Courses

Courses on a wide range of topics

Our department offers a wide variety of courses that will pique your interest regardless of your background. Where else can you learn about bodies and machines in the French baroque theater, how languages in close geographic proximity change each other, and the strategies for carrying on a 36-year tradition of one of the most beloved Italian graphic novels ever?

Fall 2019 French graduate course listings

Fall 2019 Italian graduate course listings

See our complete French graduate course listings

See our complete Italian graduate course listings

Highlighted French/francophone courses

Student filming a scene.

Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Contemporary French Cinema

Taking an interdisciplinary perspective from postcolonial studies and film studies, this course will examine the representation of race and ethnicity in French cinema as a contested field of cultural production and of sociopolitical discourse. To what degree do film and other audio-visual mass media (television, internet, social media) serve both to reify and to contest institutional power structures and administrative practices inherited from the colonial period, as well as deeply ingrained modes of imagining racial and ethnic difference as part of or in contradistinction to French national identity?

Medieval miniature in French manuscript (ca. 1470, acc.to Hogenelst 1995) of Tristan and Iseult drinking the love potion, while playing chess on board a ship.

Medieval Manuscripts

The medieval manuscript is a witness to unique versions of texts, a cultural artifact with an idiosyncratic logic and unique history. This seminar initiates students in the main fields of manuscript studies (paleography and codicology) as well as early book history and textual scholarship. Our approach privileges hands-on experiences in the Lilly Library, but prepares students for archival work of all kinds. Exercises offer students the opportunity to confront and manipulate manuscripts in person and via cutting edge digital viewers and transcription/annotation tools.

Highlighted French Linguistics courses

Language books on a bookshelf.

Introduction to Applied French Linguistics

Applied Linguistics is the field of study which seeks to apply findings from core areas of linguistics to real-world problems and concerns. Our focus will be the application of selected topics in linguistics to the pedagogy of French as a foreign language in the United States. Inter alia, we will draw on a sociolinguistically-oriented survey of the linguistic situation in various Francophone regions, enabling us to explore aspects of variability in French, including social, stylistic, and geographical variation, and implications of such variability for the FLE classroom.

Map showing France at the time of the Treaty of Bretigny.

History of the French Language II

In this course we will explore in greater theoretical and empirical depth some issues introduced briefly in F603, focusing especially – but not exclusively – on syntax, on the later medieval and early modern periods, and on areas of student interest.

Highlighted Italian courses

The Birth of Venus.

Forms of Civility in the Italian Renaissance

This graduate course examines the classical genealogy, the social and historical milieu and the rhetorical matrix of this new form of social interaction, which was to become the generative model of early modern European ethics, and which was governed by the values of moderation, convenience, conformity, adaptability, grace, and dissimulation.

Second edition of Bartoli's biography of Ignatius Loyola 1659.

Letteratura e cultura del seicento

This course will cover some of the main authors of the 17th century in Italy. We will explore their style, works, and significance within their religious, political, and scientific context. Authors will include Marino, Galileo, Bartoli, and Tesauro, among others.

Individual Readings courses

You must gain permission to register in Individual Readings courses. Please download and complete the Permission for Individual Readings Form for permission to register for the following:

  • F815 French Individual Readings course
  • M815 Italian Individual Readings course

Want to view more French and Italian graduate courses?

View French courses in our Student Portal View Italian courses in our Student Portal