Always eager to explore… Aren’t we so tired of hearing this word in academic writing? Shall I say ‘observe’? Or ‘investigate’? Even worse… I’ll begin again. I have always been eager to trace the geographies...

Since at least the time of Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories, every product of popular culture has had its fans (short for “fanatics”). Since at least the time of Star Trek’s first season,...

Digital videoessay-making is an important strand in the present and future of academic communication, already used to disseminate research and results to general public and scholarly peers, and often used for teaching, particularly in online...

My current research project, which is funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, focuses on representations of contemporary Italian youth on the video sharing platform YouTube. I am interested in understanding...

In Gorizia, Haya Tedeschi sits waiting for her long-lost son and endlessly sorts through the assembled contents of her life, which she has archived in a deep red basket that reaches up to the height...

“I am Kino-Eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, who I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there...

There are some recurring basic concepts in the humanities and social sciences that seem to be under perennial debate. They are constantly under attack for being ‘simplistic’ or criticised for being vague or ‘only metaphoric’...

In the last twenty years, intermediality and related concepts such as adaptation (Linda Hutcheon), remediation (Jay David Bolter/Richard Grusin) and transmedia (Henry Jenkins) have become exceptionally productive in a range of disciplines within the humanities...

When Umberto Eco published his seminal essay Opera aperta [The Open Work] in 1962, a number of experiments across literature and computer machines had set the ground of what we call today “electronic literature”. In...

This summer in Edinburgh, at the conference of the Society for Italian Studies, the first entirely cognitive-oriented panel was presented. The transdisciplinary perspective allowed by the cognitive lens enabled the panellists to bring together issues...

How can we identify meaningful transmedial points of contact between cultural practices in a way that doesn’t overlook the specific modes of expression inherent to different medial forms? My doctoral research has sought to explore...

What is peculiar to interdisciplinary projects that bring together literature and digital tools? Technological instability, I would suggest. This immediately raises issues concerning fruition and accessibility. But is this instability a failure? Not quite, I...

My contribution at the recent Interart/Intermedia conference looked at the interartistic collaboration between Verga and Duse and the effect their collaboration had on Italy’s artistic creativity: observations which have been inspired by my recent book,...

Traditionally modelled around a ‘lone scholar’ approach, research in the arts and humanities has been shifting in recent years towards collaborative practices more familiar to scholars in the social and natural sciences. How might Italian...

by Clodagh Brook Interdisciplinarity has been a driving agenda in Universities for some decades. We are encouraged to work in interdisciplinary ways, although these are most often only vaguely articulated. What does Interdisciplinarity mean for...

[This post was originally published in the Language Acts and Worldmaking blog] Last June I had the pleasure to give a talk at the workshop Mapping Multilingualism and Digital Culture organised by Paul Spence and...

The investigation of the close dialogue between poetic and visual language in the Italian panorama of the last seventy years is at the centre of the research project Verba Picta. Interrelazione tra testo e immagine...

Since the 1960s there has been an interest in (artistic) media from (tending towards) the technologically deterministic of Marshall McLuhan, to critics on the left such as Raymond Williams (Contact: Human Communication and Its History,...

Rosalind Krauss’ development of the idea of the postmedium condition (1999a) was inspired by Walter Benjamin and his conception of the redemptive characteristics of the obsolescence of the medium: the medium is redeemed in its...

A famous Indian folk tale tells the story of six men in a dark room, groping an elephant to learn what it is really like. Each one touches a different part and when they compare...