Postgraduate Studies
This page provides information for postgraduate students registered for both taught and research degrees.
The Department is very active in research in the areas of 20th-century literature and culture, with specific emphasis on Italy and Africa and the 'anni di piombo'; Italian linguistics and dialectology; Dante and early Italian poetry; and Renaissance cultural history. Staff are currently participating in the creation of new MAs in the School of Modern Languages at Bristol. These will come on stream in 2009-10. They also contribute to the teaching of interdisciplinary Faculty MA programmes such as Colonialism in History and Medieval Studies in addition to supervising or co-supervising dissertations at Masters (MPhil) and PhD levels on a variety of subjects ranging, in recent times, from medieval transvestite authorship to contemporary women’s travel writing, and deixis in northern Italian language varieties.
Italian at Bristol has collaborative links with a number of Italian universities from Palermo to Turin, including a postgraduate exchange with the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ in Naples. Similar exchanges are possible through the WUN (World University Network) Global Exchange programme.
The Department has recently hosted a major collaborative research project with the University of Manchester, generously financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, into the morphosyntax of early Italian vernaculars under the co-directorship of Prof. Parry.
The Department hosted the biennial conference of the Society in 1999 and the first national conference of the UK Society for Renaissance Studies in 2003. Numerous, often interdisciplinary conferences organized by Italian staff have taken place either in Bristol or at the IGRS (London), for example on Medieval urbanism, Italian colonialism, and Italian cinema, while the annual research colloquium on Italian dialects, the Incontro di dialettologia italiana, is now in its ninth year.
In addition to what is available within Italian itself, research students benefit from the huge range of research-related events such as lectures, half-day conferences, workshops, and colloquia organized within the School of Modern Languages, and the Faculty at large. They have access to the Arts Faculty Graduate School which provides a space for a lively postgraduate culture. This will be further enhanced in 2009-10 with the creation of a Faculty Graduate School. Postgraduates are also offered the opportunity to do some paid undergraduate teaching within the Department.
Contact us
By email: pg-modlang@bris.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0117) 3318039
Fax: +44 (0117) 3318010
Professor Judith H Bryce, MA, PhD (Aberdeen): Cultural history of later 15th-century Florence; poetry of Lorenzo de' Medici; cultural history of early Ducal Florence; The Florentine Academy; Renaissance literature; women's writing.
Dr Charles F Burdett (Reader): Italy and the Islamic World; Italy and Africa; Fascist culture and ideology; Italian travel writing; critical theory.
Dr Derek E Duncan (Professor of Italian Cultural Studies): Discourses of race and ethnicity; Italian cinema of migration; gay/queer studies; narrative and gender; critical theory.
Dr Ruth Glynn (Senior Lecturer): Representations of the anni di piombo; trauma theory; Italian postmodernism and critical theory; the historical novel.
Dr Elena Lombardi (Senior Lecturer): Dante; early Italian poetry.
Dr Catherine O’Rawe (Senior Lecturer): Contemporary Italian cinema; Italian cinema of the 1940s and 1950s; Sicilian literature.
Professor M Mair Parry, BA, PhD(Wales), MA(Oxon) Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow: Italian Linguistics (especially syntax); Italian Sociolinguistics; Italian Dialectology.