11 courses with the subject CLIA GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism. Limit 35
This interdisciplinary seminar will study Romanticism as a literary trend, as much as a historical phenomenon and a life attitude. Romanticism is viewed here as the sum of the different answers to the sense of insecurity, social alienation and loneliness, provoked by the changing and frail world of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. We will investigate the Romantic ideology in relation to the trans-Adriatic world of Italy and Greece, an area that entered modernity with the particular lure and burden of antiquity, as well as through revolutionary upheaval. Students will be invited to read authors like Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Massimo d’Azeglio, and to reflect on themes such as Nostalgia and Nationalism, the Discovery of the Middle Ages, the Historical Novel, the Invention of Popular Tradition, the Fragmented Self, Autobiographical and Travel Writing, the Brigand Cult, Hellenism, Philhellenism, Orientalism and Balkanism, and others.
Some years ago the word Diaspora referred to Jews and was spelled with a capital D. Today, almost every ethnic group, country, or separatist movement has its diaspora. Usually, these diasporas are presented as pieces of national life scattered here and there, in places far away from the national core. In this seminar, however, we will treat diasporas not as an emblem of national unity but as an expression of diversity, of a multiplicity of loyalties and belongings. By combining history, literature, film, and cultural studies, and by approaching the topic through the lens of transnationalism, we will study topics such as Mobility and Nationalism, Diasporas in Intellectual History, The Mediterranean in Motion, Italian Migration, Mobile Italy and its Colonies, Displacements in the Eastern Mediterranean, Lost Cosmopolitanisms in the Middle East, Emigration from Eastern Europe, and Mediterranean Refugees and Memory. The aim is to turn our gaze away from the territorially defined countries, towards a view of the world in which countries are ship-like territories.
This course will study various forms of travel writing within, from, and to the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century. Throughout the semester, you will read a number of travel accounts to develop your understanding of these particular sources and reflect on the theoretical discussions and the themes framing them, namely orientalism, postcolonial studies, imaginative geographies, literature between fiction and reality, Romantic and autobiographical writing, gender, sexuality and the body, the rise of archeology, adventurism, mass migration and tourism. We will focus on Italian travel writers visiting the Ottoman Empire and the Americas (Cristina di Belgioioso, Gaetano Osculati, Edmondo de Amicis) and others visiting the Italian peninsula (Grand Tourists, Madame De Staël), and we will study the real or imaginary travels of French, British and American writers to the Eastern Mediterranean and to antique and holy lands (Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Count Marcellus, Austen Henry Layard, Lord Byron, Mark Twain), as well as Arabic travel writers to the West (Rifāʻah Rāfiʻ al-Ṭahṭāwī).
Were nations always there? Are they real or imagined? Do they come before or after nationalism and the state? How did we pass from a world of empires, duchies, and city-states to a world of nation-states? Where does legitimacy reside if not in God and his endowed kings? Is the modern world really ‘disenchanted’? How did we come to understand time, space, language, religion, gender, race, and even our very selves in the era of nations? Are we done with this era, living already in postnational times? This course will combine older theories of nationalism (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Smith) with recent approaches of the phenomenon after the ‘Imperial/Global/Transnational Turn’ (Bayly, Conrad, Innes, Isabella, Reill, Stein etc.) and late studies in Gender, Race, Culture and Nationalism, in order to offer new answers to old questions. We will talk about many places around the world, but the main stage where we will try out our questions is Italy and the Mediterranean
This course will offer an account of the multiple migrations out, in and through Italy since 1800. By combining history, literature, and film, and by approaching the topic through the lens of transnationalism, we will study different topics of Italian mobility, such as Exile and the Risorgimento, The Mediterranean in Motion, Migrants’ Experiences at Sea, The Great Italian “Exodus” to the Americas, Mobile Italy and its Colonies, The Lost Italian “Cosmopolitanisms” of the Middle East, Postwar Italian “National Refugees”, and Contemporary Migration to Italy. We will read masterpieces of Italian literature both by Italian-American authors and by contemporary migrants to Italy. We will watch some of the most important films and documentaries on these topics. And we will think about how such phenomena as Italian mass emigration in the long nineteenth century, Fascist colonialism and resettlement of populations in the twentieth century, postwar refugees, and contemporary immigrants to Italy are all intrinsically interconnected and make part of the same story. Overall, the aim of this course is to turn our gaze away from the territorially defined Italy, towards a view of Italy as a space on the move
