Spring 2027

A course about the meaning of time, not just as a measurement of change, but also as the social and intellectual prerequisite for knowledge, morality, and political action. With examples drawn mostly from Italian culture—readings include Machiavelli...

Current scholars in the field of Italian Studies present their books on literature, philosophy, art and architecture, music, history, politics, and the social sciences. Students also learn how to conduct video interviews and write book reviews.

In this seminar we will study representations of urban experience, and how the evolution of cities has been shaped by writing. Each week will pair literary and planning texts from the 1860s onward. We will discuss shared aspirations and tense relations...

This course introduces students to a range of analytical and theoretical approaches to “reading” fiction, poetry, film, and essays. We will pair critical writings and creative texts of importance to the Romance world to help students develop their own...

How do early modern texts, images, and maps contribute to — or resist — colonization and extractivism? How are notions of ’nature’ and the ‘wild’ or ’savage’ mobilised in justifying the exploitation of land and indigenous peoples, and what symbolic and...

Islands, because of their size, boundedness by the sea and supposed isolation, have served and continue to serve as laboratories for experiments including military, nuclear, touristic, scientific and ecological ones, as well as for forms of forced labor...

We will consider issues related to race, gender, class and ecology as well as aesthetics at the intersection of the written and visual by reading contemporary graphic novels, children’s books and films as both works of art and documentation. This course...

How do early modern French texts produce, reinforce, or destabilise binaries? This course explores how, in the period around the ‘fixing’ of the French language by the Académie française into the regulated forms we are familiar with today, grammatical and...

Los judíos de Sefarad alcanzaron cotas virtuosistas de creatividad cultural en todos los ámbitos de la vida intelectual en el Medioevo: unos logros recogidos en los archivos literarios del hebreo, el judeo-árabe, el arameo, e incluso en los vernáculos...