Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School, Trinity College Dublin, 29-30th June 2018/report

We held the first Interdisciplinary Italy Doctoral Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin on 29^th-30^th July 2018. The theme for this Summer School was “Intermedia”. The Summer School attracted PhD researchers from the US (Brown University), from Australia (Sydney University), from the UK (Universities of St Andrews, Birmingham and Royal Holloway), from Italy (University of Bologna) and Trinity. 

The programme began with a Keynote address by Pierpaolo Antonello (Reader at Cambridge), entitled ‘Visible Books, Unreadable Books: Bruno Munari’s Peritextual Playground’, a talk dealing with one of Italy’s most important 20^th-century artists, pioneering what would later be called kinetic art. The talk looked at the readability of texts, and the book as a visible and material object, investigating the intersection between Munari’s work in the fine arts and his work as a writer and graphic designer, exploring ‘borders’ between text and image and the peritextual inventions in the books he designed, wrote and illustrated. 

The afternoon sessions were dedicated to three hands-on workshops led first by Emanuela Patti and then by Pierpaolo Antonello which explored key texts in intermedial theory by theorists such as Irina Rajewsky and Ágnes Pethő.

We discussed terminological obstacles and methodological knots to try to come to a clearer understanding of the issues at stake. In the final session, Pierpaolo talked about the intermediality of Paolo Sorrentino’s film La grande bellezza (2013), where we looked at how the film illustrates some of Pethő’s points. It was also clear that the relationship between the arts is not always one of collaboration, but of rivalry: a power struggle between competing media. 

On the second day, we kicked off with Emanuela Patti’s workshop on forms of transposition across the arts in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing on a particularly intriguing, and rarely discussed, short, Che cosa sono le nuvole (1967) which centres on puppet theatre.

This was followed by two creative workshops run by Clodagh Brook, in which our PhD researchers were encouraged to re-explore their own intermedial methodologies in the light of their reading and the discussions over the previous days. We used mock PhD vivas and group work centered on tackling key intermedial methodological challenges in their own work. In the second creative workshop, we led them through a collaborative writing exercise. 

All this took place in the delightful and relaxing surroundings of the Trinity’s Long Room Hub on the warmest and sunniest days to hit Ireland for 40 years. 

We are grateful to both the SIS and the AHRC for the funding which enabled us to provide the bursaries for the successful attendees. We are also grateful to the talented and engaged PhD researchers who attended, to Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway) and Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge), who gave their time to organising such interesting workshops. We hope to run another summer school next year in London.