Research Seminars

Forthcoming Events

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Seminar Series

2019-20

SPRING 2020

• **CANCELLED (to be rescheduled)** Wednesday 18th March 2020, 6:00pm-7:30pm, Institute of Education (20 Bedford Way), Room 790, Breakdown 2

Federica Chiocchetti (photocaptionist.com) in conversation with Robert Lumley (UCL)

A Love Affair between Photographs and Words

In this talk Federica Chiocchetti, in conversation with Robert Lumley, looks at theoretical and artistic practices of nineteenth-century and contemporary authors, from William Henry Fox Talbot to Sophie Calle, that subverted traditional hierarchies in the relationship of word and image.

This event is in collaboration with the “Image and Thought Network” of The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities (TORCH)

AUTUMM 2019

• Wednesday 4th December 2019, 5:30-7:30pm, Room 113, Foster Court (1st floor of UCL Foster Court Building, UCL Bloomsbury Campus)

Javier Fernandández-Sánchez (University of Gdansk, Poland)

Modal Ellipsis as Surface Anaphora
Abstract:
In this talk I will discuss a phenomenon that I will refer to as Modal Ellipsis (ME) in Romance languages. Descriptively speaking, ME involves a modal verb with an empty complement:
(1)  
a. John smokes, but he really shouldn’t. (Eng)
b. Dovrei mangiare la pizza e anche Gianni dovrebbe.(It Cecchetto and Percus 2006)
c. Beberé agua porque alcohol no puedo.  (Sp)
Despite being silent, the complement of the modal is clearly understood, so the question arises as to where meaning is coming from. Among the literature on ME in Romance, it is Spanish that has received most attention, in particular Depiante (2000, 2001). She argues that ME in Spanish (and Italian) is an instance of deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer and Sag (1976), and posits the existence of a null pronoun selected by the modal which gets interpreted contextually like regular pronouns do:
(2)    John smokes but he really shouldn’t PRON.
I will review her arguments and conclude that, upon closer scrutiny, ME should be treated as a case of surface anaphora, where the gap after the modal contains a fully fledged syntactic structure unpronounced at PF:
(3)    John smokes but he really shouldn’t smoke.
One of the arguments I will focus on concerns clitic climbing. Zubizarreta (1982) and Cinque (1998) noted that clitic climbing in Spanish and Italian respectively are incompatible with ME:
(4)    
a. *Juan las puede ver, y María también las puede.
      Juan them can see and Maria also them can
b. *Gianni lo puo vedere e anche Maria lo puo.
       Gianni him can see and also Maria him can
Depiante (2000,2001) takes this as an argument in favour of her proposal: if there was unpronounced syntactic structure (3), the clitic could have easily extracted from there. The fact that it cannot is compatible with the idea that the complement of the modal in ME is atomic (2), as we don’t expect anything to be able to be extracted. I will claim (i) that extraction is indeed possible in ME, and (ii) that the data in (4) can be accounted for in different terms.

• Wednesday 30th October 2019, 5:30-7:30 pm, Foster Court, room 217

Anna Dolfi (Università di Firenze)

Giorgio Bassani e le leggi razziali: rappresentare la storia tra memoria e testimonianza

Quale rapporto esiste tra scrittura, autobiografia e memoria? Quale relazione tra invenzione e verità storica, tra necessità artistica e bisogno di essere fedele a un reale ineludibile che rende necessario il dovere della testimonianza? Come si configura l’impegno per un intellettuale che ha creduto fermamente alla dimensione ‘poetica’ e in qualche modo ‘assoluta’ dell’arte?
È da queste domande che partirà Anna Dolfi per riflettere sull’opera di uno dei narratori più importanti della terza generazione novecentesca, Giorgio Bassani, che ha posto al centro della sua narrativa e di gran parte della sua poesia un luogo deputato, Ferrara, negli anni delle leggi razziali e in quelli immediatamente vicini, e che ha avuto occasione di dichiarare: “Un’umanità che dimenticasse Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, io non posso accettarla. Scrivo perché ci se ne ricordi”.

