Spring 2025 Courses available to graduate students in the Italian Studies concentration.
ITAL 2300 Section S01, CRN 28154. Seminar in Italian Literature, Culture, and Criticism (Taught in Italian). Thinking Life: Italian Theory and Feminism. The notion of life is pivotal in Italian Theory, which one of its most prominent representatives, the philosopher Roberto Esposito, describes as a “living thought.”This course will provide an introduction to the fundamental texts of Italian biopolitical thought (Agamben, Negri, Esposito) and confront them with a feminist tradition (Cavarero, Braidotti, Putino, Federici) that contributes an alternative conception of life to the philosophical debate. .
ITAL 2550 Section S01, CRN 26273. Gender Matters. This course examines the impact of gender as a category of analysis, focusing upon its varied repercussions on the study of history, with Italian history serving as one field of focus. Participants interested in other geographical, chronological, and disciplinary areas will have ample time to purse their interests. The study of gender has profoundly shaped the practice of history in the last half century, and the course outlines its impact and its transformations. The course places in conversation diverse but overlapping historical developments: the impact of the study of gender on history; influences from beyond history that have shared or shaped historians’ approach to gender and sexuality; the particular inflections of the study of gender in the case of Italy (1400-1800); the impact of the turn to the study of sexuality and queer studies. The course explores and critiques the limits of our gender constructs (theoretical, methodological, and modern) for explaining the culture of people in the premodern world and beyond the western hemisphere, fields of scholarship where the universality of contemporary notions of gender have been challenged. In English.
ITAL 2820 Section S01, CRN 26275. Italian Studies Colloquium. 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.