Spring Quarter 2026

For day, time, room, and TA information, see our:
PDF Schedule or Schedule Builder
For all courses not described here, see:
Catalog Descriptions

Language Courses

ITA 003 Elementary Italian
This 3rd term course will continue to develop your communication skills learned in first-two quarters of Italian and will introduce you to many new topics and more advanced grammar. Throughout the semester you will be given training in speaking, pronunciation, grammar, reading and writing in Italian through the study of a wide range of communication patterns and real-life situations. By the end of Italian 003, you will be able to utilize the future tense, and well as the conditional mood, to express wishes or suggestions, or things you would/should have done. You will be able to understand short conversations and film clips, write compositions, and perform short dialogues. Along with our language courses, the Department offers an array of events and co-curricular activities such as weekly conversation/practice hours, films, cultural events, C.I.A.O. club activities, and free peer tutoring.
Prerequisite(s): ITA 002 or ITA 002S.
For instructor information, see https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm
ITA 023 Intermediate Italian
Melissa Demos
Continued development of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Emphasis on reading and writing in Italian.
Prerequisite(s): ITA 022 or ITA 022S.

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

ITA 102 Media & Performance: Il teatro - opere in un atto
Eric Louis Russell
Taught entirely in Italian: satisfies the "Core Subject Matter" of Major/Minor
Prerequisite: ITA23, equivalent or permission of instructor
Like other Core Subject Matter courses, this class gives you the opportunity to continue developing language skills, while focusing on a specific topic: contemporary one-act plays. Throughout our time together, you will hone your oral expression and diction/pronunciation, while also working on reading and writing skills. There will be two foci for our time together:
The first half of the quarter will be given to reading, organizing and performing two contemporary one-act plays, one by Stefano Benni and another by Dario Fo'. Each student will take a role (or perhaps two, depending on requisites of these), memorize lines and work with others to produce their respective play. You will also do independent research to write a program, including information on the author, the play, its setting and the like. These will be performed around mid-quarter for the class, as well as peers (e.g. the CIAO club, lower-division students, etc.).
The second part of the quarter will be given to a play that you will write, produce and perform collectively. You will be asked to work collaboratively to write a compelling, one-act play (with three to five scenes) that includes roles for all members of the class. This will be performed at the end of the quarter.
ITA 128 Topics in Italian Culture - Food as Culture [Taught in English]
Eric Louis Russell
This course is taught in English: open to all students
(no prerequisites; you do not need to have studied Italian)
Counts for elective units toward the Italian major/minor
In this course, we will critically explore the culinary and gastronomic practices in contemporary Italy. Rather than simply reiterating mythologies about so-called "Italian food, cuisine and wine”, we will ask new and deeper questions about cultural identity, politics and practices.
Our time together begins by reviewing what it means to be a critical thinker and to practice critical analysis. The remainder of the course is divided into three units, roughly equally distributed across the quarter.
Unit One, “Making and unmaking Italy and Italianness” invites you to question preconceived notions of cultural unity and its mythological expression. Through this, you will come to understand the ways that identities and categories of identity (especially “being Italian”) have been socially constructed, as well as the ways that dominant social ideologies and actors contributed to this construction.
Unit Two, “Made in Italy… well, sorta”, builds upon the first unit, re-examining contemporary ideals of what is and isn’t Italian, focusing on culinary and gastronomic landscapes. In this part of our time together, you will examine the ways that gastronativist discourses shape our collective understanding of food, culinary practices and related fields, how these are woven into global capitalism and how these function hegemonically.
Unit Three, “Doing culture at the table”, consists of an anthropological expression of what it means to participate in cultural constructs, notably those centered around gastronomic and culinary practices. Through this, you will compare and contrasts the ways that cultural action creates cultural reality, notably values such as appropriate versus inappropriate, native versus foreign, and much more, focusing especially (but not only) varying US American and Euro-Italian contexts.