Covers the same material presented in Italian 100-200. One semester equivalent to the standard two-semester sequence. Daily meetings plus audio and video assignments.

See Elementary Italian (ITAL 0100) for course description.

Review of the fundamentals of grammar, with emphasis on speaking and writing. Reading of representative short stories. Weekly compositions, presentations, and a paper. Three Italian films. Prerequisite: ITAL 0100-0200, or ITAL 0110, or placement by examination. Requirement for enrollment in the Bologna Program.

Review of specific grammar problems. Reading of one novel and newspaper articles. Compositions and oral presentations. Three Italian films. Prerequisite: ITAL 0300, or placement by examination.

A sixth semester course with intensive practice in speaking and writing. Short stories, poems, music, and movies will be used to discuss Italian Society from the Second World War through the present. We will explore some important themes--family, religion, gender, and politics. Class discussion, compositions, oral presentations, and a final paper. Prerequisite: ITAL 0500, placement by examination.

Can an experimental approach enhance our critical-historical understanding of immersive experiences? We will look at the history of 3D vision from an interdisciplinary perspective combining the science of perception and the cultural history of technology. Through a series of collaborative activities and team experiments, we will learn how popular, pre-digital optical devices (such as camerae obscurae, magic lanterns, panoramas or stereoscopes) foreshadow contemporary VR, AR, or XR experiences designed for education and entertainment. Among the themes explored: virtual travel, social voyeurism and surveillance, utopian and dystopian imagination.

Starting from the recognition that human activity has indelibly altered the planet on a scale of geological epoch, constituting an existential crisis for all life forms, this course explores the theory and practice of cinema as artistic endeavor immersed in cultural discourse, human creativity, fossil fueled technology and its material carbon footprint. Contemporary Italian films will be addressed in the frame of eco criticism and feminism, sound ecology and affect theory. Through the work of major filmmakers (Michelangelo Antonioni, Matteo Garrone, Alice Rohrwacher) and transnational productions (the latest Disney Pixar’s Luca directed by Enrico Casarosa) we will query the crucial (direct and indirect) agency of filmmaking to create, critique, alter and foster imaginaries of new/old ways to inhabit the earth in the twenty-first century.

Primarily for students with no knowledge of Italian. Given in English. Concentrators in Italian should enroll in ITAL 1610; they are expected to read the material in the original. Close study and discussion of Dante's deployment of systems of retribution in the Inferno and rehabilitation in the Purgatorio with a view to imagining a society based on love and resistant to the effects of nascent capitalism and the money economy. Dante's work summarizes and transforms the entire ancient and medieval tradition of literature, philosophy, and science.

This course examines intersections of textual and visual representation in Boccaccio’s Decameron. A close reading of the text and its reception will enable us to explore how nascent artistic concerns like narrative realism and three-dimensional perspective emerged in conjunction with literary devices, forming new technologies of representation. Analyzing the text’s central questions concerning economic privilege, social hierarchy, and civic engagement, we will explore the role of literary representations of art and visual interpretations of the text in commenting on the nature of art and and in critiquing sociocultural conditions. Primary-source reading will be accompanied by selections from contemporary critical theory, manuscripts, cinematic adaptations, and digital media responses to covid-19.

This course explores the variety of Italian women’s histories, issues of gender and sexuality, and ingenious responses to circumvent the social, economic, religious, and political limitations placed upon them during the early modern period (1400-1800). Italian women produced some of the foundational texts of historical feminism, the intellectual and cultural movement that advanced the idea of equality across genders and the necessity of equal access to opportunity and education. This course surveys the alternatives proposed to the gender hierarchies of Italian society and will include selections from archival documents, letters, literature, treatises, and the visual arts. Course is taught in English.

The “mamma,” with her strong and inborn maternal instinct, is so deeply rooted in our collective imagination that it ended up being a cliché we cannot separate from the Italian cultural context. This course will explore the historical and theoretical complexities of such a commonplace by focusing on various figures of motherhood in literature, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and cinema. From the Virgin Mary to the surrogate mother in recent feminist debates, the course will inquire into the rhetorical strategies on which the myth of motherliness has been built.

Since the dawn of cinema, directing has been considered a predominantly male sphere. Italian cinema is certainly no exception: at the beginning of the twentieth century, directors such as Elvira Notari and Elvira Giallanella were considered anomalies. Only in recent decades has the presence of women become less rare, even though they remain a minority. Exploring the film corpus of various Italian directors (from the aforementioned Notari and Giallanella to Lina Wertmüller, Cecilia Mangini, Roberta Torre, all the way down to Emma Dante), the course will ask if there is such a thing as a female gaze, a specific way of looking at the world, at things, at people.

Close study of the third and final part of Divine Comedy, in which Dante unfolds how, in his view, the planetary and stellar spheres condition human life and fashion the Providential plan of history. There will be ancillary readings from Dante's other works: Convivio, the Monarchia, and the Epistles. In Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 0500 or 0600, or instructor permission. Enrollment limited to 40.

Undergraduate Independent Study supervised by a member of the Italian Studies Faculty. Students may pursue independent research in order to prepare for their honors thesis or honors multimedia project, or they may enroll in the course in order to work individually with a faculty member on a specific area of Italian Studies not covered in the current course offerings. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Special work or preparation of an honors thesis under the direction of a member of the staff. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Microhistory emerged in the 1970s in Italy, but was quickly embraced by scholars across the globe. Microhistory questioned totalizing explanations of historical change; rejected anachronism in all forms; and recovered the voices of individuals left out of traditional historical narratives. This course explores and critiques the method. Participants write an article in their area of interest, informed by microhistory. The course is taught in English.

The Italian Studies Colloquium is a forum for an exchange of ideas and work of the community of Italian scholars at Brown and invited outside scholars. Graduate students present their work in progress, and engage the work of faculty and visitors. They are expected to come prepared with informed questions on the topic presented. Presentations in both Italian and English. Instructor permission required.

For graduate students who have met the tuition requirement and are paying the registration fee to continue active enrollment while preparing for a preliminary examination.

Courses on special subjects individually planned and supervised. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.