72 research outputs found
Tra scienza e amministrazione: Carlo Conti Rossini durante e dopo la dominazione coloniale
No full textCarlo Conti Rossini’s work is still now considered an essential lens to approach the Horn of Africa, especially the region of today Eritrea. In fact, the contribution of knowledge given by the above-mentioned scholar, who also was the founder of the Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, is immeasurable and covers different scientific fields, from ethnography to philology and history. Despite the international reputation of Conti Rossini and the acknowledged esteem for his scientific heritage, a critical elaboration of his scholarship has been until now only touched upon. The present article aims at addressing this gap and putting the author of Principi di diritto consuetudinario dell’Eritrea in a new light; it does it by retracing on the one hand his life spent between science and administration and by highlighting on the other hand the consequences of his work still in postcolonial age. The article wishes to be a incitement to a postcolonial intellectual biography of Carlo Conti Rossini
Queering Italian Colonialism: Mapping a Blind Spot
No full textThis essay is a first attempt to introduce a debate around «non-conforming» sexualities and intimacies in the history of Italian colonialism. The starting point of the suggested reflections is the worldwide success of intertwining research between imperial, (post)colonial, and LGBTQI studies. Yet, a similar interest for these topics in the field of Italian colonial history does not follow the above-mentioned success. This blind spot is the main point addressed by this essay. The first section offers a brief overview of the variety of research on «non-conforming» sexualities and intimacies, as well as about queer history in different colonial empires. The second section briefly summarizes the state of the art on the Italian colonial case. Finally, the third section has a rather programmatic character. Based on the authors’ research experience in colonial archives and fieldwork, it scopes some lines of research that – if properly exploited – might lead to a keen understanding of the tackled themes, especially if pursued through designated, interdisciplinary, and systematic research projects. Indeed, although the history of queer sexualities and intimacies is often pointed at as hidden, it is even more useful to suggest concrete paths for new investigations. The essay wishes to contribute to opening a new research agenda that makes it possible to approach the Italian colonialism through a queer lens and thus challenge heteronormative and Eurocentric perspectives
Valuing Modularity as a Real Option
No full textWe provide a general valuation approach for capital budgeting decisions involving the modularization in the design of a system. Within the framework developed by Baldwin and Clark (Baldwin, C. Y., K. B. Clark. 2000. Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), we implement a valuation approach using a numerical procedure based on the least-squares Monte Carlo method proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz (Longstaff, F. A., E. S. Schwartz. 2001. Valuing American options by simulation: A simple least-squares approach. Rev. Financial Stud. 14(1) 113–147). The approach is accurate, general, and flexible
Problem Solving in the COVID-19 ERT University Classroom
No full textThis paper deals with pragmatic aspects of Emergency Remote Teaching adopted in an academic setting as a COVID-19 containment strategy. We consider an intensive introductory course in English Language and Linguistics
taught at the University of Bologna by the author of this study (30 academic hours). Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, the first half of the course was taught full distance, synchronically on Microsoft Teams, while the second part was administered live, with part of the audience present in the physical classroom, and the rest connected online from home. Lessons were videorecorded and transcribed using Microsoft Stream, and subsequently stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatised corpus in English. As the study is methodologically grounded in corpus pragmatics (Aijmer/Rühlemann 2015),
both corpus findings and videorecordings are analysed pragmatically for metacommunicative expressions (Bazzanella 2002, 2010), and metadiscursively for markers of interactivity (Hyland 2005: 49). The results
show that the root cause of most pragmatic accidents (as revealed, in corpus data, by the frequency of hesitations, apologies, and other expressions of uncertainty and doubt) is a contextual mismatch arising from the fact that the same lecture is administered simultaneously to students on campus and online. Despite some positives, e.g., more interactivity (Luporini 2020) in comparison with the fully in-person version of the course that was taught prepandemically (Fusari 2021), it is therefore suggested that hybrid teaching should be much more carefully planned if it is to continue after the pandemic
Language is purposeful. Some thoughts on teaching Systemic Functional Grammar
No full textThis volume is part of a Festschrift to celebrate the work of Donna R. Miller. The author is also one of the editors of this book. Her chapter suggests a reflection on the role of teaching grammar at university, with a specific focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics for non-native learners of English who aim to achieve a high level of proficiency in the English language. It is explicitly based on the guidance and inspiration Donna R. Miller gave her mentees and younger colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LILEC) of the University of Bologna. The chapter looks at the methodologies used to teach this subject at the LILEC Department, and on the advantages and disadvantages of teaching this grammatical formalism at BA level
Realizing smiles: Options pricing with realized volatility
No full textWe develop a discrete-time stochastic volatility option pricing model exploiting the information contained in the Realized Volatility (RV), which is used as a proxy of the unobservable log-return volatility. We model the RV dynamics by a simple and effective long-memory process, whose parameters can be easily estimated using historical data. Assuming an exponentially affine stochastic discount factor, we obtain a fully analytic change of measure. An empirical analysis of Standard and Poor's 500 index options illustrates that our model outperforms competing time-varying and stochastic volatility option pricing models
Option Market Trading Activity and the Estimation of the Pricing Kernel: a Bayesian Approach
No full textBetween English humour and national stereotypes – translating Stephen Clarke’s novel Merde Happens into Italian
No full textThis paper discusses the translation into Italian of "Merde Happens", a novel by Stephen Clarke, an English author who has lived and worked in France for over a decade. This novel is relevant to intercultural communication because it satirizes three nations and cultures at the same time: French, English and US American. Irony based on national stereotypes is usually considered to be very difficult to translate, and this sometimes discourages publishers to the point that very valuable fictional products end up not being translated. Our aim is to show that a
novel like Clarke’s can (and indeed, should) be translated: we argue that playing on national stereotypes and laughing about them can be one of the most effective ways of fighting prejudice, and we show that this can be achieved in translation through a careful balance of foreignizing and domesticating choices
“Yeah, you know, these are the miracles of technology.” Interactivity in the COVID-19 ERT university classroom
No full textCOVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT, Karakaya, 2020) has been described as “an unprecedented challenge in university teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2020), requiring lecturers to adapt or devise entirely new syllabi and testing methods in a very short period of time (Bryson & Andres, 2020; Major, 2020). This study investigates a relatively unexplored area of ERT, i.e. interactivity in the online and blended academic classroom, with specific reference to (1) positive and corrective feedback by the teacher; (2) student live feedback through open microphone; (3) face-saving and other repair strategies. We consider an intensive introductory course of English Language and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna (Italy) by the author of this study, for a total of 30 hours. Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, 50% of the course was taught full-distance on Microsoft Teams, while 50% was administered “live,” with part of the audience connected online from home. Lessons were recorded, transcribed, and stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatized corpus in English. The results show that the level of interactivity is higher than it was the case prepandemically (Luporini, 2020), as students take and keep the floor on average 11.3 times for each 90 minutes lecture. Feedback is more positive than corrective, and repair strategies hinge on humour, sometimes eliciting spontaneous laughter in the “live” classroom. Although this may leave the analyst under the impression that students enjoyed this learning experience more than traditional ones, the data also show a high level of anxiety on the part of all participants, as testified by the remarkable frequency of hesitations,
apologies, weak modals and pragmatic accidents
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