Giuliana Pieri, in her paper on “Vision and Visuality in Italian Studies”, explored a surprising blind spot in the current field of Italian studies: the interdisciplinary field of Visual Studies. In 2010 the SIS journal Italian Studies moved to three issues per year, with a third issue dedicate to Cultural Studies (under the editorship of Prof. Derek Duncan). Since the publication of the volume Italian Cultural Studies: an Introduction, edited by D. Forgacs and R. Lumley (1996) the field of Italian studies in the UK has witnessed a marked change in the direction of scholarly research and teaching. Cultural Studies responded to a broader conception of the boundaries of the disciplinary field, especially through the introduction of the study of Italian cinema, now an almost ubiquitous choice in the UG curriculum. Yet the cognate disciplinary area of Visual Cultural Studies, which also developed in the 1990s as a response to the theoretical changes that challenged the boundaries of Art History, has not been fully embraced by scholars in Italian Studies. Whilst we consider the theoretical and institutional challenges of interdisciplinary research in the UK in the 21st century, Pieri’s paper invited us to think about what is a discipline, what forces help to shape its boundaries, how can such boundaries be challenged and redefined, and, ultimately, what does the resistance to new disciplinary boundaries say about the state and future directions of a discipline.
