Programme SIS

Programme.

Italian Interdisciplinarity and the Disciplines.

Panel Organiser: Dr Clodagh Brook,

Papers by Clodagh Brook, Giuliana Pieri, and Peter Langdale (Association of Language Learning)

This session forms part of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: art, music, text. It provides a forum for the discussion of the future and shape of Italian Studies in universities and schools in the UK, exploring how academic interdisciplinarity – the crossing of ideas, approaches and techniques between one academic discipline and another – is affecting this language in universities and schools (both the benefits and drawbacks), and policy issues and strategies arising from this. Italian is used as a case study. We will be inviting members of UCML (University Council of Modern Languages), LLAS (Language and Area Studies subject centre), CILT (the national centre for Languages), and ALL (the Association for Language Learning), alongside the SIS to this panel.

The panel will explore and assess the situation of Italian Studies as a discipline. In the UK, the transformation of independent departments of Italian into Schools of Modern Languages and/or European Studies makes renegotiating the discipline an urgent task: exploring what it means to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries whilst also creating pathways towards more comparative approaches and discipline identity is a central question at Executive committees of Italian Studies and that of other Modern Languages and this project gives that question focus and due importance. As the relevance of public engagement in academic research grows, there is still a distinct lack of institutions and instruments to facilitate interdisciplinary research across a much wider range of disciplinary practices particularly for scholars working on 20th- and 21st-century Italian culture. This panel will  promotes the creation of such institutions and instruments.

Principal Questions: How have changing views of interdisciplinarity affected Italian Studies over its history?  Why are some areas of culture included and others excluded? What are the barriers to the inclusion of the neglected areas? Is interdisciplinarity necessarily a good thing for the discipline?