Panel: M. Gargiulo (Bergen), Joanna Kostylo (The British School at Rome), (Università Statale, Milano), G. Pieri (RHUL).

Marco Gargiulo’s observation on the interdisciplinary nature of many job adverts in Italian Studies in UK universities (asking for instance teaching and/or research expertise in 20^th-century literature AND cinema) was the starting point for our discussion on the interdisciplinary thrust of Italian Studies in the UK. Departmental structures, with Italian as part of larger groupings which include alternatively European Languages and Cultures and European Studies, were viewed by the panel as a sign of the de facto interdisciplinary context in which we currently operate.

Our discussion moved onto to three levels at which interdisciplinary research and teaching operate in academic institutions:

1. The research interests of the individual scholar. This area was further broken down into:
   1. The need for scholars to establish their reputation by building a portfolio of publications in specific areas in order to respond to the academic job market.
   2. The book market and its disciplinary boundaries which respond to marketing needs/strategies.
   3. The research and publication model which is prevalent in the humanities which does not favour multiple authors.
   4. Departmental interests and structures which may foster or hinder those of the individual. Examples which we briefly touched upon were research clusters within departments; the artificial grouping of modern foreign languages which fosters comparative approaches within certain areas (ex. Linguistics and literary studies) but not others (English, history, music are very seldom linked at departmental level with modern European languages).
   5. Wider institutional interests. For example, the launch by many UK universities of research themes which could be seen as either a means to foster interdisciplinary research OR to curb intellectual freedom. Or the impact of research assessment in the UK—Italian Studies will be assessed by a Modern Languages panel for the first time.

As the previous discussion panel at NYU noted, financial factors seems to have an impact on interdisciplinary research. The drive towards interdisciplinarity can help institutions to frame more positively departmental cuts and restructuring, but it is also linked to the policies of national and European funding bodies to which universities and individuals need to respond. This was seen by some members of our panel as a threat to the individual scholar and the high quality research which in the Humanities is still often the preserve of the lone scholar.

A different model of fostering interdisciplinarity could be seen within non-academic institutions. We talked about the British School at Rome in which for instance scholars with a shared interest in Italian culture, literature, art, archaeology and artists share the same physical and metaphorical roof.

Our final thought was that discussing interdisciplinary research and teaching in Italian Studies was a means to open up discussion on the identity of Italian Studies and the place and status of the discipline in different national and institutional contexts.

How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?

The main areas we discussed were border crossing and transgressing. We looked at the fact that the literary rhetorical load of the great work of art in Italy made it more difficult for Italians to transgress. We also looked at how much the establishment recognized the transgression, especially in relation to the time lag between the border crossings in the arts and its recognition in Universities and other parts of the establishment. Croce’s influence on early 20^th society was of particular importance, as effectively policed the boundaries of art to exclude, for example, fashion (an attitude that postmodernism, with its fusing of high and low art, changed).

However, conversely, the use of the avant-garde by the fascist establishment means that there is a utility to saying ‘no’, i.e. when border-crossing is taken on by particular powers within the establishment. Boundaries may then need to be reinstated. As Eco tells us, of course, the revolutions of the past become the conventions of the present.

In other words, there is  a “multispeed” aspect to porosity which needs to be taken into account.  In early twentieth century, there was a porosity between the high arts, but not really between high and low. We thought it interesting to explore further which boundaries were, and were not, porous.

We brought in the architectural term of ‘refunctioning’ in relation to traditional arts and the idea of ‘disorderly return’ which springs up at the borders between the reactionary and the progressive.

We also touched on policy in relation to transgression:  in the current teaching of Italian Studies, there is a sidelining of literature in favour of an interdisciplinary approach. To go against the dominant ideology of interdisciplinarity is in this context revolutionary.

In relation to creativity, the group generally felt that boundary crossing between the arts in Modernism was not necessarily a magic formula for creativity. Being constrained can increase creativity.

Panel: R. Ben-Ghiat (NYU),  J. Champagne (PennState), G. Pieri (RHUL), L. Somigli (Toronto University).

Our discussion group benefited from multiple national perspectives (US, Canada, UK). We focused on a number of interrelated issues and took as our starting point the morning sessions which raised the issue of the kind of disciplinary training that makes interdisciplinary connections possible.

The first point we discussed was related to funding and resources in institutions and how they may be linked to the current drive towards interdisciplinarity as a means to group together cognate disciplines which have traditionally occupied separate spaces. Is this a money saving exercise? Is this the future of smaller subject and/or disciplinary areas in the face of current funding cuts in the arts and humanities sectors?

We also discussed the effect of the need to offer courses in English (with all material in English translation) and how that may affect the teaching of Italian content courses. It is fair to say that we were less preoccupied with this issue since we saw language learning as often separate from the teaching of content. Tighter links between language and content in Italian Studies may or may not be desirable, since the come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages.

Our discussion then moved onto another central issue: what is the difference between a mono-disciplinary and an interdisciplinary approach from a pedagogical point of view? We spent a lot of time over the thorny issue of transmission of knowledge and the relative merits of different approaches to disciplinary boundaries.

This led us also to discuss the idea of the canon and the shifts in the Italian curriculum. J. Champagne offered the perspective of English in which the canon, as he put it, is simply ‘too large to cover it all’. We noted the similarity with the situation in Italian Studies in which a once traditional curriculum, dominated by the study of Italian literature, now includes a variety of other areas of study, especially cinema, history, and the visual arts. We thought that the expanding boundaries of the curriculum could/should be seen as a liberating force which allows a much more flexible approach to curriculum design and delivery. We also wondered whether the fact that we still think of the boundaries of the specific disciplines may be linked to longstanding 19^th-century notions of academic disciplines.

