Departmental Research Seminars
Summer Term, 2012
UCL, GOWER STREET, WC1E 6BT, LONDON
All seminars take place in the Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351, 5.30-7.00 pm, unless otherwise indicated. For further information please contact Dr Florian Mussgnug: f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk
UCL, GOWER STREET, WC1E 6BT, LONDON All seminars take place in the Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351, 5.30-7.00 pm, unless otherwise indicated. For further information please contact Dr Florian Mussgnug: f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk
16 May 2012, Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351, 5.30-7.00 pm.
Daniele Salerno, University of Bologna
"The Ustica Massacre (1980): Reparation and Conflicts over Memory".
On June 27th 1980, an aircraft en route from Bologna to Palermo plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea off the island of Ustica, near Sicily. Eighty-one people died. From 1984 to 1999, three different judges investigated the case. According to the most recent sentence, the aircraft was probably shot down by a missile, launched by a warplane belonging to an unknown NATO country.
The main aim of this research (in progress) is to analyze the shaping of the public memory of this event, which found its pivotal moment in the construction of the Museum for the Memory of Ustica in Bologna. I argue that this process can be divided in three periods: the period of latency (1980-1986); the period of recognition of the massacre (1990s to early 2000s); and the years of conflicting memories (which lasts up to the present and is ongoing). These conflicts link up to a dual and interconnected tendency in the shaping of the Italian public memory of those years (the so called ‘Years of Lead’): the inability of State institutions to create an acceptable collective version of this event, and the victims’ narratives which have been pivotal in legitimizing different versions of the past.
All welcome.
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25 May 2012, Chadwick 218, 9.30am-5.30pm
Literature and Transmediality
International Conference with the support of the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and the UCL Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies (FIGS)
Organizers: Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL) and Dr Emanuela Patti (UCL)
Confirmed speakers
Emanuela Patti (UCL, Cagliari): Remediating collective identities, narratives and myths in literature in the new media context
Jakob Stoutgaard–Nielsen (UCL) Authorship in the digital era
Claudia Boscolo (Royal Holloway) Transmedia storytelling and contemporary Italian Fiction: An Overview
Tommaso Pincio (writer and artist, Rome)
Cristina Massaccesi (UCL) Transmedial Contamination in Italian Graphic Narratives
Otto Gabos (Graphic Novelist)
Federica Chiocchetti (UCL) Literature and photography countering the mimetic: a theoretical exploration
All welcome. For further details, please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah/figs/
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Spring Term, 2012
Thursday 26 January 2012, 5pm, Pearson Building (North East Entrance), G23
Marco Assennato (Paris) presents his book:
Linee di fuga. Architettura, teoria, politica (Duepunti, 2011).
Chair: Prof Bob Lumley (UCL)
Marco Assennato was born in Palermo in 1978. He has lived in Paris since 2009. He graduated in philosophy, with a thesis on Spinoza. His main field of research is the relationship between politics and architecture. He is currently doing a PhD at ENSA, Paris-Malaquais, working on a research project on Manfredo Tafuri.
For information about the book: http://www.duepuntiedizioni.it/catalogo/argonauti/linee-di-fuga/
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Thursday 9 February 2012, 5pm, Italian Seminar: Room Foster Court 351
Presentazione dell'Atlante della Letteratura Italiana (Einaudi)
diretto da Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedulla'
Chair: Florian Mussgnug (UCL)
Introduce: Daniela La Penna (Reading)
Discutono: Stefano Jossa (Royal Holloway) e Gabriele Pedulla' (Universita' degli Studi di Roma Tre) Si dice spesso che la letteratura è un viaggio, nello spazio come nel tempo. Ma fino ad ora, nessuno aveva mai provato a scriverne la storia con gli strumenti del viaggiatore (di ieri o di oggi): la carta geografica, la guida artistica, la mappa topografica, se non proprio il navigatore satellitare. In questa nuova «Grande Opera» – frutto del lavoro di quasi duecento specialisti provenienti dal mondo intero – la storia della letteratura italiana viene raccontata per la prima volta alla maniera di Albert Einstein: come un vertiginoso viaggio nello spaziotempo. Ci sono i grandi personaggi della nostra letteratura, ritratti, quasi fosse una fotografia «istantanea», in un momento decisivo della loro vita. Ci sono i libri fondamentali della nostra civiltà letteraria, restituiti alla ricchezza (e alla complessità) dell’epoca storica in cui vennero prodotti. E ci sono – riconoscibili come mai prima d’ora – i luoghi di un’Italia letteraria che si estende ben oltre i limiti dello stivale: le città e le strade, gli edifici e le case, i panorami e i paesaggi, negli otto secoli che separano il 1200 dal Duemila. Lunghi intrecci e brevi istanti di svolta. Una mappa della fantasia italiana.
