary figures of the 16th-century Italian revival (such as Machiavelli, Leonardo, Galileo, Castiglione, Michelangelo, etc.) will be studied in relation to their time, the courts or the cities where they lived, and their seminal contributions to modern Europe culture including works of visual art, theater, and good living.

This course looks at the way Italy has expressed its historical, cultural, political, and social individuality in major cinematic works from the 1960's to the present. Directors such as Bertolucci, Tornatore, Benigni, Ozpetek, and Sorrentino offer a panorama of a generation of filmmakers that has contributed to the renewal of Italian cinema. Topics will be drawn from current issues, and will include the Holocaust and questions of memory, terrorism, political violence, migration, gender ideologies, the Mafia. Emphasis on film style and techniques.

What we do or do not eat and where we eat, are questions linked to anthropological and cultural matters. In a socio-political context, food, or the lack thereof, defines a society and its inadequacies. It becomes an agent of power, a metaphor for sex and gender, as well as a means of community. Whether as desire or transgression, whether corporal or spiritual - the representation of food is the depiction of Italian life. This course will examine translated Italian texts, along with visual art and film, in order to explore the function of eating, both as biological necessity as well as metaphor, within Italian society.