Courses

Duration: 2 weeks
Dates: To be confirmed
Schedule: To be confirmed
Prerequisites: Students must have completed an undergraduate degree, and are required to have studied or be currently studying the following subjects at a University level: Art History; Fine Arts, Design and Architecture; Cultural and Media Studies; Exhibition and Curatorial Studies; Media Studies; Global Studies; Arts and Cultural Management

The Summer School in Contemporary Art & Curatorship is made up of two distinct but interconnected modules that provide insight into the history, principles and management of two of the world’s most important and influential contemporary art exhibitions: La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, Italy) and documenta (Kassel, Germany). 

The Summer School intends to explore the contemporary art system(s) in exhibition format, which acted as a model for the “Biennialization” of the present-day art world. Held in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia’s “Biennale Sessions” programme, the Venice module will cover the history of the Biennale and curatorship, and will be implemented with targeted training activities on exhibition and curatorial practices from five focus areas: Sub-Saharan Africa; East Asia; Latin America; Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia; Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Focus areas will be treated as equally specific, yet intrinsically intertwined within the contemporary art system, as testified by the growing international participations at the art events promoted by the Venice Biennale. 

For each focus area, a dedicated instructor with expertise in both academic lecturing and curatorial practice will hold in-class seminars and talks with artists and curators from the related areas.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites. The course is open to students from different academic backgrounds. While an interest in art, history, or Cultural studies are welcome; all key concepts and methods will be introduced during the course.

Venice offers a privileged context for the study of the formation and development of the art market, thanks to a long-standing tradition of artistic production, collecting, and circulation of works of art that has exerted a lasting influence on the European and international cultural landscape. Since the Renaissance, the city has developed highly sophisticated systems of workshop organization, commercial networks, and collecting practices that contributed to defining the artistic, economic, and symbolic value of artworks. This course examines the evolution of the Venetian art market from the fifteenth century to the contemporary period, combining classroom lectures with site visits to key institutions such as the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Palazzo Grimani, Ca’ d’Oro, and the Museo Correr. 

Through direct engagement with artworks, spaces, and collections, students will investigate the dynamics that regulate the production, circulation, and acquisition of art, with particular attention to collecting as a form of social and cultural self-representation. Topics such as Venetian material culture, the construction of taste, provenance, attribution, forgery, and the functioning of auctions will be addressed from a historical perspective that highlights both continuity and change over time. In doing so, the course demonstrates how many of the mechanisms shaping the contemporary art market are rooted in practices developed in Venice between the early modern period and the nineteenth century, and why the city continues to represent a significant vantage point for understanding the relationship between art, society, and value in today’s global context.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

This course invites students to consider Shakespeare as our contemporary and to examine how his plays—on the page and on the stage—can guide us in a troubled world. Each day pairs close critical reading with discussions that connect ecological stress, social fracture, and cosmopolitan responsibility to Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds. Students will work with scholars and with a professional theatre company, observing rehearsals, meeting artists, and exploring how criticism and performance inform one another. The course’s main focus will be The Tempest, analyzed from an ecocritical perspective and staged in the heart of the Venice lagoon.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

This course provides an introduction to Italian art history within the context of the history of Venice. Through lectures and visits to the city’s main sites of interest such as Ca’ Rezzonico, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Basilica dei Frari and other important monuments, the course will focus on the analysis of Venice’s most meaningful works of art and the vicissitudes of its famous artists, and will gain a better understanding of what has come to constitute the myth of this enchanted city. 

In particular, the course, moving between the 15th and 18th centuries, intends to explain how art evolved in the lagoon between the Renaissance and Rococo periods, reading works of painting, sculpture and architecture in relation to the social and cultural context in which they were created, in order to discover how State, Church and private citizens concurred in shaping the image of the Serenissima Republic through the centuries.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

This course uses Venice as a case study to explore contemporary urban tourism from a geographical perspective. It integrates mobility, cultural, and governance approaches through a combination of classroom-based learning and field observation. Students examine global tourism dynamics, visitor flows, and urban pressures before engaging with key themes shaping tourist cities, including urban imaginaries, overtourism, sensory mobilities and tourism governance. 

Through critical analysis and experiential methods, students develop skills in spatial interpretation, observation, and the analysis of cultural representations. Although grounded in Venice, the course equips students with transferable analytical tools to understand urban tourism challenges in cities worldwide and to consider strategies for more sustainable and inclusive tourism futures.

Duration: 30 hours
Dates: To be confirmed
Schedule: To be confirmed

This interdisciplinary course will bring together philosophical, legal, sociological, and anthropological perspectives to discuss the framework of intersectionality and its impact on our understanding of inequalities, discrimination, as well as resistance and empowerment.

After having discussed the theoretical and epistemological grounding of intersectionality, this course will open to its methodological and substantial applications in the social sciences and policy-making.

