This class is about happiness in its many fortunate forms, powerful paradigms, and dizzying (dis)illusions. We will take a comparative approach, focusing especially on texts across the Italian, European, and American literary and critical traditions. The course will cover a wide historical range, with works drawn from Mediterranean antiquity, the medieval and early modern periods, and contemporary literature and philosophy. The course’s principal themes trace how happiness and humor function as means of survival, healing, and medicine; how journeys of the self—physical, psychological, and emotional—chart the course of a happy life; and how compromises between the individual and the community—made in the service of solidarity and the public good—speak to matters of cooperation, cohabitation, and the environment. Our texts will ask us to think primarily about what the nature, path, and goal of “being happy” is. Readings will include works by Epicurus, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Miguel de Cervantes, Angela Davis, Betty Friedman, Francesco Petrarca, Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf, and Giovanni Verga.

What does power do with “difference”? How does history remember “Otherness”? And what happens when cultures attempt to interpret one another? This course ventures into the Renaissance world (ca. 1300–1700) to interrogate these and other related questions. We will study how Renaissance thinkers, travelers, and translators came to know and represent the world around them in texts, images, maps, and objects. We will trace the long history of how figures in positions of power utilize and (more importantly) abuse the social, political, and economic constructs underlying perceived racial difference. Our author-guides vary from merchants, pilgrims, and enslaved peoples, to conquistadores, diplomats, and nun-philosophers, whose itineraries and imaginations stretched the far corners of the globe. The histories of expansionism, colonization, capitalism, and slavery will inform our readings and visual analysis of the relationship between forms of power and methods of influence. How have definitions of “race” and “power” evolved over the centuries? What categories of human diversity did institutions invent to sustain certain political practices and spiritual beliefs? How do voices of resistance from the past resound in acts of solidarity in today’s present? Readings will include works by al-Hasan al-Wazzan, Thomas Clarkson, Cristoforo Colombo, Hernán Cortés, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Olaudah Equiano, Bartolomé de las Casas, Michel de Montaigne, Antonio Pigafetta, Marco Polo, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Amerigo Vespucci, and others

Course Description: We often think of visual perception as a basic lower-order psychological process. Social cognition – or perceiving and understanding social and emotional information – is considered a more advanced form of higher-level cognition in humans. In this course we will explore how socio-cultural norms, values and beliefs about gender influence how we see the faces, bodies and emotions of others, as well as how our “gazing” itself proscribes and polices the faces, bodies and emotions of the genders. The course will examine basic theories of facial and bodily expression and embodiment, rooted in Darwin’s observations, theories about the gaze and “ways of seeing,' as well as contemporary psychological scientific and philosophical works on person versus object perception and objectification. We will explore how the art of the Renaissance both reflected and instantiated gendered conceptions associating women with nature, and men with technology and mastery, as well as the feminization of beauty. The art of the Uffizi and other galleries in Florence, Italy will serve as a lab all around us, and students will apply our readings to studies of these works.

This course will address a seemingly simple question: who is (can be) Italian? Students will investigate the historical, political, and economic origins of italianità [Italianness]. We will query the current-day representations of Italian as a racialized identity which manifests in immigration policies, citizenship laws, and cultural notions of belonging. The course will conclude with the question of how Black Italians claim space and provide positive representation for themselves via literature, film, rap and hip-hop music, and social media platforms, asserting a pluricultural and multiethnic Italy.

What is the origin of the mafia? How do Italians and Americans represent the mafia and its relationship to culture? This course will examine films from Italy and some from America in an attempt to explore the complex and embedded nature of the mafia. This course will go far beyond stereotypes to examine the deep-rooted nature of the piovra, or octopus, as the mafia is called. The course will take a broad view of the history of the representation of the mafia in film and focus on close analyses of films that engage the mafia in different ways.

Using late medieval, Renaissance, and modern Italy as cases, the course explores the interactions of power and art. It examines how images, structures, and urban design reflect structures of power, and how the powerful deploy art and architecture as instruments of control. The course focuses on Florence, with additional trips to Siena, Rome, and Venice. On-site visits supplement reading, discussions, and writing assignments.

Black Italian Cinema and Digital Performance is an introduction to issues of culture, “race,” identity, and citizenship in contemporary Italy drawing from documentary, film, and the new arena of the social media. An entire generation of Black Italians, in particular artists, entrepreneurs, bloggers (especially Millennials), have been affirming themselves in Italian culture and society, gaining progressively more visibility starting in the 1990s, thus entering the spotlight of the Global Black Diaspora. In this course we will ask questions such as: Which themes are most discussed among Black Italians? Which art forms do they cite and refer to? In which ways and through which channels do Black Italians engage with the Global Black Diaspora? How is this generation seeking to be included in the history and socio-economic system of a country that still refuses citizenship to children born on the Italian soil? What kind of cultural and artistic production has been emerging from “the new Italians”? Together with film-maker and activist Fred Kuwornu, we will explore his own work, and that of emerging artists such as Antonio Dikele Distefano, Ghali, and web-based projects such as “Afroitalian Souls.”

Food can be used as metaphor, as political and economical tool, as a way to assert dominance and power - and as all of the above combined. Developing a palate for a certain type of food is also intensely affected by cultural, geographical, and socio-economical reasons. Why is it almost impossible to mention Italian culture without referring to its rich gastronomical tradition? Why has Italy such a great regional diversity in recipes, staple foods, and even eating habits? What it the significance of specific food representations in art, literature, and film? And what is 'Slow Food'? In this course we will explore a broad history of Italian food in its European context, while also researching (and tasting!) local case-studies in two Italian regions. No pre-requisites, no knowledge of Italian language required (although at least one block of Italian language is warmly suggested).

“Cinecitta’, The Italian Hollywood” will serve as an introduction to the panorama of Italian cinema from the post-World War II period until the present day. Students will view and discuss masterpieces of modern Italian film, become familiar with the exemplary directors and artists of that era, and identify the distinguishing characteristics of notable cinematic movements and genres, including: il neorealismo, la commedia all’italiana, drama, lo spaghetti western, coming-of-age narratives, and socially and politically engaged works. Additionally, students will have direct encounters with the spaces and places where Italian cinema was born and continues to be created to this day, visit the premier cinematography school in Italy, learn the importance and the process of film archiving in both Rome and Bologna, and view restored films during the Cinema Ritrovato Festival. Lastly, students will attend screenings of classic films and newly released international works in the Sotto le Stelle del Cinema [Under the Stars of Cinema] Festival in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna which are introduced by the directors, cinema stars, and/or film scholars.