• Wednesday 16th October 2019, 5:30-7:30 pm, Foster Court, room 217

Domenico Scarpa (Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi)

Le preistorie e la Storia. Leonardo Sciascia dalla «prova democristiana» al delitto Moro

Sciascia ha voluto che il canone della sua opera cominciasse con Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, pubblicato nel 1956 all’età di trentacinque anni. L’inizio ufficiale di questa storia d’autore è preceduto da una stratificazione di preistorie – letterarie, civili, politiche – finora poco indagate e non tutte discernibili. Solo qualche anno fa è emerso che Sciascia attraversò, tra il 1947 e il 1951, una fase di contiguità con le battaglie autonomiste di una parte della Dc siciliana, e che vi contribuì con idee che avrebbe sostenuto lungo tutta la sua esistenza. Fra le sue preistorie d’autore, questa più di altre consente d’interpretare in una maniera nuova la sua stance etico-politica negli anni ’70 e, in particolare, nel frangente storico del delitto Moro.

2018-19

• Saturday 1st June 2019, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, Room 834 (Core B, Level 8)
This event is sponsored by the UCL Global Engagement Funds.
The Diasporic Canon. Anthologies of Italian Literature in Translation

9:00–9:15, Introductions
9:15–9:45, Niccolò Scaffai (Université de Lausanne) “Le forme del canone: le antologie di letteratura contemporanea in Italia”
9:45–10:15, Marie-José Tramuta (Université de Caen Normandie), “Antologie poetiche in Francia: le ragioni di una poesia”
10:15–10:45, Coffee break
10:45–11:15, Daniela La Penna (University of Reading), “Broken glass in the Italian garden: traduzione, accademia e periodizzazione nelle antologie poetiche italiane in Gran Bretagna”
11:15–11:45, Marta Arnaldi (University of Oxford), “The Diasporico Canon. Antologie americane di poesia italiana contemporanea”
11.45-12:00, Closing remarks
12:00 – 14:00, Lunch break
14:00–14:30, Beatrice Sica (University College London), “Samuel Putnam, ‘This Quarter’ and the European Caravan”
14:30–15:00, Alejandro Patat (Università per Stranieri di Siena), “L’antologia della letteratura italiana nella rivista ‘Sur’ (1953)”
15:00–15:30, Coffee break
15:30–16:00, Stefano Colangelo (Università di Bologna), “Antologie contemporanee: canone e transizione”
16:00–16:30, Rosita Copioli (poet), “Esperienze di antologie”
16:30–17:00, Closing remarks

Programme - Spring Term 2019

All seminars (unless otherwise stated) are held on Wednesdays from 5.30pm in Foster Court, room 351, Malet Place, UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT.

23 January	Giuliana Benvenuti (University of Bologna) Il Graphic Novel è un animale mitologico? (the talk will be in Italian)
6 February	Federica Pich (University of Leeds) Petrarch, the lyric and the reader
20 February	Luca Marcozzi (University of Roma Tre) Dante and poverty
27 February	Roberto Ubbidiente (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) Pinocchio senza "Cuore". Collodi e la favolizzazione della renitenza sociogenetica degli italiani (the talk will be in Italian)
6 March	Francesco Buscemi (Max Planck Institute) Staging Loyalty. Oath taking and the feeling rules of Italian republicanism (1796-1799)

Other Events

Italian Film Club

The calendar (including some special screenings) will be posted on the film club's blog page.

• Visit the Italian Film Club's blog

The movies will be in Italian with Italian or English subtitles and will be introduced by Dr Cristina Massaccesi (contact: c.massaccesi@ucl.ac.uk).

Rome Lecture Series

Organisers

•  Dr Lesley Caldwell, SELCS Italian, UCL
• Dr Dorigen Caldwell, History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of London

Call for Papers

The organisers invite all those working on or interested in any aspect of Rome to attend and welcome suggestions for papers.

About

This lecture series grew out of an earlier series of research seminars on ‘Rome: the Growth of the City from the Return of the Popes to the Present’, which supported jointly by the Italian department and Birkbeck College, with assistance from the Italian Cultural Institute, the British School at Rome, the Comune of Rome, and the Region of Lazio.

Nine all-day meetings were held between 2005-2008. They brought together scholars from a range of disciplines with a shared interest in Rome and its development as a metropolis. The central theme of reading the present – be it the Renaissance or the twenty-first century – through the city’s inescapable past produced a highly original approach that has been lacking from both Anglophone histories of Rome and urban studies. A book based on these seminars Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present was published by Ashgate.

Following the conclusion of the three-year project, the series has been maintained as a termly lecture. Speakers who have given lectures to date are: John David Rhodes (Sussex), Rose Marie San Juan (UCL), Jacopo Benci (British School at Rome), Eileen Rubery (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Mark Wilson Jones (Bath).

Next Lecture

For details of the next lecture and information on past events visit the blog:

• The Rome Lecture Series blog