The summer school explored the concept of transnationality in Italian comics and how both transnationality and intermediality can be used as methodological approaches for the study of comics and, more broadly, visual media. Dr Manuela Di Franco introduced the concept of transnationality as a methodological approach to the study of comics and delivered a workshop on reading and analysing a comic by Italian popular comic artist Zerocalcare. Prof Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland) delivered her keynote on transnationality in documentary comics, and explored intermedial storytelling practices of comics, linking the talk with Prof Clodagh Brook’s introduction to intermediality. Prof Brook’s seminar explained intermedial approaches, as well as the history of the field, and encouraged participants to reflect on how intermediality can be used in their research.  Dr Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato introduced alternative comics and comics zines to show how different production practices can impact the transnational dimension of comics in Italy. The summer school ended with a workshop on comics zines creation delivered by local artists, the Bad Way Press, who showed how alternative printing works and guided participants in creating their own zines. The workshop was an opportunity to put into practice concepts addressed during the seminars. It also offered an opportunity to connect with artists.

Participants collaborated to analyse comics from a scholarly perspective, engaging in group discussions on methodological approaches in comics and visual studies. These discussions provided an opportunity to reflect on how comics integrate into the broader landscape of Italian popular culture. The summer school not only facilitated academic exploration but also fostered new academic collaborations among participants. The exchange of ideas during seminars and workshops created a dynamic environment where scholars and artists could connect, leading to the initiation of potential research projects and partnerships. The hands-on activities, particularly the zine-making workshop, allowed participants to apply theoretical concepts practically, further strengthening their understanding and appreciation of comics as a significant cultural medium. This collaborative and immersive experience emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in the study of comics and visual media, highlighting their role in contemporary cultural and academic contexts.

The summer school, alongside the Interdisciplinary Italy website remain important legacies of the Interdisciplinary Italy project, which is carried on through these channels, and through the continuing research of the Interdisciplinary Italy research group (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri, Bellardi, Brioni, Di Franco, Lima, Patti), and the postdocs and PhD students who work with the members of the research group.

L'articolo Report of the 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (Dublin 2024) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Transnational Italian Comics

11-12 July 2024, Trinity College Dublin

Organised by: Manuela di Franco and Clodagh Brook

The study of comics as an interdisciplinary field has surged in recent years. Studies like Stein, Denson, and Meyer (2013) have examined how graphic narratives have overcome national boundaries and connected with global culture from a visual, literary, and cultural perspective. More recently, Comberiati, and Spadaro (2023) have investigated Italian comics and their transnationality, introducing the specificities of the Italian fumetto to a field still focused on (and dominated by) anglophone comics. The study of transnational Italian comics reveals the symbiotic relationship between national and global cultures and sheds light on the discursive power that the medium of comics had in shaping modern Italian popular culture.

The 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School aims to contribute to the flourishing field of Comics Studies and actively engage with the study of Italian fumetti and their global cultural exchange. The study of Italian comics allows for a reflection on how transnational interactions can shape national culture and create a cultural product that combines both local and global contents.

Through lectures and hands-on workshops, the next summer school enables you to acquire the tools to interpret comics, understand their transnationality, and approach Italian popular culture from an overlooked perspective. By the end of the summer school, you will have acquired hands-on experience in the analysis of comics and a deeper understanding of how Italian culture has been shaped by an increasingly globalised context.

We welcome PhD candidates and Postdocs working in any field of Italian culture.

The Summer School is entirely free of charge.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

To apply, please send a 150-250 word motivation statement and short bio (100 words) to Manuela.difranco@ugent.be by 30 April.

This Summer School has receive funds from the SIS and the EU.

In the PDF below, the full Workshop Programme:

L'articolo 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (Trinity College Dublin, 11-12 July 2024) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The two days saw a number of interactive workshops led by our keynotes speakers. Prof Emma Bond (Oxford), in a workshop entitled ‘The Museum as Interdisciplinary Space: Concepts and Practices’, drew on her extensive work with museum practitioners and curators to invite us to think about the museum space as fundamentally interdisciplinary and the place where theory and practice come into creative encounter with different communities of practice. Prof Charles Burdett, in his keynote lecture ‘Transnational Time: Approaches to Temporality in Research’, introduced us to the most recent developments of of his seminal work on transnationalizing Italian Studies highlighting the significance of understanding and promoting our discipline within the broader context of modern languages. Dr Adele Bardazzi (Utrecht) took on the challenge of AI in relation to poetry; her talk ‘Poetry’s Ends: Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Italian Poetry’ reflected on experimental poetic practice, the (many) current limitations and flaws of AI in the field, and the expansion of the material and intermedial boundaries of poetic practice in twentieth and twenty-century Italy. Dr Julia Caterina Hartley and Roberto Binetti delivered a dynamic workshop on impact and dissemination which cast light onto a key concern in British universities.

