Funded by an AHRC networking Grant.
Principal Investigator: Clodagh Brook; Co-Investigator: Giuliana Pieri.
This international network spans the US, UK and Italy. It brings together academics, artists, museum curators, and people working in conservatoires. All have a lively interest in Italian culture.
The network has two linked intellectual directions.
The first, its intellectual strand, explores issues arising from interdisciplinarity in the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy. We will be exploring ideas of border-crossing, emancipation, transgression, and fragmentation in relation to dialogues between literature, music, cinema and the visual arts. This strand spans more than a century, from modernism, to postmodernism and the internet age. We aim to address questions such as where the roots of modern and contemporary interdisciplinarity lie, what contributed to these developments, what the place of technology, artistic milieu, cafés, internet and so on is in the development of cross-fertilisation.
The second direction the project takes is its policy strand. This will involve Languages policy makers, academics and secondary school teachers in discussing questions that have arisen from the intellectual strand. This strand will result in the creation of a searchable database of all UK professionals working in Italian culture (both inside and outside the academy), publications, and – if all goes well – new projects. The idea is to explore how interdisciplinarity both affects and can affect how Italian Studies and Modern Languages are researched and taught in Universities and their public engagement profile.
Three workshops and one panel will take place:
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‘Italian interdisciplinary modernism’ (New York University, 22 February 2013).
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‘Italian interdisciplinary avant-garde ’ (UCL, 11 March 2013).
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‘Contemporary Italian Interdisciplinarity in the Internet age’ (Roma Tre, 20 April 2013).
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A panel at the SIS conference next summer, Interdisciplinarity and the Disciplines (July 2013).
The project website has been launched: www.interdisciplinaryitaly.com
For further information, please contact Clodagh Brook: c.j.brook.1@bham.ac.uk