Interdisciplinary Italy

Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: art, music, text.

This international network spans the US, UK and Italy. As it nears the end of the first phase, funded by the AHRC, we are planning a second phase, which, if successful, we hope will run until about 2018. The project takes two complementary directions.

• The first, its intellectual strand, explores issues arising from interdisciplinarity in the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy. It brings together academics, artists and museum curators. Notions of border-crossing, emancipation, transgression, and fragmentation are applied to the relations between literature, music, cinema and the visual arts. This strand spans modernism, postmodernism and the internet age.  We are  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 last year in Rome, New York and London to discuss these questions, and some of the results can be seen at our website <www.interdisciplinaryitaly.com>
• The second direction the project takes is its policy strand. This involves Languages policy makers, academics and secondary school teachers in discussing questions that have arisen from the intellectual strand. This strand has resulted in the creation of a searchable database of UK professionals working in Italian culture (both inside and outside the academy), a website and publications. 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. The database is at <www.italydatabase.com> and it may be useful to you.

Please contact Clodagh Brook <c.j.brook.1@bham.ac.uk> if you want to get your details added there. We have developed some links with the Viewing and Writing Landscape project, and so invite those who wish to also visit the blog and website at <www.interdisciplinaryitaly.com> which may be of interest to you.