The growth in importance of taking academic research to wider audiences has been a seminal shift in the way research is evaluated and conceived in Britain. It has led to a much greater engagement with communities and the wider public. Differentiating between impact and dissemination remains a key concern, guiding, from the very beginning, the way we plan how our research will travel beyond academia.

Networking and thinking proactively about the pipelines of interdisciplinary talent into our discipline has always been at the forefront of our project and an integral part of the Summer School programme. This has taken different shapes, from providing an open space for interdisciplinary exchange to sharing ideas and practical advice on career progression. The latter was a particular focus of the 2023 Summer School.

Prof Simon Gilson led an interactive session on pathways for PhD and early career researchers which mapped past and present routes into academic positions and industry opportunities for researchers. We run a CV clinic in which we gave one-to-one guidance and an outsider’s view that brought into sharp relief the need to be mindful of contexts and culture, and the need for careful tailoring of one’s profile to suit diverse institutions. The second day opened with a practical session on grants and fellowships.Prof Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway University of London) encouraged participants to think like a reviewer and interrogate one’s research project as a dispassionate outsider, who will invariably be less critical than ourselves in evaluating our work but whose work of evaluation needs to be made easier, with clear signposting and scaffolding of information. The day ended with an exhilarating session: in the elevator pitch participants took it into turn to deliver a one-minute elevator pitch on their current research project. We used the rehearsal room technique; each participant delivered their very brief speech, and received feedback on delivery, content, pace, and tone.

L'articolo Report of the 4th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (London 2023) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Italian Studies in Interdisciplinary Spaces, Transnational Times, and Digital Minds

L'articolo 4th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (London, 15–16 September 2023) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Through sessions combining short talks with interactive activities, we aimed to tackle three questions:

• How does co-creating research work in practice?
• How can we as researchers think creatively about opportunities for collaboration in, and emerging from, our own research?
• How can co-creation be leveraged to support us in winning research funding grants?

Clodagh Brook’s talk, which opened the Summer School, discussed different models of co-creation that could be applied to our research, by underlining the non-linearity of the process of co-creation and the advantages of bringing collaborators on board right at the start of a research project.

The subsequent sessions were divided onto three main areas, namely relations with education, industry and the arts. The sessions on education, led by Cecilia Brioni and Giuliana Pieri, discussed experiences of collaboration with undergraduates and secondary-school students, namely Giuliana’s ‘Interart in Schools’ project and Cecilia’s project to bring her research on YouTube into a collaborative university classroom. The session on industry was led by Martina Mendola, a recent graduate of Trinity with a PhD in Italian who now works for Accenture. She discussed her experience as a researcher in the industry and how relevant our work on identity can be in an industry setting. The two sessions led by Derek Duncan and Simone Brioni respectively dealt with co-creation of outputs with artists. Derek shared with us his experience of collaborating with photographer Mario Badagliacca for their book, Italy is Out. Simone talked about his documentary, Oltre I bordi, which uncovered Italy’s fascist-era colonialisation through a box of family photographs.

The second part of each session was designed to encourage participants to experiment with different kinds of creative collaborative activities, including designing a module with co-creative elements, making a pop-up exhibition, brainstorming research questions using post-its, discussing how to collaborate with artists as early career researchers, and creating the storyline for a documentary.

The final activity of the Summer School was a research sandpit, where participants were asked to work in groups to write the rationale for a research grant and identify the intended outputs for a collaborative research project that would fit each participant’s research interests and involve a co-creation element. The three groups produced three projects: ‘Before Ferrante. Women Writers between Visibility and Invisibility’, ‘The Aest(h)etics of memory in Urban Spaces’ and ‘Minority Engagement in the Metaverse: Voice and Visibility’. Results of the sandpit were then presented to a panel of judges, from Trinity’s Research Office and Trinity’s Tangent: Ideas Work Space, who decided the winning project. The prize was supported by the SIS.

Overall, the Summer School was very well received. Participants particularly appreciated its learning-through-doing approach that enabled them to experiment with different techniques of, and approaches to, co-creation. Our speakers actively participated in all activities, providing useful feedback on the ideas that were shared in the small group activities.

The Summer School enabled us all to carve out two days to reimagine our research and teaching in a more collaborative and impactful way.

