Professor Clodagh Brook
Professor in, Italian

Projects

• 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
  • 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
  • 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

• 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
  • 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