Funded by an AHRC networking Grant.
Principal Investigator: Clodagh Brook; Co-Investigator: Giuliana Pieri.
This international network was set up in 2012 with support from the AHRC. Having won further funding from the AHRC, we are now on the second phase of the project, which runs until 2018.
Summary of the first phase
The network spanned the US, UK and Italy and took two complementary directions:
The first, its intellectual strand, explored issues arising from interdisciplinarity in the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy. It brought together academics, artists and museum curators. Notions of border-crossing, emancipation, transgression, and fragmentation were applied to the relations between literature, music, cinema and the visual arts. This strand spanned modernism, postmodernism and the internet age. We were addressing 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 etc. is in the development of cross-fertilisation. We ran three workshops in Rome, New York and London in 2013 to discuss these questions, and some of the results can be seen at our website www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org.
The second direction the project took was its policy strand. This involved Languages policy makers, academics and secondary school teachers in discussing questions that had arisen from the intellectual strand. The idea is to explore interdisciplinarity in relation to how Italian Studies and Modern Languages are researched and taught in Universities and their public engagement profile.
Outputs include:
- Brook, Clodagh and Patti, Emanuela, Transmedia. Storia, memoria e narrazioni attraverso i media (Milan: Mimesis, 2014).
- Brook, Clodagh, and Pieri, Giuliana, 'Disciplines, Inter-disciplines and multimediality', in Marco Gargiulo (ed.), Lingua e cultura italiana nei mass media (Rome: Aracne, 2014), 13-32.
- The now-cached website (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.com), which has been replaced by www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org.