Italian
- ITA 101: Beginner's Italian ITo 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.
- ITA 105: Intermediate ItalianItalian 105 is a one semester, intermediate language course, that focuses on oral and written communication, allowing students to build up their language proficiency from their previous knowledge of elementary Italian. The course content draws on different types of texts: visual, media, music, literature, and art. In addition, the course will develop the intercultural competency necessary to better understand Italian language and culture as a whole. At the end of ITA 105 students are ready to enroll in ITA 108.
- ITA 107: Advanced ItalianThis 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.
- ITA 108: Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and CultureThe 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.
- ITA 224: Italian Civilization through the Centuries: Identity Crisis from Dante to the PresentWhat does it mean to have a crisis? How do we overcome one? This course explores the idea of crisis as a defining feature of Italian culture and history from Dante to the present, spanning the individual, political, and society. Through the examination of the most relevant intellectual, historic, and artistic movements, we study how crises have lead both to some of Italy's most spectacular achievements, and to the rise and fall of Fascism. This will allow us to reflect on today's personal and global crises, such as the atrocities of war and climate change.
- ITA 303/MED 303: Dante's 'Inferno'Intensive study of the "Inferno", with major attention paid to poetic elements such as structure, allegory, narrative technique, and relation to earlier literature, principally the Latin classics. Course conducted in English in a highly-interactive format.
- ITA 314/COM 387: Risorgimento, Opera, FilmThis course will explore the ways in which national identity was imagined and implemented within Italian literature, culture, and cinema before, during, and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-XIX century. Examples are drawn from a wide range of literary, artistic and cultural media.
- ITA 320: Cybernetics, Literary Ghosts and the Italian Way"Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?" the Italian writer Italo Calvino asked in 1967, predicting that computers would write "literature." In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear "the voice of the machine." Thanks to ChatGPT, GPT3 and AI novels, non-fiction books, media, music and videos are composed through algorithms in a digital Renaissance. How do we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use algorithms or machine learning? Class will experiment with machine writing, its role on disinformation and the polarization of politics.