The Society of Italian Studies

La più bella del mondo – The most beautiful in the world
2019-04-30 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/London) | Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8NX, United Kingdom
12 talks on the Italian language
“The most beautiful in the world” is supposed to be a supermodel and yet in Italy the expression is more often than not used to define Italian language. Is Italian truly the most beautiful language in the world? It is commonplace, due to either italophilia or nationalism, but is it only this?
A series led by Dr Stefano Jossa, author of La più bella del mondo. Perché amare la lingua italiana (Einaudi) and Reader in Italian at Royal Holloway University of London, will explore the relationships between Italian and other languages, the Italian words that have become key to interpret our contemporary world, the various languages of arts, music, technology, economy and politics.
Event in Italian with simultaneous translation in English
Next talk will be on 30/04 by Massimo Arcangeli on Insulting in Italian.
Londra
tel: fax: 020 7235 4618
e-mail: i

Interart/intermedia experimentation through the ages (from the medieval age to the present)
2019-04-12 - 2019-04-13 | Royal Holloway
The programme of the conference will be available soon.

In collaboration with
School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin
School of European Languages, Culture and Society, UCL
AHRC project “Interdisciplinary Italy” (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org)
AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)
Organisers: Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri, Emanuela Patti.

Description:
This conference explores interartistic and intermedial encounters in Italy and the new kinds of experimentation that arise from these. It will focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing and on institutions who fostered or hindered interartistic and intermedial exchange. It may subvert widely accepted canons as what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.

We welcome proposals from established scholars, early career researchers, and PhD students from all disciplines.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Interartistic and intermedial, experimentation and creativity.
How does intermedial and interartistic practice work to enhance creativity? What are its links with experimentation? Why does it arise?

2. Mapping and rewriting the cultural canon
How does looking at artists and artworks from an intermedial/interartistic perspective reshape the map of what is central and what is peripheral? Which artists have been lost to cultural histories because their work falls into the interstices between the arts?

3. Historical change
How has working between two or more arts has been received or marginalised across the ages? What is instrumental in this change? Why does this take place? What kind of interartistic practice is taking place in medieval Italy, in the Renaissance or later? Are there particular periods in Italy’s history in which explosions of interartistic practice take place and why?

4. Boundary crossing
How are borders between the arts policed and why? How have institutions in Italy played a part in shaping what fits, or does not, in certain artistic tradition? How do we best investigate the process of dialogue/translation/remediation involved in border crossings between the arts?

5. Collaboration and communities
How might interartistic and intermedial practice bring artists together? Why do groups come together and how? How does the collaborative making of artworks across boundaries differ from solitary practice? How might transmedia practice – and the fandom associated with it – make us think differently about readers and about artistic and literary communities?

6. Theories of interartistic practice and intermediality
How has thinking in Italy contributed to the international debate on intermediality and on interartistic practice?

7. Bad practice …
How does intermedial and interartistic practice threaten the stability of artistic forms and disciplines? Are there negative implications to be considered? What are the risks and dangers of intermedia?

The main goal of this conference is to look at Italian culture from an intermedial perspective (rather than a multimedial, or multiartistic one) to understand how the bringing together of two or more art forms, or two or more artists working across art forms have changed creative production in Italy, and indeed beyond, from the medieval age to the present. We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in an edited volume.

Press Play: Creative Interventions in Research and Practice
2019-03-28 10:00 - 2019-03-29 19:00
We are pleased to announce the forthcoming conference Press Play: Creative Interventions in Research and Practice
MACRO / British School at Rome / MAAM
28-29 March 2019
This conference will bring together art practitioners and academics in order to explore common interests in creativity in, and as, research practice. It grounds this conversation in the broad disciplinary area of Modern Languages, which has been at a critical juncture in terms of defining its purpose and identity for some considerable time.

Readers and Reading in the Book: the Imaginary and the Material
2019-03-27 14:00 - 17:30
Readers and Reading in the Book: the Imaginary and the Material
The event will focus on how the practices and experiences of reading have been represented in literary texts over the centuries.
Speakers include: Federica Pich, Giovanna Rizzarelli, Rhiannon Daniels, Guyda Armstrong and Karin Littau. Please find the description of the event and details about the programme and the registration

Jhumpa Lahiri in Conversation with Nicola Gardini
2019-03-07 19:00 - 20:00 | Blackwell’s Bookshop, 51 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BQ, United Kingdom
Blackwell’s is thrilled to announce this forthcoming event:
Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri, in conversation with writer and translator, Nicola Gardini, on her latest role as editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories.
When Jhumpa Lahiri decided to read exclusively in Italian, a language she had studied for many years, her life as a reader – and writer – took a surprising turn. Complete immersion in this rich literary heritage brought fresh insight and unexpected freedom.
This collection brings together forty writers who have shaped her love of the Italian language and profound appreciation for its literature. More than half of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time and the wide ranging selection includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello, alongside many captivating rediscoveries.
Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society. Together they reflect over a hundred years of Italy’s vibrant and diverse short story tradition, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and the dramatic political events of the twentieth century. The first anthology of its kind, over half of the stories in this collection appear translated into English for the first time.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia for In altre parole.
Nicola Gardini is a poet, novelist, columnist and translator. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University and is now a Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Keble College, Oxford.
The event will be chaired by Elena Lombardi, fellow of Balliol College and Chair of the Department of Italian at Oxford University.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm, at which time there will be a small bar available to purchase drinks. For more information please contact Customer Services on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

#italiesinmotion
2019-03-06 16:00 - 19:00
The 4th edition of ‘Identities in Motion. Legacies and Representations of Mobility in Contemporary Italy‘ will take place at the University of Warwick on Wednesday, 6 March 2019 (Ramphal Building, R0.04) the research seminar will provide an opportunity to discuss to what extent translation practices may impact the production and dissemination of alternative and de-centred perspectives to read contemporary Italian and European society and culture. Moreover, specific attention will be paid to some research projects which make available their outcomes via digital archives, interactive maps, and web blogs.
Programme
16.00 – Registration and Welcome
16.15 – Translating contemporary translingual writers Romeo Fratti (Linguafranca Transnational Literary Agency) in conversation with Mila Milani (Warwick)
17.15 – The Dialectics of Modernity: Designing Cultural Landscapes with Digital Humanities Francesca Billiani (Manchester) in conversation with Gianmarco Mancosu (Warwick)
18.15 – Final roundtable: Italian Cultures and Digital Humanities with Bryan Brazeau (Warwick), organizers and invited speakers

19.00 – Wine Reception

Italian Teachers Day 2019
2019-03-02 | pin Francis Holland School Regent’s Park, Ivor Place,, London, NW1 6XR
Italian Teachers Day
Speakers
Professor Robert Gordon, University of Cambridge, Fossoli: POWs, Primo Levi, Postwar Utopia
Professor Giuliana Pieri, Royal Holloway, University of London, The Making of Modern Italy: Art, Fashion and Design in Postwar Italy
Dr. Cecilia Brioni, University of Hull, Perché Sanremo è Sanremo: Teaching Italian Social History through Popular Music
Dr. Alessio Baldini, University of Leeds, The family as metaphor for a nation
Professor Guido Bonsaver, University of Oxford, Teaching I cento passi
Dr. Daniela La Penna, University of Reading, Teaching Marcovaldo
Ian Rodmell (AQA) – The GCSE examination
Carole Moore (co-author of Amici)
Round table on teaching grammar and translation (Dr Caterina Sinibaldi, Nick Roberts, Dr Julia Barron)
