Language Courses

If you have previously studied Italian, we recommend you take the CAS Placement Exam prior to beginning your Italian Language studies at NYU. Please see here to learn more about our language courses and sequence.

Content Courses

See below for additional detail. Most courses can count toward the "Culture & Society" component of the Italian Studies and Romance Language major and minor tracks.

ITAL-UA 130 The Italian Renaissance: A New Reading

ITAL-UA 147 Machiavelli

ITAL-UA 172.004 Portraits of Women: From 19th to 20th Century

ITAL-UA 260 Language, Culture, and Identity in Italy

ITAL-UA 270 Dante's Divine Comedy

ITAL-UA 285.001 Narrating the Mediterranean

CORE-UA 760 Fascism, Ant-Fascism & Modern Culture

FRSEM-UA 603 Hoarding Before Hoarders

ITAL-UA 999 Senior Honors Seminar

 

 

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

ITAL-UA 130 The Italian Renaissance: A New Reading

Tuesdays/Thursdays 11:00-12:15; Virginia Cox

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as HIST-UA 281.0001 & ENGL-UA 252.007. Previously ITAL-UA 172.003

The period or movement commonly referred to as the Renaissance remains one of the great iconic moments of Western history: a time of remarkable innovation within artistic and intellectual culture. Italy was the original heartland of the Renaissance, and home to some of its most powerful and enduring figures, such as Leonardo and Michelangelo in art, Petrarch and Ariosto in literature, Machiavelli in political thought. The Italian Renaissance: A New Reading provides an overview of Italian Renaissance culture, examining not only literary, artistic, and intellectual history, but also material culture, cartography, science, technology, and history of food and fashion. It reflects recent trends in scholarship in investigating the extent to which “Renaissance” ideas and cultural trends became diffused beyond the social elites to a wider public, and the extent to which women participated in literary and artistic culture alongside men.

 

ITAL-UA 147 Machiavelli

Same as HIST-UA 123.001, MEDI-UA 147.001

Tuesdays/Thursdays 2:00-3:15; Stefano Albertini

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Auditorium

The inventor of modern political science, Niccolo Machiavelli is one of the most original thinkers in the history of Western civilization. In this course, Machiavelli’s political, historical, and theatrical works are read in the context in which they were conceived the much tormented and exciting Florence of the 15th and early 16th centuries struggling between republican rule and the magnificent tyranny of the Medici family. The course also aims at dismantling the myth of evilness that has surrounded Machiavelli through the centuries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, through a close reading of such masterpieces as The Prince, The Discourses, and The Mandrake Root.

 

 

 ITAL-UA 172.004 Portraits of Women: From 19th to 20th Century

Mondays/Wednesdays 12:30-1:45; Elena Ducci

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Room 306

Same as EURO-UA 173

The goal of this class is promoting the understanding of a crucial aspect of Italian culture and life: the role of women in Italian society and culture, viewed as agency by women and as representation in literature and art. This perspective, from Sibilla Aleramo to Elena Ferrante, will be illustrated through the close analysis of texts,  mostly from literature but also from other media, like journalism or political writing, and of visual artifacts such as film, painting and photograph. At the same time the class will help students build skills in spoken Italian through a constant interaction and discussion. The instruction will be in accessible Italian and all concepts and critical ideas will be explained and made accessible, by using a clear language and by providing original texts with Englsh translation. The secondary readings will be mostly in English.

The class is particularly suitable for majors or minors in Italian, but it is also open to students with some prior knowledge of Italian.

**Note: This course fulfills the same requirements as ITAL-115 Readings in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

 

ITAL-UA 270.001 Dante’s Divine Comedy

Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:45; Alison Cornish

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Auditorium

Same as COLIT-UA 270, ENGL-UA 142.001, MEDI-UA 271.001

This course is dedicated to a one-semester guided reading of the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The text will be read in facing-page translation for the benefit of those who know some Italian and those who do not. Lectures and discussion are in English. Students will learn about the historical, philosophical, and literary context of the poem as well as how to make sense of it in modern terms. Evaluation will be by means of bluebook midterm and final, testing knowledge of key terms, concepts, and passages, two short papers, and active participation in lectures and discussion.

