Please visit our new project website: www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org. Our new website takes this project into its second phase and will provide a hub for interartistic and intermedial research and artistic practice in Italy.
Latest
News of the second phase of this project (2015-2018)
We are delighted to announce that we have won an AHRC standard grant of £680,000 to enable us to continue this project from summer 2015 until the end of 2018. The new project is called Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: interart/intermedia.
For the next few months, you won’t see new activity on this website as we transform this into a much more interactive, online space for the new project. The website, once launched, will be a dynamic space for co-writing across artistic disciplines and for exploring and sharing theories of interartistic and intermedial practice. We hope to create a hub for those of you engaged with these kinds of ideas and practices. Please check back here next November to see the new website.
Our research questions for Interart/Intermedia
These questions follow on closely from what we were doing in the first, networking, phase of this project. We’ve refined them and we’re looking now specifically at the relationship between interartistic practice and experimental creativity.
Our research goes beyond the narrow focus of monodisciplinary research to reveal a more comprehensive picture of interartistic encounters and new kinds of experimentation. We challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries, to focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing and on institutions who fostered or hindered interartistic exchange. Our project introduces a new and original focal point: we seek to examine how a multidisciplinary approach subverts widely accepted canons; what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.
These are the questions:
Why has interartistic practice changed so markedly over the course of 20th and 21st century? What has influenced these changes?
Why have avant-garde and activist artists critiqued and transgressed the boundaries between the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy? What effect has this had on creativity?
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, interartistic practice has been palpable in periods of uncertainty and radical social change, frequently associated with the avant-garde. It also appears to have emerged most strongly where political and cultural conventions are challenged, especially by activists. The first area our project explores is the transgressive nature of interartistic and intermedial creativity.
What theories do we need to develop in order to discuss hybrid cultural objects and avant-garde interartistic practice?
We will fashion a theoretical discourse to facilitate new research across the arts and media and underpin work done in our own project. This will highlight the social, creative and psychological dynamics of interartistic creativity, rather than the demands and constraints of disciplinary fields.
Our planned outputs
In the next phase, we’ll be moving from the exciting network of people established in the first phase to producing some significant publications, an exhibition, workshops, teaching material and setting up a research centre. This is what we have planned:
A monograph, Rupture and Renewal, that aims to rewrites the cultural history of Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries from an interartistic perspective;
A monograph dedicated specifically in the relations between the arts in Italy in the Digital Age;
A further edited book that will provide the theoretical underpinning for interartistic research for a broader intellectual community;
Sample interartistic/intermedial teaching material for secondary schools;
Together with the Estorick Collection, an interartistic exhibition in London, a catalogue, and a CPD day for museum curators;
3 workshops on theories of interartistic practice to take place in London and Birmingham;
A Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Modern Languages to be set up at the University of Birmingham (UK).
We will also be developing dedicated events for postgraduates and postdocs. Much of the work we will be doing is targeted at informing ideas about interartistic practice and empowering people to explore, in a theoretically informed way, interartistic practice.
The rest of the current website here belongs to the first phase of the Interdisciplinary Italy project (Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: art, music, text), which has now closed.
We thank all those who have supported us in the first phase of this project and helped us to develop this second phase.
Clodagh Brook (Principal investigator, University of Birmingham), Florian Mussgnug (Co-investigator, UCL), Giuliana Pieri (Co-investigator, Royal Holloway), Emanuela Patti (Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham)
Interdisciplinarity in the Classroom: Interviews with teachers
On Monday 12 May 2014 Dr Giuliana Pieri met with two highly experienced teachers of Italian, Carmela Amodio Johnson and Barbara Romito to talk about their experience of interdisciplinarity in the classroom in a 45 minute long interview. A particular focus of our discussion was a very interesting collaboration called ‘The Italian Week’, a week-long series of activities which brought together primary and secondary schools pupils in two London schools, Latymer Prep School and Latymer Upper School. Italian language and culture was brought to life by collaborating with teachers of other subjects (Art, English, History, Geography, Science, P.E.). Other issues explored in the interview include the impact of an interdisciplinary focus on the students’ learning experience and the type of resources and activities which help to foster and harness the power of interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
On 14 May Dr Giuliana Pieri interviewed Mr Peter Langdale, currently teaching at North London Collegiate School, in north London. We explored issues related to the use of different media and the way in which a broad range of disciplines (especially within an inter-artistic focus) can be introduced in the curriculum. The absence of an Italian A-level textbook was also discussed as both a challenge for teachers of Italian but also an opportunity for the creation of new material. In the 30-minute long interview you will find plenty of examples and ideas that Peter uses in class. The strongest message from Peter’s experience is that different media and a variety of disciplines work together very well; they engage the students; they make the curriculum relevant; and bridge the artificial gap often created between language and its cultural context. The need to foster a better dialogue between teachers of Italian in the state and public sector, and between secondary school teachers and the higher education sector was also a focus of our discussion.
New resource page for secondary school teachers and lecturers
One of the key questions of the project relates to the ways in which interdisciplinarity in both theory and practice can inspire new patterns of teaching. Our collaboration with teachers and national teaching and education bodies is fundamental in this respect. The following interview with two experienced teachers of Italian at secondary school level, Carmela Amodio-Johnson and Peter Langdale, offers some initial ideas and raises a number of issues about the impact of education policies and curriculum design in both fostering and hindering interdisciplinarity in the classroom. Read on and let us know what you think.
Peter Langdale [PL] is currently Head of Italian and Academic Tutor at North London Collegiate School. He was previously Head of Modern Languages at Merchant Taylor’s School, Northwood and at St George’s British International School, Rome. He began his teaching career at Dulwich College where he introduced Italian at GCSE and A Level. Other activities include editing the Independent Schools Modern Languages Association Newsletter and membership of the Italian Committee of ALL.
Carmela Amodio-Johnson [CAJ] has been a teacher of Italian since 1982 and has taught a wide spectrum of levels in many London Schools and Institutions. She was GCSE & A Level Examiner for Edexcel, member of ATI, ALL and SIS, and Chair of ALL Italian Committee of six years. She organised and run several successful Italian Inset – Days, and retired in 2012.
CHOICE AND FREEDOM
- How much choice do you have when it comes to designing the curriculum?
[CAJ] Very remotely as a teacher of Italian of GCSE, A/S and A2 in Secondary Schools I have been involved in designing the Curriculum. On the contrary in Adult Education at the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s, the Head of Modern Languages would appreciate my input due to my cultural and linguistic expertise as a native teacher.
[PL] The first aspect is, of course, whether Italian is taught at all in the secondary curriculum and then at what stage it is introduced and examined. I am not aware of any statistics but I do know of schools that introduce it in Year 7, 9 or 10 leading to GCSE in year 11. A small number of schools such as my own introduce Italian as an ab initio course to A level or Cambridge Pre-U in year 12.