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Autumn Term, 2011
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Chiara Caprì (Palermo) presents her book:
Libero.
L'imprenditore che non si piegò al pizzo (2011).
Chair: Prof John Dickie (UCL)
Chiara Caprì, one of the founders of the Sicilian
anti-extortion organization Addiopizzo, will speak about her new book on Libero
Grassi, the Palermo entrepreneur murdered for refusing to pay protection money. _____________________________________________________________ Wednesday, 19 October 2011
[Institute of Historical
Research, London, South Block, Room ST273]
Prof Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown)
“Blurred Images: The Construction of Anti-Politics in
Post-War Italy"
Chair:
Dr Axel Körner (UCL)
Prof.
Stewart-Steinberg’s widely acclaimed study of modern Italian identity in the post-Unification
period, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making
Italians, 1860-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2007) was awarded the
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Manuscript in Italian Studies by the
Modern Language Association.
This event is hosted jointly with the IHR Modern Italian
History Seminar. _____________________________________________________________
Tuesday,
29 November 2011
[Spanish Seminar Room - UCL Foster Court 314]
Prof Margaret Rose (University of Milan)
“Representations of Italians in Britain during the Second
World War”
Chair: Dr Florian Mussgnug
Maggie Rose teaches British Theatre Studies at Milan State University. A writer, translator and dramaturg, she spends part of the year in the UK for her writing and research. She is a member of Playwrights Studio Scotland and the Scottish Association of Playwrights. Her stage and radio plays, reflecting her interest in issues of migration and multiculturalism as well as reworkings of Shakespeare, have been produced in the UK and Italy. Her stage translations have been performed in the UK, America and Italy. With Salvatore Cabras, she has co-translated Edward Bond’s Warplays, directed by Luca Ronconi and Alan Bennett’s The History Plays directed by Elio de Capitani e F.Bruni. Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ran at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro in 2009 and 2010. She has co-created and co-directed festival-symposiums such as Scotsfest, Scambiare and Scottish Italian Connections and Identities. In her lecture, she will be considering various plays (Tally’s Blood, Six Months Here Six Months There, Shattered Head), documentaries (Dangerous Characters) and autobiographies, dealing with a crucial moment in history: June 1940, when Benito Mussolini declared war on Great Britain and France, and when many Italians living in the UK suddenly found themselves labelled as “enemy aliens”.
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Timothy Demetris (UCL)
“Cardinal Carafa's 1472 naval campaign: The protagonists and their portraits”
Chair: Dr Dilwyn Knox (UCL)
In the summer of 1472 Pope Sixtus IV launched a naval campaign against the Turks with Cardinal Oliviero Carafa as commander of the papal fleet. This military enterprise has received little attention from scholars. My paper will consider how it may not only inform us of Sixtus IV's early policy regarding the Turks but also provide context for his later engagement with Mehmed II's forces during the capture and liberation of Otranto in 1480-1481. I shall present a historical account of Cardinal Carafa's campaign using both modern and contemporary sources. I shall then examine the lives of those individuals involved and present the known portraits we have of them and visual representations of the campaign itself.
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Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Filippo La Porta (Rome)
“Un’idea dell’Italia: L’attività nazionale nella nuova narrativa”
Chair: Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL)
Filippo La Porta is a one of Italy’s leading literary critics. He regularly writes for Corriere della sera, Il Messaggero, and Sole 24 ore. Recent publications include Maestri irregolari (2007, winner of the Premio De Lollis); Dizionario della critica militante(2007, with Giuseppe Leonelli), Uno sguardo sulla città (2010) and Meno letteratura, per favore (2010).
This talk will be in Italian.
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Past seminars
Spring Term, 2011
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Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Dr Evelyn Ferraro (Brown University)
“Walking on the Threshold of Italian Diasporas: A North American Perspective”
Chair: Dr Federica Mazzara
Migrants’ complex identities defy any rigid cultural classifications because of the liminal, or in-between, positions that migrant subjects inhabit. In this seminar, the spatial concept of being on the threshold will primarily be adopted to discuss contemporary literary and visual representations of the Italian migratory experience to North America vis-à-vis Italian national identity. In addition, the threshold will provide a theoretical tool to launch a preliminary reflection on Italy’s own liminality within the Mediterranean.
