About us
Welcome to the Italian at Manchester website. Italian studies has been taught here since the nineteenth century, and still continues to flourish and innovate as a discipline area within our dynamic School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures. Every year we welcome between 50-60 new undergraduates onto a variety of degree programmes, which include Single Honours Italian, Combined Honours with a range of other languages, including Chinese and Japanese, and Joint Honours with other non-language courses such as History and Business Studies.
More than two-thirds of our students begin Italian from scratch as total beginners, studying under the guidance of our mother-tongue language tutors who have devised a dedicated language learning programme which has been specifically designed to build both proficiency and confidence. We currently have six full-time members of academic staff with expertise in subjects from the medieval period to the present day in fields such as visual studies, history, linguistics and the history of the language, translation studies, and literary/ cultural studies.
Our research specialisms mean we can offer a very wide range of culture units, and thus give students the opportunity to be taught by experts whose own research is setting the agenda in their respective fields of study. Our postgraduate programmes also offer the possibility of building upon these staff research interests. In the recent past we have been particularly strong in the field of Italian linguistics and more recently have begun to build our postgraduate activity in the field of Italian cultural policy and production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hosting two major AHRC Research projects since 2001.
Our work is supported by the excellent holdings of the John Rylands Library which provides the largest collection of electronic resources in the UK, and the second-best holdings of early Italian printed books in the world. We also maintain strong links with the wider Italian academic community in Manchester, co-hosting cultural and social events with the Italian departments of Manchester Metropolitan and Salford universities, as well as with the Manchester branch of the Società Dante Alighieri.
For more information about who we are and what we do, please explore the website, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to get in touch via email or phone. A presto!