That Italian is taught at all in secondary schools is rarely down to independent senior management decisions. Many of the most thriving Italian departments were born originally because of the enthusiasm of individual teachers (hired to teach another language or subject). In other cases, Italian began to be taught for demographic reasons (large Italian immigrant communities in the area, for instance).
Individual Italian teachers/departments in secondary schools have little or no input into the amount of teaching time or resources available as these are determined at MFL department or whole school level.
- How far is the syllabus pre-designed?
[CAJ] Exam Syllabi can be updated or changed every tree-four years minimum.
[PL] In schools where Italian is taught, the syllabus is largely determined by outside factors such as
- national curriculum and/or frameworks
- available resources
- examinations that pupils are expected to sit (by far the most constrictive)
All of these tend towards a design of the content/topic aspects curriculum around a set of ‘general topics’ which are shared with all other modern languages. At GCSE these are what you might find (AQA):
Lifestyle, Health, Relationships and Choices
Free Time and the Media, Holidays
Home and Local Area, Environment
Education and Work
At A level, these develop into the following (Edexcel), the first four clearly designed to follow on from GCSE:
Youth culture and concerns
Lifestyle: health and fitness
The world around us: travel, tourism, environmental issues and the (Italian) speaking world
Education and employment
Customs, traditions, beliefs and religions
National and international events: past, present and future
Literature and the arts.
Within these ‘topics’, these is a great deal of teacher discretion in how they are taught and with what materials. The reality is that up to GCSE, teachers will tend to rely on textbooks such as ‘Amici’, especially where they have been written with an eye to our examination system. At sixth form level there are no textbooks written for the purpose; I am told that the market is not large enough to justify this. The result is that teachers have to look for teaching resources in a wide range of books (mainly published in Italy), magazines and increasingly the internet. They then design the teaching of individual topics around the available material, their own particular interests and experiences.
- Do students have elements of choice in what they study? For example, could they learn about different periods/topics according to their interests?
[PL] The element of individual choice is very limited in the syllabuses as at present designed. In theory, able students at GCSE could undertake a piece of research of their own choice for their writing or speaking controlled assessments, but in practice these tend to be rather mechanical and limited by the linguistic level reached by that stage and the limited examination requirements.
At AS level, students have to choose and prepare to one of the four topics in italics above for their oral exam (how culturally specific that will be is very much at the discretion of the teacher).
At A2, students have to choose and prepare an issue for their oral exam. This may or may not be culturally specific (over the last few years my own students have chosen issues ranging from why Berlusconi should not be prime minister to advocating the learning of classical languages for all).
Until the last revision of A Level, students had to choose and individually prepare a topic for their oral exam that had to be culturally specific, but alas, this was dropped. It has however been revived by the Cambridge Pre-U syllabus (my students are currently preparing a wide range of topics from ‘il Palio di Siena’ to a novel by Sciascia).
There is then the requirement to study a film, play or novel. Theoretically this is meant to be prepared individually, but I am not aware of any department that does not ‘teach’ this, having chosen the work on behalf of the pupil.
[CAJ] Yes they do. In fact, although their choice in both GCSE and GCE is limited by the Specifications set Topic Areas, these entail wider and varied sub-topics. Also students can negotiate with their teacher for both Speaking and Writing Units, topics in which they have a particular interest or that appeal to them more.
INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN TEACHING AND MEDIA
- What opportunities are there to look at social media or consider new narrative practices using technology?
[PL] Within the topics at GCSE and A level there is clearly the opportunity to look at ‘social media’ as a phenomenon, their growth and the impact on their lives and those of others. However, if the question means studying how social media are being used in a cultural dimension and in developing new ‘narrative practices’, that is probably well beyond the scope of A Level.
[CAJ] I have exploited towards the end of the 2000s in the classroom and still do at times in my private tuition now, the use of the Internet and especially You-Tube and Facebook in order for my pupils to have “live and updated” information and resources. Pupils can also for their homework, research on their own at home or in a Language Lab. Again Facebook, Twitter, Video-conferencing and Skype whenever financially and curricular academically possible are and could become the new tools for enhancing both teaching and learning.
- Do you get in guest speakers from different places/organisations of interest? If so, do you think specifically how these people may talk about art/technology/music etc, i.e. what interdisciplinary perspectives they might bring in?
[PL] In my school we provide a quite exceptional range of extra-curricular talks and events. We get in a range of speakers in many subject areas, though I would hazard a guess that this is not universally the case (constraints on funding, geography etc.). Given small numbers for Italian, we cannot justify speakers just for Italian students, so we try to get them in in one of two contexts:
a) Weekly talks open to all years 11 to 13.
b) Modern Languages ‘symposia’ held once a year geared to all MFL students.
Recent Italian talks have been by speakers from UCL (we are London based) and have been focussed on Film. At the same time, speakers ‘for’ other languages have given talks on anything from medieval French literature to Brazilian popular music.
It is worth mentioning of course that in many schools study of matters Italian will come into other subject areas, notably History (typically fascism and the Risorgimento) or Art History.
(We also, rather uniquely, have a weekly series of open lectures given by members of staff and I have tried to ensure an Italian presence there. I have given lectures on ‘Dante and Primo Levi – two visions of Hell’ and at the request of the English department another on Dante and TS Eliot.)
[CAJ] I have indeed invited guests – visitors to come and talk or give lectures to my classes, for example Professor Arturo Tosi from Royal Holloway University gave after school time a power point illustrated talk on “The Commedia Dell’Arte” to an audience of mixed students of Italian and Drama. The talk was followed by a dance and movement workshop on the main Characters of the Commedia, performed by the Drama students. I always provide the students with the related vocabulary and spend some lessons on the topic the Speaker would deal with beforehand. The visitor-speakers bring in with them, together with their interesting life experience and professional skills, the inspiration and stimulus for the learners of how the study of the Italian Language could be embedded in a more varied and viable Curriculum at both Secondary School and University.
- Do you go on trips to places of interest and incorporate mobile learning activities? Is the choice of these places influenced by ideas of interdisciplinarity in learning?
[CAJ] Most of the outings, trips and exchanges organised and delivered during my thirty years of teaching Italian in London have been planned by keeping in mind some ideas of interdisciplinarity: Art + History of Fascism & Italian Language at The Estorick Collection of Italian Modern Art in Islington; Latin + History of Roman London & Italian Language at The Museum of London; Fashion + Design & Technology and Italian Language at the Armani Exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. In those days I used hand-outs, maps and paper questionnaires; nowadays I would use tablets and mobiles for the learners to download back up maps, information and assign activities and tasks.
[PL] We organise trips where possible in London, to exhibitions, galleries etc. (and to the cinema and theatre where appropriate). Recently we visited the Estorick Collection in Islington with a guide in Italian, and we are hoping to repeat this with the Italian fashion exhibition at the V&A later this year.
