Current Graduate Courses

2023-24 Course Offerings

ITA1000H (Fall/Winter biweekly) - Methodologies for the Teaching and Study of Italian / Staff

Students are introduced to basic reference materials necessary for research and will familiarize themselves with the Reference, Periodical Rooms, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. They will also study philological, computer-assisted and critical methods for the study of Italian literature and linguistics.

ITA1200H (Winter) - Dante / E. Brilli

An examination of Dante’s works and criticism on them.

ITA 1553H (Fall) Renaissance Crossroads: Tales of Exchange in Pre-modern Italy / L. Ingallinella

This course explores the culture of pre-modern Italy (1350-1600) from a global perspective. Focusing on a selected group of case studies, the course situates Renaissance Italy in the context of transregional patterns of contact, encounter, and exchange between different cultures. We will investigate how the development of networks of trade, religious proselitism, and colonization influenced premodern Italian culture. Students will learn how to unravel this influence by examining different cultural artifacts, from literature (short fiction, dramaturgy, and translation) to art, material culture, and documentary evidence. We will cover well-known authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto and Matteo Bandello, but also less-known yet culturally significant case studies. The course will also feature a digital humanities module in which we will work together on manuscript studies, textual editing, and geospatial analysis.

ITA1735HF (Winter) Il Gattopardo come romanzo del trauma (This course will be held from February 27th to April 4th for a total of 12 sessions) / M. Ganeri

A central figure in twentieth-century literature, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is one of the few Italian writers well-known beyond the national boundaries because of his world-famous novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). Through a detailed investigation of the novel and a glimpse into the rest of his literary and critical production, following Francesco Orlando’s psychoanalytic criticism, this course will explore the holes and the scars hidden in the deepest layers of writings, and it will connect them to the phenomenology of a secreted trauma. The course will also question many of the commonplaces still circulating in the current critical debate on the novel, and it will investigate its legacy in two preeminent Sicilian women writers: Maria Attanasio and Silvana La Spina. 

ITA1737HS/ITA425HS (Winter) Reading Black Italy / A. Pesarini

This course will explore texts of different genres produced by Italian authors of African descent including novels, essays, poetry, slam poetry, short stories, autobiographical writing. Topics will include issues of race, gender, identity, racism and anti-racism, colonialism, coming to age experiences, agency, and resistance. This course will follow the principles of a reading group in which students will have the opportunity to take part in collective readings, using the Italian original texts or the English translation, with further socio-cultural context provided in class. Students will be asked to lead class conversations, presentations and text analysis. On occasion, some of the authors will join the class and engage in Q&A and conversations. During the course, students will also be invited to explore forms of autobiographical/creative/fiction writing as forms of assignment.

ITA1755H (Winter) Italian Modernism / L. Somigli

The course will cover the culture of the period between Italian unification and the 1930s. It will consider the various responses to the process of modernization and the ensuing transformations in the traditional modes of production, circulation and reception of literature and art. Topics to be discussed include: the debate on the function of art and the artist; the formation of new literary genres and forms; the rise of mass culture; the historiographic accounts of the period. Readings will include works by Pascoli, D’Annunzio, Aleramo, Marinetti, Svevo, Bontempelli, as well as historical and theoretical studies of modernism. Students will conduct seminars on specific case studies of the theoretical issues raised in the course.

ITA 1830H (Fall) Editing 900: Leonardo Sciascia, his World, his Archive / E. Morra

This course aims to explore the work of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), among the most notable authors of 20th-century Italian literature, by intertwining literary studies and digital humanities. The theoretical component of the course will place Sciascia's oeuvre into its cultural context (from the crisis of the Christian Democracy to the Moro case, the Years of Lead and Sicilian Mafia), exploring the genesis of his books and Sciascia’s experiments with different literary genres. Moreover, it will include hands-on modules (including some online lectures by guest experts) on digital archives and scholarly editing, enabling students to experience the physical archive and learn the methods of "authorial philology”, i.e. scholarly editing of twentieth century authors. By exploring the unique resources offered by the Sciascia Archive Project, an archive preserved in the Department of Italian Studies, students will reflect on Sciascia’s reception in the Italian and North-American context.

ITA2041H: (Fall) (This course will be offered in English and will be held from September 7th to October 5th for a total of 9 sessions) / M. Zaccarello

Sketching a contrastive outline between Italian textual scholarship and the Anglo-American tradition, more attentive to printed transmission and book history, this course aims to highlight theoretical analogies and methodological contacts “across the Ocean” in the scholarly editing of early Italian texts, paying due attention to several aspects of their transmission and reception (palaeography, codicology, history of the book, reading practices), before and after the shift towards the digital production and circulation of texts in various forms.

2023-24 Timetable

Fall Term (September 2023 - December 2023)

~ All times stated in Eastern Time. ~

Winter Term (January 2023 - April 2023) (ITA Grad Winter courses are not yet open for registration)

~ All times stated in Eastern Time. ~