Duration: 1 week
Dates:  To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: To be confirmed

This interdisciplinary course explores how global climate change is transforming oceans and coastal systems, with a focus on adaptation, resilience, and socio-economic value.
Starting from the physical climate–ocean system, the course examines sea-level rise, coastal dynamics, and ecosystem responses, highlighting the role of oceans as regulators of climate and providers of essential services. Special attention is given to the blue economy and sustainable business strategies, illustrating how climate risks and environmental change affect coastal economies and value chains. The Venice Lagoon is used as a central illustrative case, linking global processes to local impacts, ecological dynamics, adaptation strategies, and long-term resilience of coastal communities and heritage.
The course combines lectures, case studies, and integrative discussions, and is designed for an international audience interested in climate change, oceans, sustainability, and coastal futures.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

The course offers a critical geographical perspective on the green transition. Rather than treating decarbonisation as a mainly technical or governance-driven process, it approaches transition as a political economy: a reworking of power relations, global inequalities, and contested ways of governing nature. Grounded in political economy and global relations, the course focuses on two dynamics that now sit at the centre of climate policy: the financialisation and digitalisation of nature. Students examine how environmental goals are pursued through markets, metrics, and data infrastructures—carbon markets, ESG frameworks, offsets, and digital monitoring—and how these tools reshape control over land, resources, and value across different regions of the world. 

The course combines key concepts with a small number of focused case studies, and ends by engaging debates on futures, utopias/dystopias, and sociotechnical imaginaries (including selected speculative texts) to explore how visions of “what comes next” shape policy choices and transition pathways.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

The course examines water as a key ecological force shaping human civilisations, functioning both as a vital resource and a source of environmental risk. Using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in environmental studies, archaeology, and conservation studies, the course explores how water influences settlement patterns, material culture, and the sustainability of water-based cities across time and regions. 

Venice and its Lagoon serve as a central case study for analysing interactions between natural systems and the built environment, with attention to hydrogeology, climate pressures, and conservation strategies, and are examined in comparison with other water-based cities worldwide to highlight shared challenges, regional differences, and global approaches to resilience and heritage preservation. Emphasis is placed on heritage preservation and restoration through on-site visits to archaeological sites and restoration sites in Venice and its Lagoon. By the end of the course, students develop critical skills in environmental analysis and cultural heritage assessment within water-centred urban contexts, including the ability to evaluate hydro-environmental risks, assess the impact of water on built and archaeological materials, and understand restoration strategies for safeguarding cultural heritage in fragile aquatic environments.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: A knowledge of general history at the high school level is recommended.

The course will deal with the main issues in broadly-conceived economic history, ranging from the development of trade and manufacturing in the very long period to the industrial revolutions, with a focus on business history and the history of innovation.  The course aims to provide knowledge of the main debates in economic history, spanning from social history to business history. Students will learn how to question and identify the limiting scope conditions to apply sociological, economic, and managerial theories to different historical contexts.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

This course examines the digital spaces and actors of risk. We will consider new forms of cyber war, including hybrid and grey zone warfare, and the changing role of AI in national security. We will also look at how AI is transforming cognitive warfare and propaganda, as well as new forms of cyberespionage and surveillance.

The module begins with a consideration of the changing spaces and forms of threats today, including hybrid threats and conditions of ‘unpeace’. We will then examine the role of AI in national security, and the changing nature of cognitive warfare and propaganda in the age of AI. Finally, we will discuss emergent forms of cyberwar and cyberterrorism, and cyberespionage and surveillance.

This course is organized and co-taught by lecturers from Ca’ Foscari, Warwick University and the Italian Naval Staff College (ISMM). Some of the course will be held at the ISMM building in the Arsenale.

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be confirmed
Schedule: To be confirmed
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course

This course maps the changing nature of geopolitics and geostrategy over the past century to consider how traditional understandings of war, conflict, and risk more broadly have been fundamentally transformed. In a moment in which ‘everything is geopolitical’, we will assess what that term has meant in practice, and how different approaches to geopolitics shape understandings of risk and insecurity – and the strategies designed to counter them.

The module begins with an overview of the histories of geopolitical thought from colonial times to the present day, with a focus on the histories of seapower and its transformations. We will critically assess the distinction between ‘grand strategy’ and ‘geopolitics’, since the two are often (mistakenly) used as synonyms, and then move on to explore the different scales of geopolitics – from the international to the domestic, including the ways in which insecurity enters our daily lives as ‘geopolitical anxiety’.

This course is organized and co-taught by lecturers from Ca’ Foscari, Warwick University, and the Italian Naval Staff College (ISMM). 

Duration: 1 week
Dates: To be decided
Schedule: To be decided
Prerequisites: Basic math/algebra (pre-calculus) and an intuitive understanding of the meaning of mean and dispersion

We will look at (investment) finance as a landscape to be explored. The course starts with the laws of physics (financial math) before moving into the terrain of asset classes like ETFs and mutual funds. The course concludes by analyzing the sinkholes; of the financial world, using the Madoff scandal and other massive frauds to show what happens when the math and trust are abused, and wealth is squandered rather than built.