Clearly, trips such as these are subconsciously influenced by ideas of interdisciplinarity – awareness and understanding of different aspects of Italian culture and society.
Trips to Italy in holiday time are another important aspect. It is virtually impossible to fund full-scale school trips for the small number of A Level students I have, but I do regularly take year 10 students who are not studying Italian on a trip to Florence and I have also ‘piggy-backed’ on an Art History trip to Italy. Schools with larger cohorts of Italian students do organise successful exchange programmes with schools in Italy.
- What media are commonly used to support learning activities? For instance films, tv, internet, music, art etc.
[CAJ]The media commonly used are TV, films on video and mostly on DVDs, Audio & Music CDs, Computer (Power Point activities and tasks on Magic Board), and Internet.
[PL] The internet is now a crucial source of teaching materials (newspaper articles, blogs, and grammar exercises, audio and video material…). There are an increasing number of sites which can point students and teachers to suitable material (e.g. for listening and cultural topics, news.centrodiascolto.it).
TV. Via the internet, it is now possible to access a fantastic variety of TV programmes from soap operas to documentaries. In practical terms one can advise students to spend a little time watching Italian programmes (for instance via rai.tv), but in class its most effective use is as audio-visual material for studying historical and political issues (for instance via La storia siamo noi or Blu notte).
Music, mainly in the form of popular songs to back up or reinforce grammatical points of as starting points for discussions on topics. Examples might include Celentano (il ragazzo della via Gluck) and Gaber (Quant’è bella la città) when studying issues of town versus country or the post war economic boom alongside reading extracts from Marcovaldo and other material. Encouraging pupils to listen to and learn songs can be very motivating and profitable. I have used extracts from opera as well as popular song. I have also used extracts form opera to introduce grammar points (eg passato remoto using Vissi d’arte and other arias.) I have also used an extract from Monteverdi’s Orfeo to talk about the pastoral in year 13 enrichment classes.
Film. It is worth distinguishing here between film as an object of study (as might be chosen as an alternative to the study of a literary text) and as a support, backup or illustration when studying a topic. For example, there is no shortage of films illustrating issues to do with organised crime or terrorism, but it is unlikely that any would be studied in their entirety when studying the topic. Let us not forget however, a film as the end of term ‘sweetener’ – the opportunity to spend the last two or three lessons of the term or year ‘enjoying’ watching a suitable film.
Art. Less common to use art or photography as they are essentially ‘wordless’ and therefore do not provide new vocabulary or expressions per se. However, images are often used for a variety of purposes such as a stimulus for speaking or (descriptive) writing. However, it might be possible to incorporate works of art in the study of Italian history such as these:
Or posters such as these when talking of the post-war economic boom (or classic TV adverts for the same):
- Can you talk about a specific example of interdisciplinary teaching?
[CAJ] In March 2009 as the teacher of Italian at Latymer Upper I was asked by Mrs Barbara Romito Head of Languages at The Latymer Preparatory School to help and work jointly in the planning and coordination of a special event for the primary children called “The Italian week”. The event saw the involvement of a team of teachers from the Prep School and a few from the Upper including almost all the disciplines: Mats, Science, Geography, Music, Art, Drama, Dance, Italian Language, and Latin. The whole of the Prep building was covered with the pupils’ art-work items and posters reminiscent of the most famous Italian Cities and People like Leonardo, Galileo, Michelangelo and others. Each day of the week had a theme and all classes were engaged: for the Science lesson a visitor Speaker arrived dressed as Galileo Galilei to surprise the pupils who later worked on an experiment switching from English to basic Italian science terminology and using all apparatus labelled in Italian. My Students of A2 Italian performed a mini slapstick Comedy based on Commedia Dell’Arte’s characters for the joy of their younger peer and it all ended with the “tarantella” being danced by teachers and pupils alike!
[PL] A recent example would be viewing Bellocchio’s La bella addormentata when studying the topic of euthanasia/assisted suicide through the story of Eluana Elgardo (along with short television clips of statements from politicians). This was only a partial success as more work would be needed to refine what aspects or passages from the film to concentrate on – the pupils found the film rather confusing!
RESOURCES
- If you could influence a move towards interdisciplinary teaching practices, what are three things you would do?
[PL]
- Influence examination boards/Ofqual in the construction and design of new A levels (or teaching frameworks) so as to make the prescription top-down.
- Commission/write models for teachers to use – i.e. exemplar teaching units, possibly with materials, but certainly providing teachers with the structure and incentive to teach elements of a GCSE or A level course in this way.
- Training for teachers. Could the next phase of the project involve a teacher conference?
[CAJ]
- CURRICULUM DESIGNINING: I would try to influence the people at the very top, Head of School, Director of Studies, my own HOD about introducing interdisciplinarity via giving them practical examples of it in my subject.
- TRAINING STAFF: all teachers should receive a proper training about interdisciplinarity with specialist talks and hands-on workshops.
- MICRO-PROGRAMME: start with a micro-programme of a week, a month perhaps and try a combination of subjects; assess and evaluate the pro and contra and good luck!
- What resources would you need in order to bring more interdisciplinarity in your teaching?
[CAJ] I reckon to have access to the Internet through mobile learning tools such as portable devices like mobiles, tablets so that the students can read and download the required information. We have to take into account of course the students’ progress and knowledge of the language and perhaps suggest them accessible Italian sites that we as teachers have tried already.
Iconic Images in Modern Italy: Politics, Culture and Society.
The 2013 conference of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, which took place on 22 and 23 November at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, London, put in sharp focus a gap in the literature that Pieri had highlighted during her paper at the SIS (Durham) conference in the summer: the study of visual culture and the field of visual cultural studies. It is fair to say that Italianists in UK universities, whilst they have come to embrace cultural studies and particularly the study of cinema, now embedded in the curriculum in many departments around the country, showed less enthusiasm for the study of visual culture, which after the departure of art history from the pages of the journal Italian Studies, seemed to occupy a very marginal place in both research and teaching in Italian Studies. This two day conference, organized by two specialists in photography and visual culture, Alessandra Antola and Martina Caruso, showcased an array of very exciting research on images as vehicles for cultural and political identity in modern Italy. As the President of ASMI, Prof. Stephen Gundle, noted in his address, a conference with a focus on images would have been unthinkable when ASMI was first founded in the 1980s by scholars with research interests in political science and history. The cultural shift was accompanied by a visual one; both are testament to the significant changes in research and teaching within the field of Italian Studies and the role of visual and cultural material in the research and teaching practices of social scientists and historians. We now have a more complex and nuanced conception of history and politics in which cultural production sits more comfortably alongside other social, anthropological and economic factors. This shift does however call for interdisciplinary perspectives and a renewed dialogue between the social and economic sciences and the humanities.