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Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Dr Fabio Camilletti (University of Warwick)
"Women at the Window: Dante's Vita Nova and the Framing of XIX century Desire"
Chair: Dr Federica Mazzara
The seminar will explore some of the methodological challenges emerged in the course of my research on the nineteenth-century metamorphoses of Dante's Vita Nova. More specifically, by focusing on some re-elaborations of the episode of the 'woman at the window' – whose ambiguities make of it a veritable crux in Dantean philology - I will show how it is used as a frame in which the tensions of nineteenth-century desire are articulated.
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Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Prof Yosefa
Loshitzky (East London University) presents her book:
“Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema”
Chair: Prof. David Forgacs
Yosefa Loshitzky challenges the utopian notion of a post-national "New Europe" by focusing on the waves of migrants and refugees that some view as a potential threat to European identity, a concern heightened by the rhetoric of the war on terror, the London Underground bombings, and the riots in Paris's banlieues. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, Loshitzky determines patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, and Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Code 46, and The Road to Guantanamo.
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Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Sebastiano Caroni (UCL
Italian)
“Umberto
Eco. Structure, Order, and the Deontology of Academia”
Chair: Dr Dilwyn Knox
The aim of the presentation is threefold. Firstly, to situate Eco's relationship with structuralist method and approach as a formative moment in Eco's intellectual trajectory. Secondly, the presentation discusses Eco's ideas of interpretation against the background of Eco's critique of structuralism. Thirdly, it shows how Eco's ideas of interpretation can be the starting point to explore the intellectual norms and practices that sustain the ethic of academic work.
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Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Maria Coduri (UCL
Italian)
"Shakespeare on the Italian Stage: Acting and Directing Shakespeare in Italy"
Chair: Dr Federica Mazzara
The aim of this seminar is to show different trends of acting and directing Shakespeare's plays in Italy from the performances of the "great actors" of mid-nineteenth century to the first stagings of the "teatro di regia" (director's theatre).
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Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Georgia Panteli (UCL Italian)
“Cutting the strings: Postmodern/Posthuman Pinocchios”
Chair: Dr Cristina Massaccesi
The seminar focuses on postmodern retellings of Pinocchio, and these include graphic retellings as well as some examples of posthuman Pinocchios. In my talk I will explain
how I connect Pinocchio to cyborgs, following the literary history of the animate/inanimate archetype, of which Pinocchio is a vital part. I will also refer in more detail to the bande dessinée that won the Fauve d'Or prize in 2009, 'Pinocchio' by Winshluss.
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Wednesday, 8 March 2011
Screening and discussion of the documentary "La Quarta Via" by Simone Brioni (Warwick). The director and the writer Kaha Mohamed Aden will be present.
Synopsis: Kaha Mohamed Aden narrates her memories of Mogadishu, her birth city, and reconstruct its story in Pavia, where she currently lives. The capital of Somalia is divided nto five streets, which corresponds to different histoica periods. The fourth street symbolizes the actuality of civil war. This negates the preceding periods and make it necessary to hope for the 'fifth street'. The film has English subtitles.
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Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Dr Elettra Carbone
(UCL Scandinavian)
“Echoes of Freedom: Representations of the Italian Risorgimento in Norwegian Literature between the 1860s and the 1910s”
Chair: Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
For many Norwegians the Italian Risorgimento was seen as an inspiration, a symbol of freedom. Besides being a topical subject, especially in newspapers and magazines, the Risorgimento struggle was represented in literary works by famous Norwegian authors. How was this period of the Italian history represented before and after Norway’s independence in 1905?
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Wednesday, 16 March 2011 [Old Refectory, Wilkins Building, 5.30pm.]
Silvia
Sfligiotti (Alizarina Studio - Milan)
Annelys de Vet (Sandberg Institute Amsterdam)
Annelies Vaneycken (Trans-ID Brussels)
“The ethics of graphic design: Social commitment and
visual communication”
Chair: Dr Gabriele Oropallo
The seminar will feature a presentation by Silvia Sfligiotti of Alizarina
Studio Milan on the role of the user in the design process – should
designers work with, for or against the users? Annelys de Vet of the
Sandberg Institute Amsterdam and Annelies Vaneycken of Trans-ID Brussels
will also present on their recent works, in which visual communication is
used as a tool to chart and highlight tensions and cleavages in culture and
society. The seminar will end with an open round table discussion with the
participation of Ken Garland and Richard Hollis.
The event is free and open to all. RSVP to ucljgor@ucl.ac.uk.
