Columbia University in the City of New York · Courses
ITAL GU
21 courses with the subject ITAL 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.
ITAL GU4005RAPID READ＆TRANSLATION IN ITAL3.00
For graduate students and others who need to develop their reading knowledge of Italian. Open to undergraduate students as well, who want a compact survey/review of Italian structures and an approach to translation. Grammar, syntax, and vocabulary review; practice in reading and translating Italian texts of increasing complexity from a variety of fields, depending on the needs of the students. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Note: this course may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or to fulfill major or concentration requirements
This seminar examines the many meanings of food in Italian culture and tradition; how values and peculiarities are transmitted, preserved, reinvented and rethought through a lens that is internationally known as ;Made in Italy;; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production, presentation, distribution, and consumption of food. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand the Italian taste through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how food can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary Italian society, in relation to the European context and a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. In English
In the 1970s and 1980s a group of young Italian historians transformed the methods of historical inquiry and narrative. This class explores the origins, the diffusion, as well as the debate around Italian Microhistory across Europe and the United States. In particular, we will focus on “cultural” and “social” Microhistory and its evolution in Italy, France, and the US. We will read masterpieces such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, as well as Nathalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerrre. Also, we will analyze the current application of microhistorical methods to contemporary global history and the genre of biography. Topics include pre-modern popular culture and literacy, minority and marginality, the Inquisition, individual and collective identities, and the relation between the pre-modern Mediterranean, Europe and the world. In Italian. Fall 2026: ITAL GU4019 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ITAL 4019 001/12556 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm 613 Hamilton Hall Pier Mattia Tommasino 3 7/25
Is the Qur’an translatable? Was the Qur’an translated? Are non Arabic-speaking Muslims allowed to translate the Qur’an? And what about non-Muslims? Did Muslims and non-Muslims collaborate in translating the text of the Qur’an into Latin and European vernaculars? This course focuses on the long history of the diffusion of the Qur’an, the Scripture of the Muslims, and one of the most important texts in the history of humanity. We will focus on reading and translation practices of the Qur’an in Europe and the Mediterranean, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. We will explore how European Muslims, such as Iberian moriscos, European Jews, as well as Orthodox, Protestants and Catholics read, copied, collected, translated and printed the Qur’an. We will also explore why the Qur’an was confuted, forbidden, burned and even eaten, drunk and worn along eight centuries of the history of Europe. This long excursus, based on a close reading of the Qur’an and on the discussion of the major themes this close reading proposes, will help us to understand the role of Islam and its revelation in the formation of European societies and cultures
ITAL GU4043Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture3
This course on Italian Renaissance literature and culture will pay special attention to the crossing of boundaries, whether socio-cultural, religious, linguistic, gendered, ethnic, or strictly geographical, in a range of fourteenth- to early seventeenth-century texts in a variety of genres, including travelogue, chivalric epic poetry, comedy, dialogues, and the novella, as well as political, philosophical, and scientific writing. Authors covered include Marco Polo, Leonardo Bruni, Pico della Mirandola, Boiardo, Ariosto, Machiavelli Castiglione, Beolco, Giraldi Cinzio, Tasso, Moderata Fonte, Tarabotti, and Galileo. In English.
This seminar examines ways in which Italy is understood and represented by Italians and non-Italians. It will analyze the formation of multiple discourses on Italy, how Italian culture and society are imagined, represented and/or distorted. Based on an anthropological perspective, this course will examine ways in which we can understand Italy through the intersections of pluralism, ethnicity, gender, and religion. The course will study how Italy strives for political and economic unity, while there is a concurrent push toward inequality, exclusion, and marginalization. Moreover, the course will analyze the revitalization of nationalism on one hand of regionalism on the other, and will focus on the concepts of territory, identity, and tradition. Short videos that can be watched on computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course
ITAL GU4086Castiglione and the Italian Renaissance Court3
Focus on Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier as educational treatise, philosophical meditation, sociopolitical document, and book of courtly manners; other courtly writings of the period, from Della Casa’s Galateo to Ariosto’s Satires to Bembo’s Asolani. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.
This course presents a reading of Petrach's Canzoniere and a theory of the lyric sequence as a genre. In this course we examine Petrarch as he fashions himself authorially, especially in the context of Ovid, Dante, and previous lyric poets. We bring to bear ideas on time and narrative from authors such as Augustine and Ricoeur in order to reconstruct the metaphysical significance of collecting fragments in what was effectively a new genre. We will consider Petrarch's lyric sequence in detail as well as read Petrarch's Secretum and Trionfi. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although students from other departments who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.
