The second meeting of the Italian Research Seminar in Spring 2023 will host research presentations by 2nd-year students in the Italian MA program. This semester's speakers are: Fabiola D'Angelo and Peter Scharer.
Fabiola D'Angelo's presentation is titled:
Afro-Italian Cultural Movements: Cinema and Literature through Alternative Versus Mainstream Channels
Afro-Italian representation in the cinema over the last ten years establishes a new aesthetic narrative of the cinematic genre beyond the ‘migrant’ label. Through a deductive approach, this study explores a meta-analysis of those productions and their distribution trend, challenging the notion of the existing ‘migrant’ label within or without mainstream channels. The research focuses on the critical role of film festivals as alternative channels. This paper aims to observe the most recent Italian cultural processes and analyze how Afro-Italians have created a cultural movement that revolutionized their no longer marginal positioning in the national cultural dimension.
Peter Scharer's presentation is titled:
Vulgarity otherwise: amid audiences and crowds in Petrarch’s will
Petrarch’s corpus discloses a lasting preoccupation with the thoughts and opinions of uneducated masses. From the legally binding Latin prose of Petrarch’s understudied Testamentum to the inconclusive rehearsal of a tribunal in canzone 360 of his famed lyric sequence, the poet consistently articulates himself against the rabble. I trace the muddled silhouette of Petrarch that emerges in his juxtaposition of the learned and the unlearned, and I question the extent to which self-portraiture is a useful paradigm to understand Petrarch’s extraction of self from multitude. As I argue, contamination by the vulgar crowd furnishes Petrarch with an asset to manipulate as much as it tags him with a blemish to hide.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.