Research in Italian Studies
Italian Studies at Manchester undertakes internationally recognized research which is both wide-ranging and markedly interdisciplinary, with a particular focus on linguistics, translation studies, and cultural politics from the Medieval to the modern period. Resources for the study of Italian at Manchester are outstanding and underpinned by the holdings of The John Rylands University Library, the third largest academic library in the UK. The Deansgate branch of the JRULM, which has recently undergone a £16m refurbishment, houses the library's special collections which include a world class holding of early Italian printed books from the Spencer, Christie, and Bullock collections. The research culture is further enhanced by the presence of Visiting Professors and Lecturers from Italy, participation in the interdisciplinary seminars held by the Italian Forum, and two or three major research events per year.
- RAE Success
- Research Projects
- Research Centres
- Seminars and Conferences
- Research Students
- Staff Research Profiles
Success for Italian Studies at Manchester
Italian Studies at The University of Manchester has established its reputation as a leading centre for international research in the 2008 Research Assessment exercise (RAE). Over half of its research activity was judged to be in the top two categories of 'world-leading' and 'internationally excellent'. In national rankings produced by Times Higher Education and based on RAE 2008 quality profiles, Italian Studies at Manchester is in the upper tier of a small group of elite institutions. It is part of the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures, one of the leading Units of its kind in the country. Moreover, The University of Manchester has emerged from this RAE as one of the UK's top four or five universities for research and one which boasts a breadth of research achievement spread across more distinct discipline areas than any other UK institution.
Research Projects
- Structures of the early vernaculars of Italy (SAVI)
- Venice remembered: identity and the uses of history in Risorgimento and Liberal Italy, 1815-1922
- Existential constructions. An investigation into the Italo-Romance dialects
- Partial Rhetoric: Florentine Civic Republicanism and the Premodern State
- Palla Strozzi and vernacular oratory in fifteenth-century Florence
- The Manchester Digital Dante Project
Research Centres and Institutes
Seminars and Conferences
- The launch of the Manchester Digital Dante Project
- The launch of the AHRC funded project Existential Constructions: An Investigation into the Italo-Romance Dialects
Research Students
- Please see here for the profiles of PhD students in Italian Studies
Italian Studies Research Profiles
Guyda Armstrong: the history of Boccaccio in English translation; the intertextual relationship between Boccaccio and Dante; and the production of Boccaccio editions from manuscript culture to the digital age. Wider research interests include the history of the book, literary cultures of medieval and Renaissance Europe, and feminist critical approaches to literary and translation studies.
Delia Bentley: Italian synchronic and diachronic linguistics; Italo-Romance dialectology, with particular emphasis on Sicilian and Sardinian; theoretical linguistics (Role and Reference Grammar). Consultant to the AHRC-funded project SAVI (Strutture degli Antichi Volgari d'Italia).
Francesca Billiani: 20th Century literature and culture, especially translation policies and publishing activity in Italy during the fascist period; Gothic and Fantastic fiction in late nineteenth-century Italian prose fiction; early twentieth-century journalism; Cesare Pavese; contemporary Italian novel.
Stephen J. Milner : Italian medieval and Renaissance cultural history, especially rhetoric and the revival of popular vernacular oratory; urban space and communal imagination in the late medieval communes; the Florentine territorial state under the Medici; artistic patronage and cultural translation in Renaissance Italy; cultural theory and the historiography of the Italian Renaissance.
Stuart Oglethorpe: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy, and particularly its social history, including: the legacy of the Papal States and the role of the Catholic Church, peasant life and rural societies, local museums, national, regional, and local identities, migration, Fascism and anti-Fascism, 'divided memory', commemoration, post-1945 transformations; post-war Italian cinema, anthropological approaches, and oral history and its methodology.
Spencer Pearce: Has contributed to books on orders and hierarchies in Medieval Europe, and on the literature of Europe and the Americas in the 1960s; is currently preparing a comprehensive study of the Italian Renaissance philosopher of nature Girolamo Fracastoro.
Chris Rundle: the history of fascist Italy, especially fascist cultural policy and the development of the Italian publishing industry, from the point of view of translation.