This course offers an overview of the scholarly debate about the Renaissance during the last twenty years (2001-2021), with a particular focus on the relationship between early modern Italy, Europe, and Muslim Eurasia. This class intends to give students insight into and philological tools to engage the current debate about the revision of the concept—and the period—of the Renaissance (broadly 1350-1570). We will read both primary (Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Galateo, Leonardo Bruni, Leo Africanus) and secondary sources in order to understand the main trends of philological and historical research about early modern Eurasia in the last twenty years. We will read about how Petrarch’s anti-Arabism has been analyzed and used by twentieth-century Medievalists. We will explore how Said’s Return to Philology influenced the study of the transmission of texts in the Early Modern World. Also, we will try to understand the role of Islam, Muhammad, and the Ottoman Empire in the evolution of European political thought. Similarly, we will dive into Early Modern European representations of the Muslim Other, as well as into Arabic travel writing about Early Modern Europe. The main goal of this class is to discuss with the students about what happened in the field of Renaissance studies in the last two decades, roughly between September 11, 2001 and our current “post”-pandemic world, with a particular attention to the study of literary texts, intellectual and cultural history, the history and theory of translation. In English
Mediterranean Humanities I explores the literatures of the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. We will read Boccaccio, and Cervantes, as well as Ottoman poetry, Iberian Muslim apocalyptic literature, and the Eurasian connected versions of the One Thousand and One Nights. We will dive into the travel of texts and people, stories and storytellers across the shores of the Middle Sea. Based on the reading of literary texts (love poetry, short stories, theater, and travel literature), as well as letters, biographies, memoirs, and other ego-documents produced and consumed in the Early Modern Mediterranean, we will discuss big themes as Orientalism, estrangement, forced mobility, connectivity, multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations. Also, following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and Erich Auerbach, we will reflect on the Mediterranean in the age of the first globalization as a laboratory of the modern global world and world literature
What is the Mediterranean and how was it constructed and canonized as a space of civilization? A highly multicultural, multilingual area whose people represent a broad array of religious, ethnic, social and political difference, the Mediterranean has been seen as the cradle of western civilization, but also as a dividing border and a unifying confluence zone, as a sea of pleasure and a sea of death. The course aims to enhance students’ understanding of the multiple ways this body of water has been imagined by the people who lived or traveled across its shores. By exploring major works of theory, literature and cinema since 1800, it encourages students to engage critically with a number of questions (nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, South/North and East/West divides, tourism, exile and migration, colonialism and orientalism, borders and divided societies) and to ‘read’ the sea through different viewpoints: through the eyes of a German Romantic thinker, a Sephardic Ottoman family, an Algerian feminist, a French historian, a Syrian refugee, an Italian anti-fascist, a Moroccan writer, an Egyptian exile, a Bosnian-Croat scholar, a Lebanese-French author, a Cypriot filmmaker, an Algerian-Italian journalist, and others. In the final analysis, Med Hum II is meant to arouse the question of what it means to stand on watery grounds and to view the world through a constantly shifting lens
This course will offer an overview of historical and anthropological writing on the Mediterranean from the birth of the field through the pages of Fernard Braudel’s celebrated book in the 1940s to the present day. It will trace the shifts in the ways we understand the Mediterranean by examining the sea as a malleable geographical space, which changes over time. It will explore topics such as the macro- and micro-histories of the Sea; the ‘history in’ and the ‘history of’ the Mediterranean; ‘anti-Meditterraneanism’; the revolutionary Mediterraneans; the colonial Mediterranean; the Grand Tour; the migrants in the Mediterranean; Italy in the Mediterranean, and others. Looking at the sea can tell us a lot about human life on land and can change our perspective on how we view this and other parts of the world.
Spring 2026: CLIA GU4725 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment CLIA 4725 001/11438 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 501 Hamilton Hall Elizabeth Leake 3.00 6/20 CLIA 4725 AU1/18283 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm Othr Other Elizabeth Leake 3.00 1/2 Hungarian Courses
Source: Columbia University in the City of New York's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
