Katia Pizzi, Senior Lecturer (Italian Studies) at the IMLR, talks about her recent week spent at the University of Coimbra.
Thank you EU! I spent a most enjoyable and productive week at the University of Coimbra in Portugal in late November, thanks to a recently established Erasmus staff mobility agreement with the School of Advanced Study, University of London. The invitation came from Coimbra University’s Centre for Social Studies (CES), a hub of transdisciplinary research and advanced training in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, a sister institution of ours.
CES’s main aims are democratising knowledge and revitalising human rights in response to societal needs. Particular focus is on North-South and South-North dialogues: the library of CES bears the same name and is managed with energy and good humour by the formidable Maria-Jose Carvalho. In this frame I had fruitful meetings with students, researchers, colleagues and teachers. My seminar for the ‘Translocal Modernist Magazines and Cultural Networks’, attended by the students and academic staff of CES, addressed issues of peripherality in modernity.
In the lecture ‘Transcultural Memories in Trieste‘ I discussed transcultural memories in border areas in the context of globalisation, a topic of CES’s particular interest. In a further seminar I was lucky enough to interact with a large class of students and postdocs whose research in the Lusophone context maps onto the research of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research. In a summer school planned for autumn 2019, Creative Writing will be used as a method of enquiry to explore these issues.
Thank you Maria-Irene, Patricia, Antonio, Bruno, Maria-Jose, Ines, Acacio, Nancy and Gabriele for your generous and warm hospitality! I very much look forward to welcoming you in London and to pursuing further collaborations.
Dr Katia Pizzi, Senior Lecturer (Italian Studies), IMLR
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