In revisiting two major authors of the Italian modern novel, the course investigates the relation between fiction and the "conditions of modernity" (personal risk, anxiety and lack of control on reality, secularization, to name a few). Special attention will be paid to the response of the novelistic discourse to modernity, and to Italy's peculiarly peripheral position in the modern world. Primary texts will be read in Italian, while theoretical references will be in English. Fall 2026: ITAL GU4100 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ITAL 4100 001/12570 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 501 Hamilton Hall Elizabeth Leake 3 9/25 ITAL 4100 AU1/20787 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm Othr Other Elizabeth Leake 3 2/2
Against the backdrop of the heated critical debate on the boundaries and limitations of the autobiographical genre, this course addresses the modern and contemporary tradition of autobiographical writings, focusing in particular (but not exclusively) on exploring and positing the potential difference between male and female autobiographers. More specifically, we will question the adequacy of the traditional model of autobiographical selfhood based on the assumption of unified, universal, exemplary and transcendent self to arrive at an understanding of women's autobiography. Topics to be addressed include: the crisis of the subject, je est un autre, the man with a movie camera, strategies of concealment and disclosures. Authors to be studied include: D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Svevo, Fellini, Moretti, Ortese, Ginzburg, Manzini, Cialente, Ramondino. In Italian
ITAL GU4185The Making of Italy: The Risorgimento in Global Context3
This course will examine the history of the Italian Risorgimento by following the major historiographical trends of the recent decades. First, it will approach the Risorgimento through the prism of cultural and intellectual history by investigating a series of topics, such as the discursive patterns of the ‘Risorgimento canon’, the gendered tropes of nationalism, the creation of a new public sphere through operas, festivals and plebiscites, the connection of nationalism with religion, and the relation of empire to nation and liberalism. Second, it will look at the Risorgimento through the eyes of local and regional history by examining local patriotisms, revolutions and civil wars and the division between North and South. Finally, it will offer a new topography of Italian history by placing the Risorgimento in its Mediterranean and global context and by exploring its international aspects: the global icons that it produced (i.e. Garibaldi, Mazzini); the networks of exiles in other Mediterranean and European countries; the war volunteers; and the connection of Italian patriots with the wave of liberalism and revolution that swept the globe from India to Latin America.
Spring 2026: ITAL GU4220 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ITAL 4220 001/11439 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm 501 Hamilton Hall Elizabeth Leake 3.00 7/20
ITAL GU4395Fifty Years of Impatience: The Italian Novel between 1950-20003
The course examines some of the most important novels that belong to Italy's period of major social and economic transformations. Only after WWII Italy finally becomes a modern nation, i.e. a republic based on truly universal suffrage, and an industrialized country. Such accelerated progress, though,causes deep social instability and mobility which obviously results in heavy psychological pressures on the people: adaptation becomes crucial and inevitable. Fiction therefore resumes the task to represent such awkwardness of integration into a modern bourgeois society that, contrarily to its European and American counterpart, is extremely tentative and insecure per se, since it's political identity has extremely precarious grounds. Among other authors, primary readings include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Italo Calvinos's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Primary Readings in Italian.
ITAL GU4420The Window On the World: Reassessing Italian Neorealism3
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and other Italian filmmakers challenged modes of film production in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, both in theoretical and practical terms. This course will analyze both the feature films and the theoretical writings of such directors as those mentioned and others, in order to investigate the modes of representation of reality in the immediate postwar years, their relation to the identity of the newborn Italian Republic, and their significance in post-WWII filmmaking. All readings and lectures in English; Films in Italian or French, with English subtitles.
An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society in the years between Unification in 1860 and the outbreak of World War I. Drawing on novels, historical analyses, and other sources including film and political cartoons, the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with a knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian
An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society in the years between World War I and the present. Drawing on historical analyses, literary texts, letters, film, cartoons, popular music, etc., the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with a knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian.
The course will examine the foundations of modern drama and stage representation by analysing Luigi Pirandello's plays and theoretical works in close comparison with the major authors and drama theorists of the XIX century, including Bertolt Brecht, August Strinberg, and Jean Genet.
