Italian Interdisciplinary Modernism (Part III)

The final set of papers in the morning session of our New York workshop shows the potential for fostering interdisciplinary thinking when one brings together scholars with expertise in multiple areas. In 2007 our two speakers, Giuliana Pieri (RHUL) and Jacqueline Reich (Stony Brook) met at a workshop co-hosted by Reading and Royal Holloway in which scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary contexts (history of the Church, French and German history, cinema etc) came together to provide a much needed wider context to the main project, the study of the personality cult of Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The research project, funded by the AHRC, was lead by Stephen Gundle (Warwick), Christopher Duggan (Reading), and Giuliana Pieri (RHUL).

Giuliana Pieri presented briefly the project (which run between 2006-2010) by highlighting how the coming together of three distinct disciplines – cinema and media (Gundle), history (Duggan) and art history (Pieri) – resulted in a much needed wider contextualization of the cult of the Italian dictator. By placing Mussolini in the context of the age of mass media and celebrity culture, and by looking at the ways in which the cult reverberated in Italian culture in the post war period, the project aimed to understand the creation and development over time of the extraordinary cult of personality which surrounded the Italian dictator.

Jacqueline Reich’s paper on Maciste, the Italian strongman who was the protagonist of a phenomenally successful series of films both in Italy and abroad, showed the effect that an interdisciplinary approach can have on research. Drawing from a wide variety of disciplines and discourses – cinema, the press, race, celebrity and mass culture – Jacqueline’s study of the impact of the Maciste franchise in North America showed how one can build a complex and multifaceted picture of a cultural and cinematic phenomenon.