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3rd Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School 

Collaboration and Co-creation in Italian Studies 

Venue: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

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The first day began with the welcome remarks of the Interdisciplinary Italy team, followed by an introductory workshop by the two organisers, Dr Clodagh Brook and Dr Eleonora Lima, on the long history of the involvement of arts and humanities with digital culture: from the mid-1950s to the present. This initial historical survey aimed to encourage participants to consider how artists see digital technologies differently as broader cultural changes take place, and how this constant shift can be addressed in our research.

The second workshop, which concluded the first day, was dedicated to digital art and digital justice. It was led by Dr Tatiana Bazzichelli, the artistic director of Disruption Network Lab, a Berlin-based non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting participatory, interdisciplinary, international events that focus on human rights and technology, freedom of speech, exposing systems of power and injustice within network culture. Bazzichelli invited the participants to consider many pressing issues arising from digital technologies – the role of whistle-blowers for democracy, the practice of hacktivism, the military use of drones, racial and gender bias in AI systems – and how the arts can disrupt and oppose oppressive and discriminatory practices.

The second day began with a more hands-on workshop led by Eleonora Lima, during which participants shared their personal experiences and discussed opportunities and difficulties in working with Digital Humanities, in terms of career trajectory, grant applications, positioning within the academic field, time-management, and so on. To kick off the conversation, Lima presented her ongoing project for a monograph on Italian literature and computer culture, as well as her constantly developing website Narrating Computing, which hosts her work with Social Network Analysis.

It was then time for participants to meet the first of the two distinguished keynote speakers, Professor Henry Jenkins, and to discuss with him some of the key concepts and ideas he then presented in his online public lecture, titled Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid-19: A Fever Dream (available here). Prof Jenkins’s keynote speech first explored how the concept of “convergence culture,” which he famously theorised in in his 2006 pivotal book (featuring a preface by Wu Ming in its Italian translation), needed to be updated in light of the collective and personal experiences with digital technologies during the imposed world-wide lockdown. Secondly, he considered what long-term trends in media, entertainment, and popular culture the pandemic may have set in motion.

The third and final day started off with a workshop led by graphic and animation artist Leonardo Sangiorgi, founding member of Studio Azzurro, a collective engaged in art research related to new technology since 1982. The workshop was designed to offer the participants the opportunity to consider digital art from a creative rather than purely academic perspective. Sangiorgi, in conversation with Dr Emanuela Patti, retraced Studio Azzurro’s early involvement with digital technologies by showing rare footage of their installations, and shared the collective’s most recent projects, such as the exhibition for Federico Fellini’s centennial and the newly opened Museo Fellini in Rimini.

The Summer School concluded with a public lecture by Professor Massimo Riva, another long-standing contributor of the Interdisciplinary Italy project, like Studio Azzurro. First, though, Prof Riva met the participants for a private discussion, during which he shared some remarks on the state of Digital Humanities in the Italian Studies. In his keynote address (available here), titled Simulating the Past, from Analog to Digital (and vice versa), Professor Riva discussed his latest project, an upcoming digital monograph dedicated to “virtual travel” in the pre-digital age (18-19th centuries), such as the cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope, which he considered to be the ancestors of present-day Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Extended Reality (XR) experiences.

The Summer School thus concluded by coming full circle: having opened with a workshop considering the long history of digital culture, it closed with a lecture reflecting on the prehistory of virtual reality. The variety of periods, issues, and topics proposed was not  intended to suggest a flattening approach, equating different technologies and practices under the broad label of “digital.” The intent was rather to problematise it by considering the complexity of a concept which is constantly subjected to reinterpretations as a result of  historical contexts, affiliated fields, political positioning, and personal sensibility. We hope we succeeded in our attempt.

We look forward to our next Summer School in 2022. Details will be available on this website shortly.

L'articolo Report of the Second Interdisciplinary Italy Postgraduate Summer School sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid-19: A Fever Dream

by Professor HENRY JENKINS

(July 2, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

AND

Simulating the Past: From Analog to Digital (and Vice Versa)

by Professor MASSIMO RIVA

(July 3, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

The events are hosted by the Interdisciplinary Italy research team as part of the Second Summer School The digital turn: When, why, and how to embrace it (1-3 July 2021), organised by Prof Clodagh Brook (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Eleonora Lima (Trinity College Dublin).

To attend the lectures, please register via Eventbrite at these links:

Prof Henry Jenkins’s public lecture: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-henry-jenkins-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-158891642179?keep_tld=1

Prof Massimo Riva’s public lecture:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-massimo-riva-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-159551682377

L'articolo Henry Jenkins + Massimo Riva Online Public Lectures (Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

L'articolo 1st Interdisciplinary Italy/Summer School – Trinity College Dublin, 29-30 June 2018 PROGRAMME sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.