Professor Clodagh Brook

Professor Clodagh Brook

Professor in, Italian

3531896 2063

Biography

Clodagh Brook is Professor in Italian. She was educated at Oxford University (D Phil) and at University College, Dublin (BA and MA). She took up her position at Trinity College in 2017. She has been Associate Vice Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (2019-21) as well as Head of the Italian Department (2019-22) and is currently Athena SWAN chair for the School of SLLCS (2024-). She is author of 4 books, as well as special issues, edited volumes and articles on Italian film, intermedia, and poetry. She leads the research group, Interdisciplinary Italy (which leads thinking on intermediality in Italy), with Prof Mussgnug (UCL) and Prof Pieri (Royal Holloway), and through this runs a website and blog (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org) and an annual summer school, usually held in Trinity.

Publications and Further Research Outputs

  • Clodagh Brook, Marco Bellocchio: The Cinematic I in the Political Sphere , Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2010, 272ppBook, 2010
  • Clodagh Brook, Daniele Albertazzi, Charlotte Ross, Nina Rothenberg, Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition under Berlusconi (2001-2006), United States, Continuum, 2009, 270ppBook, 2009
  • Brook, The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale's Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, 196ppBook, 2002
  • Clodagh Brook, Emanuela Patti, Italian transmedia storytelling: Storie e narrazioni attraverso i media , Italy, Mimesis, 2015, 1 - 257ppBook, 2015
  • Clodagh Brook, Post-Secular Identity in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Nostalgia for Catholic Values and the Suppression of History', Modern Italy, 22, (2), 2017, p197 - 212Journal Article, 2017
  • Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri, Interdisciplinarity in Italian Studies, Italian Studies, 72, (4), 2017, p380 - 392Journal Article, 2017
  • Clodagh Brook, Italianistica in Gran Bretagna: tra interdisciplinarità e tradizione', Rassegna della letteratura italiana , 120, (1:2), 2016, p207 - 217Journal Article, 2016
  • Interdisciplinary Italy: Disciplines, Inter-disciplines and Multimediality in, editor(s)Marco Gargiulo , Lingua e cultura italiana nei mass media: uno sguardo interdisciplinare, Rome, Aracne, 2014, pp13 - 32, [Clodagh Brook, Giuliana Pieri]Book Chapter, 2014
  • Dissenso, potere e Chiesa cattolica nell'Italia contemporanea: un impegno anti-cattolico? in, editor(s)William Hope , Un nuovo cinema politico italiano? , Leicester, Troubador, 2014, pp13 , [Clodagh Brook]Book Chapter, 2014
  • Clodagh Brook, 'The Spectacle of the Unseen: Marco Bellocchio and Lure of the Catholic Church, Italian Studies: Cultural Studies, 68, (3), 2013, p399 - 410Journal Article, 2013
  • Clodagh Brook, Cosetta Veronese, Alex Standen, 'Novecento and the Contemporary Period', Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 2012, p307 - 323Journal Article, 2012
  • Clodagh Brook, Alex Standen, Cosetta Veronese, 'Novecento and the Contemporary Period', The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 71, 2011, p497 - 528Journal Article, 2011
  • Clodagh Brook, C. Veronese, R. Bertoni, Novecento and the Contemporary Period, YWMLS, (70), 2010, p512 - 539Journal Article, 2010
  • The Cinema of Resistance: Nanni Moretti's Il caimano and the Italian Film Industry in, editor(s)Clodagh Brook, Daniele Albertazzi, Charlotte Ross , Resisting the Tide , Continuum, 2009, pp231 - 240, [Clodagh Brook]Book Chapter, 2009
  • Clodagh Brook, Daniele Albertazzi, Charlotte Ross, From Parliament to Virtual Piazza: Opposition in Italy in the Age of Berlusconi, Bulletin of Italian Politics, 1, (1), 2009, p111 - 114Journal Article, 2009
  • Clodagh Brook, 'Beyond Dialogue: Silence and the Monologue in the Films of Ermanno Olmi, The Italianist, (28), 2008, p268 - 280Journal Article, 2008
  • Clodagh Brook, Borderlines: Otto e Mezzo, Sogni d'oro and the Real-Dream Continuum, Forum Italicum, 41, (1), 2007, p1 - 15Journal Article, 2007
  • Clodagh Brook, The Oneiric in the Cinema of Marco Bellocchio', Italica, 84, (2-3), 2007, p479 - 494Journal Article, 2007
  • Clodagh Brook, 'Beyond the Controversy: Marco Bellocchio and Fagiolian Psychoanalysis, Italian Quarterly, 42, (163/164), 2005, p55 - 66Journal Article, 2005
  • Clodagh Brook, 'The The Hallucinating Eye: Fellini and Bellocchio', Italianist , 24, (1), 2004, p63 - 76Journal Article, 2004
  • 'Screening the Autobiographical in, editor(s)William Hope , Italian Cinema: New Directions, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2004, pp27 - 52, [Clodagh Brook]Book Chapter, 2004
  • Brook, Clodagh, Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television in the Public Sphere , Toronto, University of Toronto Press , 2019, 1-240ppBook, 2019
  • Brook, Clodagh , 'Interdisciplinary Italy website', Interdisciplinary Italy (AHRC project), 2018, -Digital research resource production, 2018
  • Italian Studies Special Issue: Open Works: Italian Creative Intermediality, (2019), Brook, Clodagh; Mussgnug, F.; Pieri, G., [eds.], 2019Journal, 2019
  • Brook, Clodagh, G. Pieri, F, Mussgnug, 'The Making of Modern Italy; Art and Design in the Early 1960s', Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art , London , Estorick Collection , 2019, -Exhibition, 2019
  • Brook, Clodagh, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri, Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence, Oxford, Legenda, 2024, 1-234ppBook, 2024
  • Transnational Perspectives on Postsecular Italy: Arts Media and Religion in, editor(s)Marco Cervolo, Anna Finozzi , Italian Studies across Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity, New Approaches, Future Directions, 2022, [Clodagh Brook]Book Chapter, 2022
  • Clodagh Brook, Postsecular Cinema and Television: Islam in Phaim Bhuiyan's Bangla, Italica, 101, (3), 2024, p443 - 459Journal Article, 2024

