1. Italian Cultural Institute 18 June 2016

2. AHRC Translating Cultures
Part of AHRC’s initiative Translating Cultures
A series of over 90 research grants
The three large grants running from :
Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language
Translation and Translanguaging
Transnationalizing Modern Languages
AHRC Open World Research Initiative: £10m

3. Transnationalizing Modern languages Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures
If you are studying the theme of Translating Cultures…
Italian Culture offers a very good example
20-30 million Italians have emigrated during Italy’s history as a nation state
60-80 million people worldwide trace their descent from this diaspora
We all know that Italian culture is global culture but it is a culture that has become global through migration rather than through imperial imposition

4. Studying Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures
How do you study the forms of mobility that have defined Modern Italian Culture?
Emphasis on case studies of the geographical, historical and linguistic map of Italian mobility
UK, Australia, South America, East and North Africa, migrant communities in contemporary Italy
Particular attention to cultural associations
Journals, autobiographies, photographs, collections, and other forms of narrations, and representations
The research map of the project:

5. Analysing Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures
Part of the project is about developing modes of analysis that are based on literary and cultural criticism
Examining stories that are both individual and collective, representations, memories, acts of self expression
It is about exploring the processes of translation that are evident at every level of the community
The interweaving of concepts, traditions, modes of perception
The transposition of a series of practices into the terms of another
It is about studying the changing material world but also the interior world of the individual, his or her subjective existence.

6. Approaching notions of Italianita’
So what we are studying is the way in which the notion of italianita’ has been dynamically reformulated and performed
The multiple levels of negotiation within Italian history and culture
The fluid and relational sense of Italian belonging
Studying moments within Italian history and sites in which ideas of what it means to be Italian are continually enacted
It is about placing these experiences in contiguous perspective.

7. The transcultural
The analysis of the written, visual, oral and digital material produced by people who live between two or more cultures and whose experiences are characterized by linguistic and cultural translation
How people understand and realize movement between borders that are linguistic, social and cultural
This places an understanding of being human within a certain perspective and it certainly alerts to how cultures are in continual movement
Media collection of the project:

8. Questions concerning MLs in HE
The issue of falling recruitment.
The reduction in the national provision of the subject.
In 1998, there were 93 universities offering specialist language degrees. In 2013 that figure had fallen to 56.
The Worton report of 2009: Modern Languages need to be clearer as to their identity.
Do we need to think not only about inter-disciplinarity but also about disciplinarity?
Do students fully understand the rationale of Modern Languages study?

9. What is Modern Languages Research?
Modern Languages is generally seen as an area of study for ‘specialists’ working in discrete fields, often associated with nations and nation states. It needs, instead, to be articulated as an expert mode of inquiry whose founding research question is that of how languages and cultures operate and interact across diverse axes of connection that may flex according to historical, geographic, economic, political, and cultural conditions. That question needs, we contend, to take its rightful place as a foundational one not only for MLs, but also for enquiry across the humanities and social sciences into intersubjective and social experience, interactions and organisation in a global frame.

10. The Handbook, eds. J.Burns, D.Duncan
Translation Memory Queer Routes Performance
Transnational Hauntings Gender Communities
Cosmopolitanism Medievalism Class Cities Creativity
Translanguaging/ The Modern The Human Ecologies Me
Multilingualism Colonial Things Borders
Histories Postcolonial Sounds Mimesis
Futures Race Voice Stories

11. The Series
Transnational French Studies, eds. Charles Forsdick (Liverpool) and Claire Launchbury (IMLR/IHR);
Transnational German Studies, eds. Ben Schofield (KCL) and Rebecca Braun (Lancaster);
Transnational Hispanic Studies, eds. Catherine Davies (IMLR), Rory O'Bryen (Cambridge) and Stuart Green (Leeds);
Transnational Italian Studies, eds. Charles Burdett (Bristol), Loredana Polezzi (Cardiff), Marco Santello (Leeds);
Transnational Portuguese Studies, ed. Hilary Owen (Manchester) and Claire Williams (Oxford).

12. Language and multilingualism
This section will concentrate on inter-lingual practices and how they articulate culture, highlighting the role played in each case by multilingualism and translation or self-translation. Essays will consider practices of representation and communication that cut across canonized and standardized forms, thus examining the ways in which language use varies according to different spaces or times. Translation is a key object of inquiry: essays will interrogate practices of translation from the everyday to the highly formal, in order to understand what cultural transactions occur within the process of linguistic translation and what are the limits and possibilities of the notion of cultural translation.

13. Spatiality
This section examines how cultures construct notions of space and how those spaces are inherently porous. It looks at the mechanisms that are used by societies to sustain their narratives of territorial identity. It explores how concepts of space have operated in the past and how they continue to inform the present. It examines the idea of territoriality that underlies models of the nation state, empire, or more recent political formations. It explores what constitutes the notion of belonging to a geographically determined site. It looks at the role that ideas of otherness play in the shaping of cultural geographies.

14. Temporality
This section explores how people inhabit time as a meaningful dimension of human identity. It looks at the ways in which collective memories of the past have been constructed as a means of understanding the present, at the rhetorical power that models of past societies exert, at the spaces of remembrance, and at the interface between private and public memory. It looks at the interactions of past and present within the everyday. The section examines future projections of identity: the role which idealized conceptions of society perform, the persistence of religious modes of considering time within predominantly secular societies.

15. Subjectivity
This section examines the way in which people are positioned by discourses and practices relating to cultural geographies. It looks at how gender and class define the roles that people perform within cultures and at how discourses of racial identity operate within the past and present. It examines the practices for understanding alterity that are common to different cultures, at how practices of defining other people operated within cultures at given historical periods, at the identifications that people make within the present. It examines the identities that are projected onto people belonging to other cultures and the range of practices that people deploy to subvert hostile definitions of their ethnic or social groups.

16. TML Events The website of the project:
Exhibition, British School at Rome, beginning 26 October 2016
Exhibition, Italian Cultural Institute, London, 2 October 2016