Research
Research is a priority in the strategic plan of the Department of Italian in Trinity College. It is meant to enhance knowledge, provide better teaching and better education overall. Trinity College is brilliantly positioned for the study of Italian literature, film and culture. In Dublin, there is a vibrant Italian Cultural Institute with a rich programme of cultural events and speakers. We also have strong historic and current links with the neighbouring Department of Italian Studies at University College, Dublin. Trinity College’s renowned Long Room Hub (https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/) is next door to the Department and provides us with an interdisciplinary humanities research centre, housed in a state-of-the-art building and providing a stimulating programme of talks and events.
Italian at Trinity has a lively research focus. We have specialisms in: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the intellectual history of Italian Renaissance Humanism; 13th-20th century Italian poetry, theatre and literature; History of the Italian Language since its origins; History of Western and Italian novels; Italian Modern and Contemporary History (with focus on Mafia and Fascism); Italian cinema and post-cinema, cultural theory, identity politics, interdisciplinary methodologies and practice; Comparative literature in the European context as well as through the American perspective.
The Italian holdings in Trinity Libraries are rich and continuously updated, thanks also to the fact that Trinity Libraries are Copyright Libraries: https://www.tcd.ie/library/collection-man
Our Collaborative Research Projects:
TEEBOC[Translated Electronic Edition Boccaccio texts with Commentary]: This project brings together a Groupement de Recherche International (GDRI) dedicated to the annotation, translation and digitalization of the entire corpus of Giovanni Boccaccio’s works. The Principal Investigator is Dr. Sabrina Ferrara (Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François-Rabelais, Tours). Dr Igor Candido is the project co-ordinator for activities 2 and 3 (Meetings, seminars, conference organization).
Boccaccio and the History of Western Narrative Fiction: Dr Igor Candido is launching a new research network under the umbrella of the Trinity Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The network aims to explore both the sources of Boccaccio and the great influence of his narrative art in the centuries to come. See https://www.tcd.ie/Medieval_Renaissance/research-networks/
Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia [Prof Clodagh Brook, Principal Investigator (2012-17), now International Co-I]. Interdisciplinary Italy is an international, AHRC-funded research project exploring interartistic and intermedial practices in Italy from 1900 to the present. It explores why and how the arts and artists transgress boundaries between artistic disciplines and how this transgression transforms creative practice. The project has run workshops in Rome, London and New York and is currently preparing 3 books, several articles, teaching material and an exhibition at the Estorick Collection in London. See www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org. To be involved, contact Dr Brook.
Performative Arts Today: Dr Giuliana Adamo’s project explores poetry, music, architecture, visual arts, translation by involving artists and institutions. In collaboration with University of Pavia, University of Cagliari, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, “Archivio del Novecento” MART (Rovereto), Conservatory “Bonporti” in Trento, Department of Music (Maynooth College, Ireland), School of Italian, Middlebury College (VT, USA).
Our research environment and individual projects:
Dr Giuliana Adamo: My current book project is entitled Save the Mafia Children and it is based on a historic, sociological, pedagogical research on the life conditions of the children of mob families. My second project is devoted to the historic novel tradition, which is one of my main research areas. My third project is a work on Melodrama in opera and cinema from the 18th century to the present.
Clodagh Brook: Contemporary Italian Cinema and the Post-secular: Religion, Identity, Dissent. This project investigates the place of religion – Catholicism, Islam and emerging forms of spirituality – in Italian film. It explores both religion’s part in shaping the Italian cinema industry and in shaping films made for both the big and small screen. Monograph: Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema in the Post-Secular Public Sphere (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2019). Articles published in Italian Studies (2017), Modern Italy (2017) and book chapters (2015).
Dr Igor Candido: is currently working on a new commented edition of Petrarch’s De vita solitaria (Toronto University Press, under contract) and his next research project is tentatively titled The Genealogy of the Novel. Studies in the Origins and Silent Transmission of Western Narrative Fiction.
Postdoctoral researchers:
Dr Ellie Crabtree – Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2025)
Advisor: Professor Clodagh Brook.
Post-doctoral research project: Investigating how translingual experiences intersect with the methodological becoming of doctoral researchers. This project investigates the learning experiences of PGRs undertaking research transnationally, within the disciplinary field of languages and as so-called ‘international researchers’ who move countries to embark on PhDs.
Dr Rebecca Walker - Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2025)
Advisor: Professor Clodagh Brook.
Post-doctoral research project: Madonnas, Mystics, and Materialists: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Italian Women’s Writing. This work investigates how scholarship in Italian Studies can better account for the religious dimensions of modern and contemporary Italian women’s writing.
Dr Cecilia Brioni– Visiting research fellow (completed Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship 2020-22)
Advisor: Professor Clodagh Brook.
Post-doctoral research project:(Trans)national Online Communities: Celebrity, Identity, and Reception on YouTube Italia'. This project analyses self-representations of Italian YouTubers, young video creators who produce original video material and upload it on the platform, and their audiences.
Dr Adele Bardazzi– Visiting research fellow (completed Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship 2021-23)
Advisor: Professor Clodagh Brook.