Of the many iconic images that filled two very busy days, one seemed to be particularly significant in the context of an interdisciplinary dialogue: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of the Rags [Venere degli stracci], 1967, 1974 (Tate Modern) which formed part of the analysis by Prof. Robert Lumley (UCL) of the role of monuments and anti-monuments in Italian art as central vehicles for national identity and its critique in modern Italy. Pistoletto’s Venus, facing a mountain of rags, is in the words of Lumley ‘gently mocking’ the grandiosity of the monument. The choice of medium is significant: Venus is not a precious marble statue reminiscent of the grand narrative of classical art but she is made of cement a material with very modern connotations. The rags are the tangible representation of the ephemeral and the everyday celebrated in Arte Povera. Politics, art practice, economic and social history and theory are some of the disciplines which could make this work their own by looking at the role of counterculture and social and political unrest in Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s.
What are your iconic image(s) of Italy?
New interdisciplinary project on photographer Luigi Ghirri
The interest in taking interdisciplinary and interartistic approaches to Italian cultural figures continues, as a new project is announced on Luigi Ghirri: ‘Viewing and writing Italian Landscape: Luigi Ghirri and his legacy in photography and literature’, funded by Leverhulme and the British Academy. Marina Spunta (University of Leicester) and Jacopo Benci (The British School at Rome) are the principal and co-investigators. The project runs from now until August 2015 and its inaugural event is a conference at the British School in Rome, on Wednesday 9th October 2013. Marina has joined our own Advisory Board. Its objectives are to widen the study of the works of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992), and to explore his legacy in photography, literature and other disciplines (such as geography and aesthetics) and contemporary practices (such as art, the moving image, architecture) and to examine the intersections between photography, narrative writing on space/place and landscape.
The first event is next week: “Come pensare per immagini?’ Luigi Ghirri e la fotografia / How to think in images? Luigi Ghirri and photography”, at The British School at Rome, mercoledì 9 ottobre 2013, dalle 9.30 alle 19.30. The event is free and open to all. See the project website for details: http://www.le.ac.uk/ghirri and the blog http://staffblogs.le.ac.uk/luigighirri/
‘ITALIAN TRANSMEDIA CULTURE’: STORIES AND STORYTELLING ACROSS MEDIA by Emanuela Patti
On the occasion of the last SIS Biennial Conference (Durham, 7-11 July), I organized a panel entitled ‘Italian transmedia culture: stories and storytelling across media’ which included papers presented by Marco Amici (Cork), Emanuela Piga (Cagliari), Marina Guglielmi (Cagliari), Giulio Iacoli (Parma), Ilaria Masenga (Exeter) and myself. The panel aimed to investigate Italian storytelling across media, with a special focus on how new media technologies have fundamentally changed our methods of story constructions and modes of reception. One of the most remarkable experiences emerging from the convergence of old and new media is indeed ‘transmedia storytelling’ (Jenkins 2007). As a result, this new medial hybridity has challenged the classical concepts of adaptation and intertextuality usually employed in literary and film studies. It has also reinforced the need for a rethinking of the boundaries of fictionality, genre, authorship and identity in relation to new technologies. The main topics addressed were new narrative practices across media and how older forms were extended (narrative interaction, multimodality, remediation of genres across media), authorship (dispersed authorship, co-creation, fan fiction, collective authorship), reception/participation of audiences (from traditional audiences to social networks, cultural production and communities). Papers looked at forms of cross-fertilisation between textual, pictorial, graphic and audio-visual mediality Italian literature, cinema, audio-visual and performative arts have responded to transmediality and how digital imaginaries shape and relate to our way of narrating ourselves and our creative practices.
I introduced the panel and the first session, Literature across borders, with the paper Dalla Galassia Gutenberg alla Galassia Internet: storie e narrazioni transmediali attraverso i media which mapped the development of media transmedia narratives in XXI century Italian fiction from Wu Ming to Scrittura Industriale Collettiva. In the next paper, Transmedia and Genre Narrative: Some Observations on United We Stand by Simone Sarasso and Daniele Rudoni, Marco Amici focused on a specific case study to investigate the new digital genre of net graphic novel and how this enacts a multimodal representation between fiction and history. In the third paper, La comunità convergente: memorie condivise e narrazioni in rete, Emanuela Piga examined the transmedial extension of the novel Manituana by Wu Ming and the role of communities around the collective’s blog Giap, looking at the conceptual relationship between ‘open work’ and ‘open source’. The second session, Rethinking Adaptation and Reception in the Era of Convergence Culture, started with Marina Guglielmi’s paper on the reception of classics in Walt Disney comics and fan-fictions. In the second paper, Mariposas in volo: analisi spaziale di un adattamento, da Sergio Atzeni a Salvatore Mereu, Giulio Iacoli examined practices of intermediality between Sergio Atzeni’s novel and Salvatore Mereu’s film, focusing on the visual translation of space and the narrator. Finally, Ilaria Masenga’s paper, Coming of Age in the Social Media Era: Literature, Readership and Fandom in Contemporary Italy, explored readers’ response and fandom in Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Facebook fan page. The following debate was lively and stimulating addressing questions like power and representation, new media and ideologies, communities and collective identity.
Panel on Interdisciplinarity in Teaching by Giuliana Pieri – Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, Durham, 8th July 2013
Giuliana Pieri, in her paper on ‘Vision and Visuality in Italian Studies’, explored a surprising blind spot in the current field of Italian studies: the interdisciplinary field of Visual Studies. In 2010 the SIS journal Italian Studies moved to three issues per year, with a third issue dedicate to Cultural Studies (under the editorship of Prof. Derek Duncan). Since the publication of the volume Italian Cultural Studies: an Introduction, edited by D. Forcags and R. Lumley (1996) the field of Italian studies in the UK has witnessed a marked change in the direction of scholarly research and teaching. Cultural Studies responded to a broader conception of the boundaries of the disciplinary field, especially through the introduction of the study of Italian cinema, now an almost ubiquitous choice in the UG curriculum. Yet the cognate disciplinary area of Visual Cultural Studies, which also developed in the 1990s as a response to the theoretical changes that challenged the boundaries of Art History, has not been fully embraced by scholars in Italian Studies. Whilst we consider the theoretical and institutional challenges of interdisciplinary research in the UK in the 21st century, Pieri’s paper invited us to think about what is a discipline, what forces help to shape its boundaries, how can such boundaries be challenged and redefined, and, ultimatelly, what does the resistance to new disciplinary boundaries say about the state and future directions of a discipline.
