Core Course: Historical Cultures and Collective Identity
8 ECTS – course offered in the Fall semester
- Modernity: birth and development of a historical concept
Instructors: Prof. Rolando Minuti–Emanuele Giusti
Topics: An outline of the history of concepts. The historiographical meaning of modernity and related concepts. European modernity and ‘other’ modernities in early modern age. Classical heritage and the development of a new idea of modernity in early modern culture. An outline of the approaches to historiography in the 18th century. Varieties and tensions of the idea of modernity. European expansion, ethnographical approaches and the problems of cultural diversity. Guided visits to some Florentine libraries and museums.
- City and countryside in Medieval Italy. Rivers and human settlement
Instructor: Prof. Francesco Salvestrini
Topics: Medieval and Modern use of rivers in European cities. Economy, culture, religion, society. Protection of cities from river floods in Medieval and Modern periods. European examples and the case of Florence (with visit to the Arno “pescaia” and mills).
- The Contemporary use of the Renaissance
Instructor: Prof. Igor Melani
Topics: World Expositions between 19th and 20th centuries. The project for a World Esposition (Rome 1942). Fascism and the use of national-culture identitarian rethoric; Urban Planning and Musealization; uses of Renaissance within European historiography; displaying Italian Renaissance: objects, people, meanings.
- Travelling and building identities in the Contemporary age
Instructors: Prof. Francesca Tacchi–Dr. Lorenzo Venuti
Topics: 1) West VS the “non European world”: analysis of some European illustrated travel journals and touristic guides in the 19th and 20th centuries (representations, travel accounts, role of images); 2) Experiences and accounts by Italian travellers in Eastern Europe during the Cold War (1950s and 1960s); 3) Racial representations in the world.
- Politics of memory in post-authoritarian systems
Instructor: Prof. Stefano Bottoni
Topics: the patterns of post-communist transition in Eastern Europe compared to post-1945 handling of Nazi and Fascist past; the process that led to the opening of the communist-time archives in Romania and the controversies over the past; forms and outcomes of the “lustration” projects in post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe; analysis of how several museums and public institutions have been representing the totalitarian past.