Bachelor of Italian Studies at University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Italian Studies at Berkeley is an interdisciplinary enterprise. You will find courses in Italian language, literature, history, cultural studies, film, and folklore offered by the department, both in Italian and in English. You will also discover that courses with significant Italian content are often taught in other departments and programs, including history of art, music, comparative literature, film studies, anthropology, political science, history, and Medieval studies which may be applied to major or minor requirements by advance consultation with the undergraduate adviser.

Declaring the Major

Students who are considering a major in Italian Studies should contact the undergraduate student services adviser as early as possible in their academic career in order to plan an individualized course of study. The earliest a student can declare the major is following the completion of one year of elementary Italian or the equivalent.

Once students are ready to declare the major " or if they still have some unsettled issues regarding their academic preparation " they should schedule an appointment with the undergraduate student services adviser for creation of a study list plan to help realize their goals to major, double major, or incorporate courses for major credit from UC study abroad programs in Italy.

Honors Program

To enter the honors program, in addition to having a minimum overall 3.3 grade point average (GPA), majors must have completed at least 20 upper division units in the major with a minimum GPA of 3.5. Candidates must enroll in ITALIAN H195 for one semester in their senior year during which they will carry out research and write an honors thesis under the guidance of a faculty member. Students who meet the GPA requirements must first consult with the undergraduate faculty adviser in order to pursue an honors thesis.

Minor Program

The Department of Italian offers two undergraduate minors: the minor in Italian Studies, emphasizing Italian language, literature, history, cultural studies, film, and folklore, and the minor in Transnational Italian Studies, focusing on Italy's many dimensions of political thought, labor theory, migration, refugee, and race studies, fine arts, food, and poetry, in global contexts.  For information regarding how to declare a minor, please contact the undergraduate student services adviser.

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1. Develop proficiency, approximating to that of an educated native speaker, in speaking, reading, writing, and comprehending Italian.
2. Be broadly familiar with the historical development of Italian culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.
3. Acquire detailed familiarity, through intensive and focused study, with a chronologically and generically disparate selection of cultural phenomena connected with Italy and the history of their critical and social reception.
4. Develop advanced skills in the critical analysis of literary texts and other cultural materials (e.g. films, paintings, musical compositions, historical documents, critical theories, social practices).
5. Have awareness and experience of a variety of approaches to the study of Italian culture, as practiced in both the humanities and the social sciences and of the ways in which these may intersect to generate interdisciplinary study.
6. Learn to conduct research (i.e., to gather and evaluate evidence relating to a hypothesis and construct an argument using it).
7. Learn to assess the validity of evidence-based argumentation conducted by others.
8. Be aware of, and scrupulously practice, ethics-based protocols of citation etc., in academic research and writing.
9. Write clearly, accurately, and persuasively in both Italian and English.
10. Where practically possible, encounter contemporary Italian culture directly through study or travel in Italy. In this respect, study abroad might well constitute a capstone experience.
11. Develop a sense of the study of Italian culture not merely as an end in itself but as an integral part of a potentially unbounded set of processes and relationships through the exploration of which thinking human beings engage with the world they inhabit.