Interdisciplinarity in the Secondary Modern Languages Curriculum, failed experiment or way forward? by Peter Langdale – Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, Durham, 8th July 2013
Before the radical changes to the languages curriculum that began in the late 1980s, the study of literature and the language required to read it were the unique focus of languages study in secondary schools. By comparison, the modern (Italian) A level contains very little study of literature, if any, and the syllabus is designed around a defined list of culturally non-specific ‘General Topics’ chosen, it would seem, according to a politically correct agenda. In practice, of course, many teachers introduce a great deal of up to date and specifically Italian content, often by redefining or adapting topic headings to include aspects of Italian history, economics, politics and so forth, especially at A2. It is true that in the second year of the course, students are expected to study one more specific (historical, geographic, social or cultural) topic but it is only assessed by a brief essay. The fact remains that very little of A Level is assessed for a candidate’s knowledge or understanding of Italy or Italian society. A new equivalent examination (Pre-U) attempts to introduce a more interdisciplinary approach, allowing for the study of a cultural topic studied through the prism of a minimum of two plays, films or books as well as a specified work of literature, though the vast majority of schools will undoubtedly continue to offer A level. With A level reform underway, it is incumbent on all, including universities who have been promised ‘ownership’ of A level by the Secretary of State, to contribute to the design of the new ‘more rigorous’ examinations which are due to be introduced in the next 2 or 3 years. Here is an opportunity to encourage (through the design of the new examinations) the study of a range of culturally specific, interdisciplinary topics to promote student interest in the culture of the language being studied, to eliminate ‘study’ of such topics as climate change and drug abuse and so make the study of Italian (or French, or German or Spanish), in sixth forms at least, more distinctive and stimulating for the student.
Panel on Interdisciplinarity in Teaching by Clodagh Brook – Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, Durham, 8th July 2013
Interdisciplinarity is everywhere seen as normative, necessary, and part of what we do, and need to do, as academics. It’s good, isn’t it, to bring in documentaries when we teach history? It makes our courses more alive, surely, if we bring in paintings when we teach Renaissance literature? One can argue too that literature and film, the mainstays of our Italian Studies programmes, are also per se interdisciplinary – containing within them economics, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies and so on. However, despite the omnipresence of interdisciplinarity, as Alan Liu puts it (1989), interdisciplinary study is the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy.
In the paper, the first question posed by Dr Brook was whether interdisciplinary practice could strengthen the position of the discipline. She discussed what happens when Italian Studies lecturers work across campus to create networks (for a formalisation of this process, see Columbia University’s The Italian Academy founded 1991), or how working with those in other fields outside of academia facilitates impact cases and helps the discipline grow its public engagement profile, thus strengthening its position nationally.
However, she also addressed the threat of disaggregration. In his book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings challenges some of the ambitious claims made for interdisciplinarity, suggesting that the term is malleable, and can be easily appropriated in pursuit of the market-orientated university’s aims. In other words, interdisciplinarity has as much to do with Universities managing budgets and being flexible to the demands of the marketplace as it does with the admirable aims of intellectual dialogue and co-operation, since merging departments into interdisciplinary programmes can be a form of downsizing and cost-cutting (Readings, 191). This is not to say that interdisciplinarity is bad, per se, but that we need to be careful of how it is used. The second danger that needs to be faced is that of losing a sense of an overarching shape or sense to the disciplines. It is by means of disciplines that thinking traditions take shape and they have contributed immensely to the production of knowledge (Mills in the HEA’s Interdisciplinarity: A Literature Review, 2007), and to its curation and defence. They promote rigour and depth, which provides a good foil to the breadth of interdisciplinarity. If the discipline changes rapidly and in different ways from University to University it is hard to defend the need to have anything specific at all within its borders. While interdisciplinary brings benefits, these potential threats need to be taken on board.
In the paper, Dr Brook also explored a second question: how can we use interdisciplinarity (and pluridisciplinarity) to make teaching more interesting and worthwhile for students. She explored various possibilities, including clarifying student pathways with students, rethinking our introductory courses so that they also pose questions about the discipline and what questions get asked within it and who its players are (and are not), asking students to co-write essays with fellow students from other Departments, like History of Art or Architecture, inviting guest lecturers from other Departments to give classes on our courses, and using the Year Abroad better as a living laboratory for art, architecture, cinema, music. Here too, there are, of course, potential obstacles, such as the time-consuming organisation of team teaching and pedagogical issues around replacing depth of understanding with breadth.
Italian Studies is already an interdisciplinary, or probably more exactly, a pluridisciplinary discipline. We have film and literature in our Departments in a pluridisciplinary way, but how often do we bring them together and ask, for example, how has cinema affected writing in Italy? Dr Brook ended the presentation by suggesting that we think more about where the gaps in our interdisciplinary/pluridisciplinary practice lie. Who are we not working with and why? Why are we working so little with Education, with Psychology, with Music, even English and IT, and into the hard sciences? Our discipline, if not looked at with due reflexivity, loses sight of the amount of knowledge not accessible to it by the limits of its boundaries. We need too to be more aware of our interdisciplinary practice and to communicate this to students and to find the right balance in our courses between breadth and depth in our courses.
This is a time of change and challenge for Italian Studies. The relation of this discipline to others is crucial to navigating the threats of disaggregation and strengthening our hand.
Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge)
Experiment/Experience
Pierpaolo Antonello’s contribution to the third Interdisciplinary Italy Workshop held at University College London, Saturday, 11th May 2013, can be accessed here:
experimentexperience powerpoint
Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Martina Caruso (Courtauld)
Fotografia circa 1968
I focus on the chiasmus that occurred between art, and photography in particular, around 1968 in Italy. By then artists had begun to creatively use photographic documents, rendering the medium an accepted art form. Photographers, conversely, started to experiment with the conceptual and self-reflexive potential of the medium beyond its perceived documentary straightjacket.
1968 represents a recognised locus for political and social fermentation and unrest as well as a heightened moment for neo-Dada and conceptual art experimentation. It was a time when photographers began to mix socially and professionally with artists. Nevertheless these ‘categories’ (art and photography) still tend to be examined separately in an art history subsumed by the arte povera movement promoted by Germano Celant.
At the time, Benedetto Croce’s 1902 idea that “photography is not quite art” still prevailed. Even current research that tries to draw links between art and photography maintains an inevitable separation that does not allow for the thematic and political cross-cuttings that began to occur between both practices in the late 1960s.
My investigation is the first to develop conceptual connections between the work of photographers and artists. Photographers like Mario Cresci, Ugo Mulas and Franco Vaccari began their careers in the 1950s and early 1960s making socially-engaged humanist documentary photographs. Their neorealist imagery shows a post-war Italy of folklore, behaviour and habits that were rapidly disappearing. In the late 1960s they began to look towards the world of art and experiment with installation, abstraction and seriality, influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s ultimate refusal to create. Around the same time, following the use of photographic imagery in pop art, conceptual artists like Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Emilio Prini began to use photography to play with ideas of perception.
Cresci, Mulas and Vaccari’s early photographs reveal a very distant world, while their later photographs can now be seen to occupy the realm of conceptual art. While a perceived divide that still exists between ‘artists’ and ‘photographers’, this presentation focuses on the social, conceptual and political ways in which their work is connected.
Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Steve Halfyard (Birmingham Conservatoire)
Music/ theatre/ virtuosity: Berio, Berberian and Eco at the Studio di Fonologia
Dr Steve Halfyard examined the work Luciano Berio did involving language with Umberto Eco and Cathy Berberian at the studio di fonologia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the profound impact on his subsequent compositions outside the studio as he sought to translate musical ideas he had explored electronically to live situations, the result being a new virtuosity in his instrumental writing as a key element in the way that he brought ideas of music and theatre together, especially in the series of pieces entitled Sequenza. Read more in the slide show with commentary here: Berio
Luciano Berio: Sequenza III for woman’s voice (1965) Performed by Steve Halfyard (Birmingham Conservatoire)
Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Catharine Rossi (Kingston)
Experimentation Through/With/Against the Past: The Role of Craft in Italian Design
The 1960s represent a moment of transition in post-war Italian design. The earlier part of the decade was defined by its dominance in the international design marketplace, thanks to the desirable luxuries conceived by architects such as Gio Ponti and Vico Magistretti who were able to turn their modernizing, glamorizing hand to everything from the vernacular materials of Italy’s historic craft traditions to the newer realm of plastics.
The progressing decade saw a critical voice emerge amongst designers concerned at design’s market orientation. This was evident in the Radical Design movement whose designs ironically embraced kitsch and bad taste. Radical Design’s anti-modernist stance would become more transgressive and less-object based in the early 1970s before the advent of full-blown postmodernism with Studio Alchymia and Memphis by the 1980s.
Although well known in their own right, the links between these sixties and eighties in Italian design has received little critical examination. An interdisciplinary approach could provide the way to examine this; architects such as Ettore Sottsass, central figure to both Radical Design and Italian postmodernism, expressed their critical position through a conscious engagement with a discipline close to, but distinct from, design; craft, a realm with its own distinct, but largely unwritten, history. This is a realm described by the craft historian Glenn Adamson as a “horizon” or a “conceptual limit” in artistic modernity, I argue that it occupies the same position in relation to design.[1]
There are three main ways that design could be seen to have productively played at this border with craft – first, through craft; the turn to artisanal makers for the physical realization of ideas, as in Sottsass’s reliance on the artisans behind the production of his Superboxes for Poltronova. Designed in 1966, the Superboxes’ Pop art references expressed his rejection of Italian design’s elitism and attempt to connect with contemporary consumer culture.
Second, with craft; the embrace of historic Italian craft traditions such as ceramics and enamelware for surface experimentation and the exploration of alternative values in our relationship with material culture by way of craft concepts such as the vernacular. This is seen in Sottsass’ Ceramiche delle Tenebre and Ceramiche di Shiva, made in the early 1960s in response to the architects’ illness and which spoke of his travels to both North America and India in this period.
Third, against craft; the active and visible negation of craft concepts – such as luxury and workmanship. This was evident in the use of plastic laminates in objects such as the Superboxes, a material that would become the mainstay of Memphis designs such as Sottsass’s Casablanca sideboard from 1981, and a casual approach that informed Sottsass’s enthusiasm for the particular workmanship of Renzo Brugola, the furniture maker who would oversee the production of Memphis objects.
As this brief summary has attempted to demonstrate, examining this interdisciplinary activity has implications for our understanding of Italian design, both in terms of its interdisciplinary and postmodern qualities. Ultimately it shows that interdisciplinarity can be a useful way to think through design practice just as Sottsass actively used another discipline – craft – to think through his own.
References and Further Reading
Adamson, Glenn, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007)
Adamson, Glenn and Jane Pavitt (eds.) Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990 (London: V&A Museum, 2011)
Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design, trans. by C.H. Evans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984)
Radice, Barbara, Memphis: Research, Experiences, Results, Failures and Successes of New Design, trans. by Paul Blanchard (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985)
Sparke, Penny, Italian Design 1870 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988)
[1] Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 2.
Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Robert Lumley (UCL)
Robert Lumley’s report of his contribution to the third Interdisciplinary Italy Workshop held at University College London, Saturday, 11th May 2013, can be accessed here:
Sit in- Art Design and Politics in Italy in the 1960s
Discussion panel, Università degli Studi di Roma 3: How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?
By Clodagh Brook
Our group were exploring metaphors of borders and their ability to enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better, and also looking at concepts of facilitating, policing and transgression.
Our discussion began with the strong imperative, voiced and seconded by members of the group, to map the contemporary period: its thought, the origin of that thought, the significant players, across the range of the arts, who now produce work though the Internet. Unlike the periods of modernism and the neoavantguardia/post-modernism, which we explored in the New York and London workshops, the contemporary period is so close to us that it disappears into a thousand fragments, rather like Antonioni’s hyper-enlarged pictures of the crime scene in Blow up. It is fluid and only partially and temporarily canonised. While a great deal has been written in media studies, sociology and so on about the changes wrought by the Internet, very little work is done specifically on the cultural shift within Italy.
We spent some time discussing the possible metaphors which might be used to approach interdisciplinarity. We looked particularly at relevant theoretical work: from Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome (developed in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project) which allows for proliferation, the multiple, and the non-hierarchical; from the writings of Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, to the new understandings of subjectivity, identity, and freedom expressed in so-called post-humanist thought (Katherine Hayles (Writing and Machines), Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto), Rosi Braidotti (the nomadic subject). There was also discussion of the importance of the ‘secondo oralità’ in the Internet age, and the possible outcomes of this. There was some discussion too of the works bringing together literature and technology by George Landow and Katherine Hayles, and mentions of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alvin I. Goldman and Renato Barile, alongside arte povera and arte concettuale. Conversation turned inevitably to Wu Ming, and especially to an example of a piece of graffiti by Blu on a wall of an occupied building, the Xm24 in Bologna, which Wu Ming commented on and of which they told the story story http://radio.rcdc.it/archives/occupymordor-wu-ming-racconta-blu-116698/ . In it Tolkien’s narrative becomes part of Blu’s political graffiti, and it then narrated by Wu Ming; the story migrates and changes through different mediums. The discussion therefore threw up a variety of possible metaphors and practices.
Power and the surveillance of borders was then discussed. Who polices the huge, and ever growing number of new genres and virtual artistic de-formations? We discussed how in the literary world it is editors who police text, but the Internet is of course bypassing this by publishing material directly on line. The ideology of participation is clearly important here, and needs more research to be done on it. While it’s clear that old forms of power and authority are being removed or shifted, no one in our group had a definitive answer for where new forms of power were collecting. There were some possible directions indicated: new global powers (including new global languages like English), hackers, the continuing social power of the Premio Strega, blogs creating an on-line territoriality competing with the off-line one and especially the powerful personalities of some of these bloggers.
Emanuela Piga thought that it would be interesting to contrast the reactions to texts on the web to reactions within the institutions – looking at blogs competing with off-line work.
We agreed that a collective bibliography would be a good next step.
This group still lacks people working on contemporary design and on music and we should endeavour to get representatives from these fields involved in the project.