Research Expertise

  • Title
    Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020 (Phase Two): Interart/Intermedia
    Summary
    I was Principal Investigator on Interdisciplinary Italy. With my move to Trinity in 2017, I became International Co-I (PIs must be in the UK). I ideated the project and retain its intellectual leadership till its close. It was originally worth £680,000 Interdisciplinary Italy Phase 2: This ambitious project sets out to reframe the discipline of Italian Studies to include arts and media typically excluded from it, or marginalised within it, thereby challenging the 20th-century canon that has become established within the discipline. The core of the research centres on exploring why artists and other cultural practitioners have broken boundaries between the arts during this period and how this boundary breaking relates to activism and avant-garde practice more generally. It is a largely unmapped field despite the pivotal role played in the 20th and 21st centuries by Italian cultural practitioners who worked with multiple forms, intellectual and artistic groups which encompassed various arts, and by hybrid forms of art and media. It is underpinned by the project's development of new interartistic theories. What looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one. OBJECTIVES Using advances in interdisciplinary methodologies, to explore why avant-garde and activist artists critique and transgress the boundaries between the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy and how this affected creativity. 2. To underpin this research, and extend its reach, to create a new methodology framework for exploring interartistic practice, building on such ideas as "travelling concepts" and "translation as a metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange". However, we will also question academic orthodoxies by highlighting the general social, creative and psychological dynamics of interartistic creativity. 3. At a time of crisis in Modern Languages, the third key objective is to provide a new confident vision to share with researchers working on earlier periods of Italian culture and those working across other modern languages. This vision relies on genuinely, and reflective, interdisciplinary research. While the concept of "interdisciplinarity" seems almost hegemonic in Universities, most research done, even when described as interdisciplinary, is multidisciplinary. ML research is also typically limited to a particular range of arts (literature and film primarily) to the near exclusion of music, digital media and hybrid art forms. This project trains PG and Postdoc researchers, facilitates cowriting across artistic disciplines, with the aim of improving the methodological grasp of interdisciplinarity in Italian Studies and in the wider ML community. 4. Together with our partners, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art (London) and the Association for Language Learning), we bring our findings on interart/Intermedia creativity to 2 specific groups outside academia: Secondary school teachers: (creating sample A-level teaching materials); museum curators (CPD workshop) OUTPUTS. All outputs (or drafts) completed by October 2019: 1. Co-authored monograph. Rupture and Renewal: An Interartistic Cultural History of Italy 2000-2010 (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri) 2. Single-authored monograph (by RA): The Digital Age 3. A co-edited Special Issue of The California Italian Studies on Intermediality in Italy (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri) 3. 3 articles 4. sample interartistic/intermedial teaching material for schools; 5. An intermedial exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (Jan-March 2019) and an Exhibition catalogue. 6. 3 workshops on Intermediality and creative artists (London & Rome), summer school (Trinity), and conference (London) 7. CPD training/networking event for museum curators on interdisciplinary methodologies in curatorial work 8. A website: InterdisciplinaryItaly.org: 122 blogposts and 24,761 views (Dec 2018).
    Funding Agency
    Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
    Date From
    2015
    Date To
    2018
  • Title
    Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition during the Berlusconi Years
    Summary
    The project's aims was to analyse resistance to Berlusconi's political regime by cultural practitioners in Italy. It resulted in an edited book, published by Continuum (Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition under Berlusconi, 2009), and 2 articles in peer-reviewed journals One of the key contributions of the project was how it brought together, for the first time, material about writers, filmmakers, playwrights, intellectuals, bloggers, and social groups such as migrants and feminists etc. in Italy under Berlusconi and its analysis of obstacles to opposition, and free expression of ideas, in Italy during the years of Berlusconi's premiership. It won £81,014 from the British Academy
    Funding Agency
    British Academy
    Date From
    2007
    Date To
    2009
  • Title
    Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship
    Summary
    PI (10%) for Eleonora Lima's postdoctoral project, "Mapping Remediation in Italian Literature Beyond the Digital Revolution". Eleonora Lima is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Italian department of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. The project investigates 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.
    Funding Agency
    European Commission
    Date From
    2018
    Date To
    2020
  • Title
    Marco Bellocchio: The Political Eye in the Personal Sphere
    Summary
    AHRC funding to support the completion of a manuscript on Marco Bellocchio, which explored the political and personal aspects of his 40 year filmmaking career. The book was published in 2010 with Toronto University Press. AHRC outcome rating: 'outstanding'
    Funding Agency
    Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
    Date From
    2007
    Date To
    2007
  • Title
    Interdisciplinary Italy Phase 1 : Art Music Text
    Summary
    Phase 1 of Interdisciplinary Italy (2012-14): This network drew together for the first time international museum curators, artists, musicians and academics to discuss a series of questions focused on interdisciplinarity in 20th and 21st century Italy; it also tackled interdisciplinary teaching and educational policy in universities and secondary schools. The project attracted widespread interest nationally and internationally: 200 people attended international workshops and panels; 10,000 people visited the project website; 5 publications, including 2 edited books, are published or in press. 1. Strand 1 of the project (3 workshops) facilitated dialogue between the discipline of Italian Studies and those working on Italian culture outside the borders of this discipline - especially in Departments of Art History, Music and Film and Media Studies, Museums and Conservatoires and in the art world - in order to address a key gap in our understanding of 20th and 21st century interdisciplinarity practices in the arts in Italy, what we broadly refer to as 'cultural interdisciplinarity' - i.e. the borrowing and crossing over of specific techniques within the arts, as well as multi-media creations. Three workshops; (1) in New York on interdisciplinary Modernism (US museum curators participate); (2) in London on interdisciplinary Postmodernism (UK museum curators participate); (3) in Rome on interdisciplinarity in the Internet Age (cultural practitioners participate). 2. Strand 2 (panel at the Society for Italian Studies conference (SIS)) is a policy strand providing a forum for the discussion of the future and shape of Italian Studies in universities and schools in the UK, exploring how academic interdisciplinarity - the crossing of ideas, approaches and techniques between one academic discipline and another - is affecting this language in universities and schools (both benefits and drawbacks), and policy issues and strategies arising from this. Italian is used as a case study, and findings were shared with UCML (University Council of Modern Languages), CILT (the national centre for Languages), and ALL (the Association for Language Learning). 3. To build an online national UK searchable database of academics and curators in the UK working on all aspects of 20th and 21st century Italian culture and to create a website to disseminate ideas and information. 4. To nurture links between academics, cultural practitioners, members of conservatoires and museum curators. To nurture links between early-career, mid-career, experienced researchers and postgraduates. 5. To instigate and promote further collaborative research on cultural interdisciplinarity through the established Interdisciplinary network, with the aim also of supporting the development of applications for further collaborative funding, and facilitating the engagement of Italian Studies with the Impact agenda.
    Funding Agency
    Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
    Date From
    2012
    Date To
    2014

