The Department has developed three key areas of research collaboration:

• Medieval and Renaissance intellectual culture. Prof. Gilson, and Drs. Lines and Vanhaelen explore the reception of texts (especially Aristotle, Plato, and Dante) and ideas in the period, as well as their relationship with institutions of learning (e.g., universities, academies) and habits of reading (manuscript and print culture). Particular genres considered include commentaries and translations, both in Latin and the vernacular. An AHRC grant centred on the diffusion of Aristotle in the vernacular supports this area of research, which has strong links with the Warburg Institute in London. A new AHRC project, on 'Dante and Medieval Florence: Theology in Poetry, Practice and Society' (a collaboration between Warwick and the University of Leeds) got underway in January 2012.
  

• Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading cultures. The rise of the novel and the development of reading cultures in this period are explored especially by Prof. Caesar and Drs. Burns and Camilletti. Their research addresses the work of canonical and more marginal authors of the period and traces the development of ideas and movements such as Romanticism, nationalism, and psychoanalysis, paying attention to routes of intellectual influence across western Europe. Questions related to literacy and the impact of technology on the formation of reading publics are central to this research.

• The literature of migration and mobility in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italy. Narrative texts associated with the movements of population within, out of, and into Italy since Unification are the focus of research by Drs Burns and Polezzi, investigating particularly the impact of such representations on models of Italian cultural and literary identity established within the confines of the nation-state. Literature related to different directions and periods of mobility is explored in the theoretical context of postcoloniality, 'minor' literature, and polylingualism. A number of inter-institutional collaborations have been established in this area.

The Department regularly organizes major international conferences. Recent conferences, sponsored by external funding bodies, are detailed on our Events archive page, with the range of topics including

The Department collaborates with the Department of Italian at Birmingham University in research activities at staff and postgraduate levels, including a highly successful annual postgraduate forum. International collaborators include a number of universities in the USA and Italy and, most recently, a programme with Monash University in Melbourne on 'Mobility, social inclusion, and transnational identities' in Italy and beyond. In all of these activities, Warwick's research base in Venice, the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, provides a crucial resource.

At graduate level members of the Department supervise PhD, MPhil and MA dissertations, as well as running – jointly with Birmingham University – a taught MA in Italian Studies: Culture and Communication; a number of students graduating from the MA have gone on to study for a PhD. Italian is also involved in the collaborative Warwick MA in Translation, Writing and Cultural Difference and the interdisciplinary Warwick MA in The Culture of the European Renaissance. Colleagues collaborate at research level with a number of other subject departments (including French, German, English) and interdisciplinary research centres, both within the Faculty (Humanities Research Centre, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance) and outside (Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature).

Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy 

Nineteenth-Century Research Seminars