Advertising campaign for the 31st edition of the Oporto International Film Festival, Fantasporto 2011, realised by DraftFCB (http://www.draftfcb.com/) in Jornal de Notícias, Lisbon, 24 February 2011. http://reface.me/humor/bloody-like-button/
Discussion panel, Università degli Studi di Roma 3: How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?
By Emanuela Patti
Our group focused on borders and border crossing in relation to interdisciplinarity in the Internet age. The first part of our discussion covered issues like the relationship between academic journal and blogs in interdisciplinary intellectual discourse, as well as forms of transmedia storytelling from narrative texts to narrative landscape. Following our stimulating discussion, one of the first questions to answer is the following: does our Internet ‘brainframe’ (De Kerckhove) influence the way we approach the disciplines and their relation to each other? I have gathered a few thoughts on this issue. In a media ecological perspective, the answer would be positive. The assumption would be that the socio-technological environment we live in has an impact on the way we conceive knowledge and interact with the world. In this sense, representation and cultural practice are strictly related to the technologies that, respectively, produce and facilitate them. As Neil Postman said, ‘Our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture’. Drawing on Postman, we could then reformulate the questions above in the following terms: what does the border crossing of the Internet tell us about interdisciplinarity? And, more precisely, how does the rhizomatic structure of the Internet contribute to interdisciplinary thinking? How is this competing with the other media through which we develop and communicate knowledge, especially the book? In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan emphasizes that the way we have conceived knowledge up to the electronic age has been influenced by the linear narrative structure of the printed book and the predominance of the sight on all other senses. The so-called ‘book mentality’ has significantly contributed to giving a sense of an ending to our narratives and creating our ‘point of view’ on the world. Also, it has encouraged disciplinary specialisation and the fragmentation of knowledge. If we consider academia as the place in which specialised knowledge is developed to its highest levels, we could further explore how virtual interconnectedness is challenging the compartmentalisation of physical and disciplinary areas in our universities, how new narrative forms of knowledge can co-exist with traditional ones and what consequences the former and the latter would have on knowledge development in our networked culture.
Discussion panel on the causes of contemporary interdisciplinarity, Università degli Studi di Roma 3: Where do the roots of contemporary interdisciplinarity lie? Why has it taken place in Italy during this period and what contributed to these developments? What is the place of technology in the development of cross-fertilisation?
By Florian Mussgnug
Rome, 22April 2013: For some participants of our second workshop, “Italian Interdisciplinarity in the Internet Age”, the afternoon ended with an intensive and illuminating discussion about the causes of contemporary interdisciplinarity, and about the specific influence of new communication networks. Our debate acknowledged the importance of technological progress, and distinguished between three significant elements: the physical dimension (new hardware), the digital dimension (new ways of creating and storing information), and the semantic dimension (cyberspace). We agreed that the existence of the last two depends crucially on the first, but decided that, for reasons of competence as well as time constraints, we would focus on the second and third domain. This allowed us to adopt a less technically specific definition of “internet”: a network of communications that grants a computer anywhere in the world rapid access to any other computer’s information.
The semantic dimension (“cyberspace”), it was felt, has a particular relevance for the production of new works of art, but also for new forms of social organization and collective action. In this context, our discussion focused on hypertexts and the specific status of genre literature. Over the past decade, we agreed, the direct impact of the internet had been most conspicuous in relation to clearly codified literary genres and sub-genres, such as epistolary writing. At the same time, internet literature had encouraged new forms of reader involvement, i.e. movement and interactivity rather than self-distancing and passive absorption. For some members of our group these dynamics and textual possibilities were anticipated in interesting ways by the non-linear fictions and “open” narratives of the mid-Twentieth Century. For others, the emergence of collective and hypertextual narratives appeared more specifically linked to global communication technologies, and therefore unique to the internet age. We agreed that the dynamics of literary readership and reception were still underexplored, and that there was a substantial need for further enquiry, not only from a theoretical-philosophical perspective but also at the level of quantitative, sociolinguistic and socio-cultural analysis.
Our appreciation of the digital domain was largely undisputed. We acknowledged the importance of the internet as an archive for works originally published under “old” technologies. In this context, we emphasized the crucial role of digitalization, not only for the scholarly presentation of archival material, but also for the rapid and widespread divulgation of texts. The members of our group saw increased ease of access as a fundamental precondition for contemporary scholarly research, and a prerequisite for teaching and widening access. But basic “internet literacy” was a source of concern, in this context. It was felt that the digitalization of archival material and free and instant access to information were most beneficial to a highly educated minority, many of whom had been trained in more “traditional” learning environments. New readers without appropriate training, by contrast, were, in our opinion, likely to be disoriented by the millions of blogs, bulletin boards, and websites available online, and would probably struggle to recognize more authoritative sources. We further established that a genuine understanding of the physical domain (hardware), and of programming was the privilege of a small number of specialists, and that this had potentially worrying consequences. Finally, we expressed our concern about the fragility of digital information storage, which contrasts greatly with the solidity and durability of the book.
Finally, we made an attempt to relate the contemporary interest in interdiscplinarity to what we perceived as a profound crisis of traditional institutions of learning and research, in higher education. In this context, we referred to some recent attacks against “overspecialization” and the widespread view that scholarship in the humanities is self-limiting and self-referential. We established that this view is problematic. But we also expressed concern about the difficult and lengthy process of acquiring credentials in academia, especially for scholars working in the arts and humanities, where disciplinary boundaries are particularly open to re-interpretation. In conclusion, we agreed that disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary curiosity were equally necessary for the wellbeing of the arts and humanities, and that the “internet age”, despite its evident challenges, had enhanced our ability to think critically, to understand and criticize authority and tradition, to sympathize with the marginalized and different.
Plant Guilds http://jaromil.dyne.org/artworks
Permaculture urban laboratory http://urbaniahoeve.nl
Discussion panel on policy implications, Università degli Studi di Roma 3: How can interdisciplinarity inspire new patterns of research and teaching?
By Giuliana Pieri
Panel: M. Gargiulo (Bergen), Joanna Kostylo (The British School at Rome), (Università Statale, Milano), G. Pieri (RHUL).
Marco Gargiulo’s observation on the interdisciplinary nature of many job adverts in Italian Studies in UK universities (asking for instance teaching and/or research expertise in 20th-century literature AND cinema) was the starting point for our discussion on the interdisciplinary thrust of Italian Studies in the UK. Departmental structures, with Italian as part of larger groupings which include alternatively European Languages and Cultures and European Studies, were viewed by the panel as a sign of the de facto interdisciplinary context in which we currently operate.
Our discussion moved onto to three levels at which interdisciplinary research and teaching operate in academic institutions:
- The research interests of the individual scholar. This area was further broken down into:
- The need for scholars to establish their reputation by building a portfolio of publications in specific areas in order to respond to the academic job market.
- The book market and its disciplinary boundaries which respond to marketing needs/strategies.