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Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Enza
de Francisci (UCL)
“Verga and Pirandello’s Women: from Page to Stage”
Chair: Dr Stuart Oglethorpe
This seminar compares Verga’s and Pirandello’s method of transposing a selection of short stories to the stage; questioning what happens when authorial intervention is withdrawn and the two writers rely on dialogue and assessing how the modifications introduced to the theatrical versions affect the portrayal of women. It will be suggested that although the female protagonists take a subsidiary position in the triangular relationship they are involved in, they nevertheless dominate both narrative and dramatic plots.
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Autumn Term, 2010
UCL, GOWER STREET, WC1 6BT, LONDON
Italian Writers in the UK: LAURA PARIANI at UCL
"Milano è una selva oscura": La scrittura di Laura Pariani tra Dante e la tradizione lombarda
Chair: Prof. Laura Lepschy
Date: Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Time: 5.00 - 7.00pm
Venue: Pearson Lecture Theatre (UCL North Entrance)
*This event will be in Italian without translation*
"La lingua batte dove l'immagrato duole". Language, Media and Migration in Today's Italy
Dr Federico Faloppa (University of Reading)
Chair: Dr Federica Mazzara
Date: Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Time: 5.00 - 7.00pm
Venue: Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Abstract: Statistics say that Italy has become a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural contry. But the representation of migrants and ethnic groups in the Italian press has not changed much in the last 20 years, and derogatory labels and misreprsentations are far from being a relic of the past. Through the analysis of examples taken from newspapers and magazines, the paper will try to highlght a few linguistic elements - from lexicon to rhetoric - which seem to be part of an enduring strategy to construct and isolate 'otherness' linguistically.
NORMAL (2010)
A film by Dr Nick Mai (London Metropolitan University)
Screening followed by a discussion with the director
Chair: Prof. David Forgacs
Date: Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Time: 5.00-7.00pm.
Venue: Chadwick Lecture Theatre
Abstract: NORMAL is made of the combined intrviews with four migrants (2 men, 2 women) working in the global sex industry, as agents and workers, respectively. The four characters explain how they came to see their involvement in the sex industry as NORMAL and how their notion of normality evolved with their life experiences. The film lasts 37 minutes.
**THE ACTORS WIL BE PRESENT**
Looking for a Father, Reaching Back into History
Benedetta Tobagi (UCL) presentas her book: "Come mi batte forte il tuo cuore"
Chair. Prof. John Foot
Date: Thursday, 18 November 2010
Time: 5.00-7.00pm.
Venue: Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Abstract: Benedetta Tobagi presents her book dedicated to her father, Walter Tobagi, a "Corriere della Sera" journalist, murdered by leftist exstremists in 1980.
Cultura e letteratura nella Trieste austroungarica
Prof. Giuseppe A. Camerino (Università del Salento)
Chair. Prof. Laura Lepschy
Date: Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Time: 5.00-7.00pm.
Venue: Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Abstract: Si tratta di un ampio panorama della caratteristiche dei maggiori scrittori triestini e giuliani tra l'Otto e il Novecento, tra attrazione della cultura viennese e austroungarica e richiamo della letteratura italiani nelo stesso periodo. Un'analisi che tocca i modi molto diversi e pur complementari con cui autori come Svevo, Saba, Slataper e Michelstaedter afrontano una complessa e irripetibile condizione di frontiera con tutti i connessi problemi linguistici, religiosi, filosofici e culturali in genere che una realtà del genere, per certi vesi altamente cosmopolita, richiedeva.
ITALIANS THE GOOD PEOPLE: Reflections on National Self-Representation in Contemporary Italian Debates on Xenophobia and War
Dr Paolo Favero (Lisbon University Institute)
Chair: Dr Federica Mazzara
Date: Friday, 3 December 2010
Time: 5.00-7.00pm.
Venue: Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Abstract: Moving among historical material and contemporary debates on xenophobia and war, his seminar will explore the self-representation "Italiani Brava Gente", an image claiming the intrinsic goodness of the Italian people. Functioning as an ideological laundry for reformulating and then setting aside disquieting moments of national shame, "Italiani Brava gente" is central to the construction of a modern Italian identity.
'Non si cambi la fede'. Futurism and the Post-war World
Chris Adams (Estoricl Collection of Modern Italian Art)
Chair: Prof. Bob Lumley
Date: Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Time: 5.00-7.00pm.
Venue: Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Abstract: Unlike Fauvism or Cubism, Futurism was not simply a painterly technique but a way of life. This paper considers if its holistic ambition was a distinctively Italian phenomanon - the movememnt emerging in the home of a world religion and the birthplace of modern totalitarianism - and if Futurism's continuation in the post-war period was motivated as much by the desire to counter a newfound cultural ‘agnosticism’ as by any aesthetic differences.