 

ITAL-UA 260 Language, Culture, and Identity in Italy

Tuesdays 12:30-1:45; Nicola Cipani

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

*Recently added due to popular demand*

Same as LING-UA 32

What we call the Italian language today is only one variant among many languages spoken within the peninsula. Local dialects continue to have a significant cultural role in literature, music and cinema. Moreover, because of the recent increase in immigration, there is now a significant number of speakers of other languages living in Italy. An awareness of this linguistic diversity is essential to communicate effectively. This course is intended to introduce students to the linguistic history of Italy and the key socio-linguistic notions that account for language use today. As such, the course is an ideal complement to the study of Italian as second language.

 

ITAL-285.001 Narrating the Mediterranean

Monday/Wednesdays 12:30-1:45; Amara Lakhous

25W4_C-18

Same as EURO-UA 200.001, HIST-UA 123.002, MEIS-UA 660.001

The Mediterranean has become a place of death and violence, in short an open cemetery. We will explore different narratives of the Mediterranean by using movies, documentaries, novels and articles.

 

CORE-UA 760 Fascism, Ant-Fascism & Modern Culture

Tuesdays/Thursdays 11:00-12:15; Ara Merjian

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Auditorium

The terms “fascism” and “culture” frequently resonate as opposites. We think immediately of sterile, bunker-like architecture, book burnings, and reactionary archaisms. Much fascist culture certainly entailed these. Yet we ignore the centrality of advanced culture to fascist ideas – both in the early twentieth century and beyond – at our own peril. This course examines the nuances of that centrality, through particular instances in historical context: Mussolini’s Italy (home of the first fascist revolution and regime), Nazi Germany, Popular Front and Vichy France, and international anti-fascist activity up through World War Two. In particular, we will look at Paris’s 1937 Exposition Internationale as a site where these competing cultural ideologies first clashed on a world stage and in aesthetic form. The Exposition forms a kind of laboratory and concentration of these various political phenomena and their respective aesthetic arsenals.

Through the lens of particular cases we will tackle various questions: May we speak of a general fascist theory of culture and representation? How did fascist governments use aesthetics to respond to modernity, or to create a modernism of their own? Was the concept of an avant-garde alien to fascist culture, or useful to it? To what extent was there a movement of international anti-fascist resistance? How did it play out in art, architecture, or literature? May we even speak of a clean, absolute break between an aesthetics of fascism and that of anti-fascism? Did fascism die with World War Two? If not, how (and where) does it live on? What do we mean by the term “fascist” in contemporary culture and society? 

We will begin by addressing the history and theory of fascism. We will then examine specific case studies: Italian Futurist art and literature and its relationship to the founding of Fascism; the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome; National Socialist (Nazi) aesthetic policy, Nuremberg rallies, and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935); John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages; Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 Exposition Internationale; the 1937 Degenerate ‘Art’ Exhibition in Germany; and revivals of anti-fascist rhetoric and protest in the events of 1968 in the US and abroad. In the context of neo-fascist resurgence, we will also consider more recent manifestations of fascism in cultural discourse, from Timus Vermes’ compelling book Look Who’s Back (2012), to the nationalist populism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

This course is taught in English, and also satisfies the Culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.

 

FRSEM-UA 603 Hoarding Before Hoarders

Mondays 2:00-4:30; Rebecca Falkoff

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Rm 125

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen an overwhelming cultural interest in people who accumulate things. Hoarding is the subject of medical research, as well as documentary and narrative films, novels and memoirs, theater, painting, photography, and television episodes and series—including A&E’s ‘megahit,’ Hoarders. This seminar is guided by the questions “Why hoarding?” and “Why now?” We will address these questions by studying the contemporary hoarder within a broader literary and cultural context that encompasses fetishists, collectors, misers, rag pickers, gleaners, and other figures defined (and pathologized) by their attachments to things.

Note: This is a FRESHMAN Seminar.

 

ITAL-UA 999 Senior Honors Seminar

Wednesday 9:30-12:15; Ara Merjian

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as GERM-UA 999.001, HEL-UA 999.001, MEDI-UA 999.001, MEIS-UA 720.0001, FREN-UA 886.001

This collective, interdepartmental course lends practical, methodological, and strategic support to the writing of the Senior Honors Thesis.  We will read theoretical works on the process of research and the craft of academic writing, as well as short scholarly texts, upon which we will exercise our own critical readings and analyses.

Department permission is required to register. Email Elisa Fox (elisa.fox@nyu.edu) to enroll.