- The research and publication model which is prevalent in the humanities which does not favour multiple authors.
- Departmental interests and structures which may foster or hinder those of the individual. Examples which we briefly touched upon were research clusters within departments; the artificial grouping of modern foreign languages which fosters comparative approaches within certain areas (ex. Linguistics and literary studies) but not others (English, history, music are very seldom linked at departmental level with modern European languages).
- Wider institutional interests. For example, the launch by many UK universities of research themes which could be seen as either a means to foster interdisciplinary research OR to curb intellectual freedom. Or the impact of research assessment in the UK—Italian Studies will be assessed by a Modern Languages panel for the first time.
As the previous discussion panel at NYU noted, financial factors seems to have an impact on interdisciplinary research. The drive towards interdisciplinarity can help institutions to frame more positively departmental cuts and restructuring, but it is also linked to the policies of national and European funding bodies to which universities and individuals need to respond. This was seen by some members of our panel as a threat to the individual scholar and the high quality research which in the Humanities is still often the preserve of the lone scholar.
A different model of fostering interdisciplinarity could be seen within non-academic institutions. We talked about the British School at Rome in which for instance scholars with a shared interest in Italian culture, literature, art, archaeology and artists share the same physical and metaphorical roof.
Our final thought was that discussing interdisciplinary research and teaching in Italian Studies was a means to open up discussion on the identity of Italian Studies and the place and status of the discipline in different national and institutional contexts.
Post on Philosophical and ideological underpinnings of Interdisciplinary modernism.
How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?
The main areas we discussed were border crossing and transgressing. We looked at the fact that the literary rhetorical load of the great work of art in Italy made it more difficult for Italians to transgress. We also looked at how much the establishment recognized the transgression, especially in relation to the time lag between the border crossings in the arts and its recognition in Universities and other parts of the establishment. Croce’s influence on early 20th society was of particular importance, as effectively policed the boundaries of art to exclude, for example, fashion (an attitude that postmodernism, with its fusing of high and low art, changed).
However, conversely, the use of the avant-garde by the fascist establishment means that there is a utility to saying ‘no’, i.e. when border-crossing is taken on by particular powers within the establishment. Boundaries may then need to be reinstated. As Eco tells us, of course, the revolutions of the past become the conventions of the present.
In other words, there is a “multispeed” aspect to porosity which needs to be taken into account. In early twentieth century, there was a porosity between the high arts, but not really between high and low. We thought it interesting to explore further which boundaries were, and were not, porous.
We brought in the architectural term of ‘refunctioning’ in relation to traditional arts and the idea of ‘disorderly return’ which springs up at the borders between the reactionary and the progressive.
We also touched on policy in relation to transgression: in the current teaching of Italian Studies, there is a sidelining of literature in favour of an interdisciplinary approach. To go against the dominant ideology of interdisciplinarity is in this context revolutionary.
In relation to creativity, the group generally felt that boundary crossing between the arts in Modernism was not necessarily a magic formula for creativity. Being constrained can increase creativity.
Discussion panel on policy implications, New York University, Casa Italiana: how can interdisciplinarity inspire new patterns of research and teaching?
Panel: R. Ben-Ghiat (NYU), J. Champagne (PennState), G. Pieri (RHUL), L. Somigli (Toronto University).
Our discussion group benefited from multiple national perspectives (US, Canada, UK). We focused on a number of interrelated issues and took as our starting point the morning sessions which raised the issue of the kind of disciplinary training that makes interdisciplinary connections possible.
The first point we discussed was related to funding and resources in institutions and how they may be linked to the current drive towards interdisciplinarity as a means to group together cognate disciplines which have traditionally occupied separate spaces. Is this a money saving exercise? Is this the future of smaller subject and/or disciplinary areas in the face of current funding cuts in the arts and humanities sectors?
We also discussed the effect of the need to offer courses in English (with all material in English translation) and how that may affect the teaching of Italian content courses. It is fair to say that we were less preoccupied with this issue since we saw language learning as often separate from the teaching of content. Tighter links between language and content in Italian Studies may or may not be desirable, since the come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages.
Our discussion then moved onto another central issue: what is the difference between a mono-disciplinary and an interdisciplinary approach from a pedagogical point of view? We spent a lot of time over the thorny issue of transmission of knowledge and the relative merits of different approaches to disciplinary boundaries.
This led us also to discuss the idea of the canon and the shifts in the Italian curriculum. J. Champagne offered the perspective of English in which the canon, as he put it, is simply ‘too large to cover it all’. We noted the similarity with the situation in Italian Studies in which a once traditional curriculum, dominated by the study of Italian literature, now includes a variety of other areas of study, especially cinema, history, and the visual arts. We thought that the expanding boundaries of the curriculum could/should be seen as a liberating force which allows a much more flexible approach to curriculum design and delivery. We also wondered whether the fact that we still think of the boundaries of the specific disciplines may be linked to longstanding 19th-century notions of academic disciplines.
We also noted the difference of US Honours programmes and their relative flexibility since the 1980s. This institutional shift has not taken place in the UK. However, we noted that, if one takes the example of Italian Studies in the UK, the growth of Italian Cultural Studies since the 1990s has altered the curriculum and has led some departments to develop a more interdisciplinary offer.
Italian Interdisciplinary Modernism (Part III)
Italian Interdisciplinary Modernism (Part III)
The final set of papers in the morning session of our New York workshop shows the potential for fostering interdisciplinary thinking when one brings together scholars with expertise in multiple areas. In 2007 our two speakers, Giuliana Pieri (RHUL) and Jacqueline Reich (Stony Brook) met at a workshop co-hosted by Reading and Royal Holloway in which scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary contexts (history of the Church, French and German history, cinema etc) came together to provide a much needed wider context to the main project, the study of the personality cult of Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The research project, funded by the AHRC, was lead by Stephen Gundle (Warwick), Christopher Duggan (Reading), and Giuliana Pieri (RHUL).
Giuliana Pieri presented briefly the project (which run between 2006-2010) by highlighting how the coming together of three distinct disciplines—cinema and media (Gundle), history (Duggan) and art history (Pieri)—resulted in a much needed wider contextualization of the cult of the Italian dictator. By placing Mussolini in the context of the age of mass media and celebrity culture, and by looking at the ways in which the cult reverberated in Italian culture in the post war period, the project aimed to understand the creation and development over time of the extraordinary cult of personality which surrounded the Italian dictator.
Jacqueline Reich’s paper on Maciste, the Italian strongman who was the protagonist of a phenomenally successful series of films both in Italy and abroad, showed the effect that an interdisciplinary approach can have on research. Drawing from a wide variety of disciplines and discourses—cinema, the press, race, celebrity and mass culture—Jacqueline’s study of the impact of the Maciste franchise in North America showed how one can build a complex and multifaceted picture of a cultural and cinematic phenomenon.
Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: ART, MUSIC, TEXT 
