Harvard Summer Program in Venice, Italy

Glenda Carpio, PhD, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited Enrollment.
Mon/Wed, 12:45-3:15pm

Migration patterns have shaped reshaped states and individuals throughout history and across the world. Forced migration, produced by imperial legacies and neo-colonialist practices and, increasingly, by climate change, poses political and social challenges in both the United States and Europe. This course introduces key scholarly debates in the study of forced migration in comparative race studies, and in literature. We will investigate the causes and consequences of modern population movements from a comparative perspective by asking: what are the social, economic, and political reasons and outcomes for migration across sending and receiving countries? We will also explore how contemporary literary artists represent global migration as it intersects with race and racism in America and in Europe.

Paolo Pellizzari, PhD, Professsor of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited Enrollment.
Mon/Wed, 9:15-11:45am

In the first part, the course provides an introduction to financial markets, instruments and trading. In the second part, the “modern portfolio theory” is presented, touching important topics such as diversification, portfolio risk, the trade-off between risks and return, the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the importance of the efficient market hypothesis.

Prerequisite: Precalculus; Some background on probability theory would be helpful but not required

Gordon Teskey, PhD, Professor of English, Harvard University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.
Mon/Wed, 9:15-11:45am

William Blake called the Bible “the great code of art.” Nowhere was this statement truer than in the famous Italian centers of art, Rome, Florence, and Venice. But the biblical culture of Venice was special because of her rich contacts with the East: with Islam, with the Greek culture of the Eastern Mediterranean, and with the Holy Land itself. The great cathedral of Venice, Saint Mark’s, is named for the city’s patron, who wrote the oldest and most venerable of the Christian gospels. The Bible provided the artists of Venice with a rich fund of subjects for painting and sculpture. This course gives students an outline of the contents and structure of the Bible similar to what most people in Venice would have had during the period when its greatest art was produced. The aim is for students to be able to look at a work of Venetian art and read not only its biblical subject but also its biblical thinking, especially the subterranean connections between episodes. We also consider how extra-biblical subjects such as saints’ legends and episodes from the apocrypha are themselves extensions of biblical reading. Meeting times are about equally divided between classroom discussion and field trips to sites around Venice. Among the more important of these are Saint Mark’s cathedral, the Doge Palace, the Basilica dei Frari, the Scuola di San Rocco (with its amazing Tintorettos), the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Basilica della Salute (with Titian’s biblical paintings in the sacristry), and the Accademia gallery, with its great hall containing Veronese’s gigantic and exuberant Feast in the House of Levi and Titian’s large but intimate Pieta,with its subtle biblical meanings adopted to personal expression. The course’s final class concludes in this room, in front of these contrasting visions of the meaning of life, seen through the lens of the Bible.

Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

Shaul Bassi, PhD, Full Professor of English, Ca’ Foscari University

4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.
Tues/Thurs, 9:15-11:45am

For William Shakespeare, Venice represented both the present and the future, a great early modern metropolis and a richly symbolic landscape where he set two celebrated works of art, a comedy and a tragedy. In our own age, The Merchant of Venice and Othello continue to be surprisingly topical plays, dramatizing sensitive and intransigent issues such as gender-based violence, racism, antisemitism, and debt, as well as offering glimpses of a cosmopolitan society where friendship and love can exist across ethnic and religious divides. With their brilliant language, plot, and characterization, the plays have captivated audiences for more than four centuries; they have also proved provocative and disturbing, inviting numerous adaptations and reimaginings in different media (film, poetry, fiction, and graphic novels).

This course analyzes Shakespeare’s plays and charts their controversial critical and theatrical histories. We examine the rich cultural and literary material that informs the plays, including the representations of Africans, Jews, and Muslims. Our presence in Venice is crucial to our understanding. We visit Venetian sites that illuminate the contexts that forged Shakespeare’s notions of cultural and religious difference, like the Venetian ghetto or the various sites representing black people and slaves. We then analyze multiple adaptations of the plays to explore how they can be reinvented in relation to the contemporary city. Students engage creatively and collaboratively with The Merchant of Venice and Othello, developing their own interpretations through various media. They explore how today’s Venice can offer new insights into the plays—and how the plays, in turn, illuminate the contemporary city.

Note: Professor Greenblatt will lecture for two weeks of the course.

Giorgio Pirina, PhD, Research Fellow in Sociology, Ca’ Foscari University

Giulia dal Maso, PhD, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Ca’ Foscari University

4 credits
UN, GR Limited Enrollment.
Tues/Thurs, 12:45-3:15pm

This course allows students to develop an appreciation of the emerging geographies of digital infrastructure in both their material manifestations and their associated environmental impacts. It provides students with an in-depth understanding of the various tensions that bind the promises of a digital future and a sustainable digital transition. Bringing together scholars from critical data studies and critical infrastructure studies, law, political geography, and science and technology studies, the course engages with some of the most pressing questions currently facing policymakers and corporate leaders, as well as citizens.

Prerequisite: none.