Post-doctoral research project: A Textile Poetics of Entanglement.
This interdisciplinary project investigates the relationship between the poetic text and textiles, arguing that the interaction between the language of poetry and that of textile practices, which is at the core of what I call ‘textile poems’, can be understood through a paradigm of productive entanglements. Collaborative Projects: Non solo muse (www.nonsolomuse.com), Italian Poetry Today
Dr Lorenzo Dell’Ozo - Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow
Advisor: Dr Igor Candido
Post-doctoral research project: “Theology, Aristotelianism, and Poetry in Late-Medieval Italy: Dante’s Intellectual Formation in Florence and Bologna (1283-1307).” It aims to provide an extended and interdisciplinary study of knowledge acquisition by lay literates (i.e. those without a formal Latinate education) in the late Middle Ages and, more specifically, to analyse the theological and philosophical formation of Dante Alighieri, in Florence (1283-1302) and Bologna (1304-1307).
Dr Eleonora Lima– Visiting Research Fellow (completed EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2018-20)
Advisor: Professor Clodagh Brook.
Post-doctoral research project:Mapping Remediation in Italian Literature Beyond the Digital Revolutioninvestigates the intermedial dialogue between Italian literature and electronic media—analogue and digital—so as to provide a detailed evaluation of the process of remediation in Italian literature from the mid-1950s up to the present day. The project aims to challenge the dominant critical paradigm, which sees the digital revolution as an unprecedented turning point in the relationship between literature and electronic media, and to question the intellectual approach which opposes inert literature and all-powerful electronic media. Project website: https://narratingcomputing.com/about/
Phd Researchers (Current and Recent)
Giulia Bonaldi – PhD Italian
Supervisor: Igor Candido
Research topic: Smiling, Weeping and Knowledge in Dante and Medieval Culture. Giulia Bonaldi studies the function and meanings of the concepts of smile and weeping in Dante’s works and in the theological and literary medieval context, in light of the peculiar and unexplored relation that these emotional expressions have with knowledge.
Research Interest: Dante and Medieval studies.
Gianluca Caccialupi – PhD Italian
Supervisor: Igor Candido
Research topic: Dante's "Divine Comedy" and the "Queste del Saint Graal". Project funded by the Irish Research Council (2019-2023): Project 209309, Award 15909
Gianluca's dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive comparative study of the anonymous Old French romance Queste del Saint Graal and Dante’s Divine Comedy. By showing key thematic features common to both works, this research is meant to challenge the traditional theory of Dante’s condemnation of the Arthurian literature as a whole, as well as provide evidence of a direct relationship between these two masterpieces of medieval literature. This study also aims to demonstrate that the representation of Dante’s journey to the Otherworld has inherited typical features of Irish myths, which derive from both the Navigatio sancti Brendani and the Queste.
Research interests: Dante Studies, Medieval Italian Literature, Arthurian Literature, Medieval French Literature, Romance Philology.
Federico Vigano'– PhD Italian
Supervisor: Clodagh Brook
Research topic: The influence of Maoism in the cinema of Marco Bellocchio: from I pugni in tasca to Buongiorno notte
Research interests: links between groups of the revolutionary left and artistic production in Italy of the 1960s and 1970s
Dr Molly Flynn Tanis – completed
Supervisor: Giuliana Adamo
Research topic: Animals and Dreams as threshold space interlocutors in Italo Calvino's first period war novels, a pathway to understanding the essence of humanity
Dr Elisabetta Leopardi – completed
Supervisor: Peter Arnds and Clodagh Brook
Research topic: Morphology of the Phenomenon of Metamorphosis in Literature: New Approaches to the Problems of Systematization
Dr Paola Orrù – completed
Supervisor: Giuliana Adamo
Research topic: Genesis of an author: the early works of Mario Praz.
Completed PhD's
Dr Martina Mendola – PhD Italian
Supervisors: Giuliana Adamo and Clodagh Brook
Research topic: Contemporary Italian literature - transmedia Italian pulp fictions and the literary canon.
Applying for a Postdoc position, PhD, Distance PhD, or Masters in Italian.
We warmly welcome applications from students or researchers whose work aligns with ours and who would like to develop either a PhD or Masters thesis or postdoctoral research with us. Have a look at our research profiles on the Italian Staff Pages and feel free to get in touch with our lecturers directly or with postgraduate.sllcs@tcd.ie for general enquiries.
Please note funding deadlines: For doctoral applications, you can apply at any time for September entry, but funding deadlines are in March each year. For applications to Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship, the deadline falls in mid-September each year and for the Irish Research Council fellowships, the deadline falls in November.
Conferences, Workshops and Events:
To see forthcoming research events and to get a taste of recent events hosted by Trinity Italian, please see events on our home page.
External Links:
Our formal links outside the academe:•Studio Azzurro http://www.studioazzurro.com/
•The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London http://www.estorickcollection.com/
•The Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin http://www.iicdublino.esteri.it/iic_dublino/it/
•The British School at Rome http://www.bsr.ac.uk/