Performing arts, Languages and literature, Philosophy, Ethics and Religion,

Recognition

  • PI on Interdisciplinary Italy, AHRC networking grant 2012-2014
  • PI on Interdisciplinary Italy AHRC grant (International Co-I in 2017, as PIs have to be resident in UK) 2015-present
  • AHRC Leave scheme to write monograph of Marco Bellocchio, filmmaker 2007-2008
  • Co-I on British Academy Larger Research Grants for 'Resisting the Tide' 2007-2009
  • PI on Marie Sklodowska-Cure Postdoctoral Fellowship (Dr Lima) 2018-2020
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Authority, UK present
  • Member of Society for Italian Studies UK and Ireland Present
  • Member of the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) present
  • Chair of Irish University Association Vice Presidents of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group Jan 2020
  • Member of COIMBRE EDI working group March 2020
  • Member of Editorial Board of Journal of Italian Cinema and Media (US) 2012
  • Member of Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC), UK 2012
  • Editor (Italian) Forum for Modern Language Studies 01/09/2022
  • Member of National Committee for Gender Equality Jan 2020
  • External Examiner, University of Leeds (Italian Studies) 2011
  • Member of Editorial Board of Modern Language Open (Journal) 2014
  • Member of National Athena SWAN committee Dec 2019
  • Research Portfolio Holder for the Society of Italian Studies, UK and Ireland Jan 2013-2019
  • External Examiner, University of Exeter (UG Italian and MPhil Translation Studies) 2014
  • Co-director and founding member of B-Film, the Centre for Film Studies at University of Birmingham 2014
  • External Examiner, University College, Cork 2015
  • Member of the Scientific Board for Florence University Press (Italy) Feb 2020
  • Member of LERU EDI working group March 2020
  • External Examiner, University of Leicester 01/01/2021