We also noted the difference of US Honours programmes and their relative flexibility since the 1980s. This institutional shift has not taken place in the UK. However, we noted that, if one takes the example of Italian Studies in the UK, the growth of Italian Cultural Studies since the 1990s has altered the curriculum and has led some departments to develop a more interdisciplinary offer.

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.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is currently working on a major exhibition on Futurism which will open in February 2014. Dr Vivien Green, curator of 19^th and early 20^th century art and chief curator of the show, gave us a fascinating insight into the planning of the event in her talk entitled ‘Exhibiting Italian Futurism in 2014: l’opera d’arte totale’. She literally took us on a virtual guided tour of the forthcoming exhibition, showing us how the architectural space of the museum is guiding, challenging and inspiring the way in which Italian Futurism will be presented to the American and international public in 2014. The show promises to be a major rethinking of the entire Futurist moment from its inception in 1909 to its development in the interwar years and will include some lesser known figures such as Gerardo Dottori, an excellent example of the regional reach of Futurism and the dynamic relationship within later Futurism between the periphery (Umbria and the city of Perugia in particular) and the centre which by the late 1920 and 1930 for the Futurists had shifted from Milan to Rome.

The question of the often difficult integration of music into traditional exhibition formats will be addressed by the show and forms part of the strong commitment to a truly interdisciplinary display of the Italian Futurist movement. This is especially interesting to our project since it relates to one of the specific questions which we wanted to raise during our first workshop: how does our understanding of Italian Modernism affect trends in museum display and curatorial choices? The reverse is of course also true: physical and financial constraints, curatorial choices and display trends have the potential to affect and/or obstruct our understanding of artistic movements especially when they have at their core an interdisciplinary and multimedia agenda.

I was also struck by another challenge which Dr Greene faced and raised with us: how to build layers of knowledge and information which can at once challenge and engage the general public, who may come to the show with very little previous knowledge of Italian Futurism, and those who may already possess a strong interest in the Italian avant-garde movement.

The current exhibition at the Guggenheim, Gutai: Splendid Playground, which presents Japan’s most influential avant-garde collective of the postwar era which had interesting links with the Italian neo-avanguardia, puts in sharp relief the idea of disciplinary boundaries in the postwar period which we are going to explore in the forthcoming workshops. The amazing space of the Guggenheim rotunda is now filled with a work by Motonaga Sadamasa, Water. The Guggenheim commissioned the artist ‘to recreate this work for the rotunda, where he hangs common, polyethylene tubes of varying widths filled with brightly-colored water between the rotunda levels, making giant brushstrokes out of catenaries in the open air that catch the sunlight (Work [Water], 1956/2011)’.

Our first workshop took place at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò on Friday 22 February. The morning session had three position papers which addressed in different ways the potential and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches in the study of some discreet aspects of Italian modernism.

Since the lectures were recorded on video and will be available soon, the following summary of the day’s events constitutes a personal response rather than a more formal record of the proceedings. Let’s start with Prof. David Forgacs’s talk ‘Disciplines, Arts, Industries, Technologies, Spaces’.

David gave us a very thought provoking presentation, which echoed what some of the members of our advisory board said in our November 2012 meeting by reminding us that interdisciplinary is not always a good thing. The relationship between the arts (which many of us see as one of the fundamental contributions to the artistic debate and art practices of Italian modernism) looks different if one looks at it from the point of the view of the academic researcher or from that of the educator. David stressed the importance of well trained people in different disciplines coming together as opposed to the absence of disciplinary boundaries per se, and shifted the emphasis on the type of disciplinary training that is needed in order to make interdisciplinary connections. The existing disciplinary boundaries were indeed a real concern for some of the Italian Futurists, especially if we think about the Futurist critique of academic artistic training which is where interdisciplinary work truly happened. David also addressed the issue of the Italian (but probably not peculiarly Italian) anxiety about backwardness which is the backdrop against which ideas of modernity were projected. I was very interested in the point he made about the way Italian modernism was fashioned and its complex links with tradition, since tradition was of course mostly excluded but also at times reinstated as part of the idiom of Italian modernity.

Technological changes (the literally and metaphorically wireless—senza fili—technology embraced by the Futurists), new art forms (especially cinema as the eminently inter-artistic medium of the time) and the role of the cultural industries as mediators between artists and the public/political space reminded me of the need to address modernism from multiple perspectives and to place the art and the artist firmly within the new spaces created by modernity. The move away from the cafe society of interwar Italy and the world of the riviste (the literary and art journals which were so influential in shaping Italian intellectuals at the time) to one of radio, tv and mass motoring in the postwar period produced new Italian intellectuals who were not anymore self-contained outsiders but found their space within the cultural industries and academia.

It seems fitting to mention a final point raised by David’s lecture to conclude this first posting. A great part of the period under examination (we set the years 1900-1940 as our chronological focus) witnessed strict cultural control raising the issue of the scope of interdisciplinarity under Fascism.

In the next posting you will find a more on the other papers in the morning session and further ideas and points for discussion which came out of the small working groups in the afternoon session. We hope you will keep reading and contributing to our blog.