Italian

Research groups

The department has two broad areas of research expertise:

• Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Cultural History, including: Italian colonial/postcolonial cultures; representations of terrorism; sports history and culture; cultural memory; the history of psychiatry; the history and culture of 1968; visual culture and film; gender and sexuality; travel writing; autobiography; literary culture; representations of the south of Italy.

• Medieval and Early Modern Italian Literature and Cultural History, including: Dante; Boccaccio; medieval theory of language; early Italian poetry; reception studies; the history of the book.

Every member of the department participates in the research clusters of the Faculty of Arts and the School of Modern Languages. Staff in the department play an active role in the Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Societies; Identity Formation in Political, Historical and Linguistic Contexts; Medieval Cultures; and Screen Research.

Members of staff have been recently involved in various major projects, such as Transnationalising Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures, and Italian Cinema Audiences (on Italian cinema audiences and stars in the 1940s and 1950s), both of which were funded by large grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as a Wellcome Trust project on radical psychiatry in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Colleagues are also deeply involved in the promotion of scholarship in Italian studies, institutionally, nationally and internationally.

Postgraduate students are fully integrated in the research culture of the department and participate in our programme of colloquia, workshops and lectures. You may also benefit from the department's strong research links with universities in Italy, especially Naples and Bologna.

Careers

Many graduates from this programme develop careers in higher education or work on high-level research projects in the field of Italian; others take their in-depth understanding of literary and visual cultures into a host of other professions, such as translation, journalism, publishing and the cultural industry.

The advanced critical and professional skills developed at postgraduate level, alongside skills in research and communicating research, also prepare our graduates for a diverse range of careers, from the civil service and law to commerce and the media.