Monsters, imagined as occupying the margins of reality and patrolling its borders, teach us about the cultures that engendered them. This seminar investigates the kinds of monsters represented in premodern art and literature and asks what these texts and objects do, how they work, and what relationships they generate with their readers and beholder. It considers how different societies aligned monstrosity with excessive creatures, unwanted persons, and aberrant behaviors to establish order: natural, social, religious and political. By examining the historical formation of cultural categories, it probes the mechanisms that define otherness.

To develop the skills of speaking, understanding, reading and writing Italian. The main emphasis is on oral drill and conversation in the classroom. Aspects of Italian culture and civilization are integrated in the course. The Italian Language Program uses a new digital portfolio that serves as students' textbook. Through this medium, students are exposed to a more dynamic mode of language acquisition.

Italian 105 provides the opportunity to further develop Italian language proficiency in all three modes of communication: Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational. Students will interact with various types of texts (literature, film, visual culture, music, interviews, etc.) and will develop the intercultural competency necessary to better understand and embrace Italian language and culture as a whole. At the end of ITA 105 students are ready to enroll in ITA 108.

This course analyzes Italian culture and cultural changes through products such as newspaper articles, essays, comic books, music, film, food, and visual artifacts in connection with Italian history and society. Italian 107 is intended to provide students with tools for communicating effectively in Italian in an informal and formal context, to move students along the proficiency spectrum toward a more advanced language level, and to promote a global awareness and cross-cultural understanding of contemporary Italian life and culture. Classes are conducted entirely in Italian.

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

This course is designed to give an overview of pivotal moments in Italian culture, such as the relationship between Church and Empire in the Middle Ages, Machiavelli's political theory during the Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Fascism in the 20th century. Through the examination of the most relevant intellectual, historic, and artistic movements and their main geographical venues, students will be able to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the development of Italian history and civilization.

Conceived in the aftermath of the plague of 1348 and as a response to the devastation it produced, Boccaccio's "Decameron" is a complex set of interconnected stories, linked by the author's convictions about literature and the role it plays in a community. Our reading of selected novellas in the original language will offer a point of entry into several traditions in Italian and European culture and an opportunity to reflect critically on the present.

The course's goal is to analyze the Modern movement in Italian fiction from 1900 to the present, particularly as it reflects various responses to social, political and cultural problems of the period. The following topics will be examined: Fascism in literature; literature of neo-realism and its relation with films, and neo-capitalism; the protest movement of the 1960s and '70s, and the new outlook for the '80s, '90s, and beyond.