I am currently the Head of the School of Humanities, and I teach on the Italian and History of Art and Visual Culture programmes in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. I am a Visual Arts and Cultural Studies specialist and am currently involved in a research project that looks at the intersections between the arts and media in Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The project, Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia, has enabled me to collaborate with colleagues from across Europe and the US, secondary schools in the UK, and museums and galleries.
My teaching has three main strands: Italian Visual Culture (especially fashion and design), translation, and modern Italian literature.
My background is in Art History but I have always been interested in the way artists, writers and other cultural practitioners collaborate across the borders of their disciplines. My own research is also about collaboration, co-production of knowledge, and curatorial practice. I particularly enjoy projects which bring together schools, the heritage sector, and universities. I have worked with national and international institutions (Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome) as well as with smaller specialist galleries (a particular favourite of mine is the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London which has a brilliant collection of Italian Futurist painting).
The work I am most proud of is the exhibition The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the early 1960s (2019, see video below). This was the first time that, as well as researching the topic and writing the exhibition catalogue, I was able to design the exhibition display and space.
Expertise
- Italian art and visual culture (19C and 20C);
- Italian Fascism
- Word and image relations in European culture (19C and 20C)
- Anglo-Italian cultural and artistic relations (19C and 20C)
- The reception of Renaissance art and culture in the 19C and 20C
- Italian crime and noir fiction
