Instructor: Marina Dossena (University of Bergamo)
Title: ‘Tools and Methods for Explorations in the Histories of English: What Are the Options Today? + Focus on Networks and Coalitions in Late Modern Times’
Dates: 24
th and 25
th February 2022
The seminar was divided into two days. During the first one, Professor Dossena discussed research options becoming increasingly available to historical linguists for the study of language use in the past through corpora and digital resources. During the second session, emphasis was laid on the analysis of social networks and coalitions in historical sociolinguistics, with particular attention to Late Modern English materials and documents. After being given a list of online resources from which to draw information, the doctoral students had the opportunity to work in groups in order to familiarise themselves with this kind of research. Then they presented their considerations on their findings and received feedback from the professor.
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Tutorial no. 9
Instructor: Patrick Zabalbeascoa (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Title: ‘Aspects of Humour in Literary, Audiovisual and Translated texts: Multilingualism and Codeswitching: Theories and Methodologies + Analysing Multilingual Audiovisual texts’
Dates: 16
th and 17
th March 2022
Translating humour requires an adaptation to the culture of the target countries. Conveying humour does not consist only in translating a text, but also in understanding the spirit of the author. Otherwise, a comic situation may be lost in translation. Things arguably get even more complicated when it comes to translating multilingual texts. After a review of the main translation theories, extracts from Tom Woolf’s and Kazuo Ishiguro’s works were analysed together with their Spanish translation during this two-day seminar, revealing that misunderstood humour can be inadequately translated.
Tutorial no. 10
Instructor: Rory Loughnane (University of Kent)
Title: ‘Re-Editing Shakespeare + Editing Early Modern Drama in Practice’
Dates: 16
th and 17
th April 2022
Different editions of most of Shakespeare’s works have been printed since his lifetime, which has caused small variations – if not printing mistakes – to exist in the different editions of the same play. Various attempts at re-editing Shakespeare have thus been made over the centuries, with the aim of producing versions of his works that resemble as closely as possible what he originally wrote. As shown by this two-day seminar, new technologies allow searchers to spot printing mistakes more efficiently, but in-depth knowledge of the plays as well as of Early Modern English is necessary to grasp all the subtleties of this exercise.
Tutorial no. 11
Instructor: Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University)
Title: ‘A Theory of Contemporary Drama + Workshop’
Dates: 20
th and 21
st April 2022
The seminar was divided over two days. The first session drew attention to current debates about connections between ecocritical perspectives and contemporary British theatre, as well as reflecting on how past theatrical traditions may carry with them latent ecological concerns and preoccupations. In particular, Professor Angelaki provided doctoral students with a detailed reading of Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh’s introductory essay, ‘Greening the Absurd’, to
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment, and the Greening of the Modern Stage. The second day involved an open discussion of a number of recent theatre productions which explicitly or implicitly sought to engage audiences with questions of environment, ecology and the Anthropocene.
Tutorial no. 12
Instructor: Massimo Bacigalupo (University of Genoa)
Title: ‘Modernist American Poetry’
Date: 10
th May 2022
The lecture focused on the notion of ‘late style’ across a range of twentieth-century American poets. Professor Bacigalupo began by discussing Robert Frost’s preface to his
Collected Poems (1939), ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, and William Carlos Williams’ prologue to
Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), which both address the plight of modernity and its relation to poetics and the task of the writer. Professor Bacigalupo then led doctoral students through readings of poems by Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Ezra Pound, considering the implications of each text for wider questions about style, the modern and tradition.
Tutorial no. 13
Instructor: Martina Pfeiler (University of Vienna)
Title: ‘Contemporary American Poetry’
Date: 11
th May 2022
The seminar was divided into two sessions. In the first part, Professor Pfeiler provided doctoral students with an overview of performance-centred and cross- or inter-media American poetry of the late-twentieth and twenty-first century. She discussed how these traditions and innovations relate to historic and ongoing debates about the relationship of the poem to subjectivity, political and cultural contexts, and the material conditions of its production. The following workshop involved group discussions of texts in performance by Gil Scott-Heron, Maya Angelou, Patricia Smith and Daniel Beaty.
Tutorial no. 14
Instructor: Ugo Rubeo (Sapienza University of Rome)
Title: ‘Afro-American Poetry’
Date: 12
th May 2022
The seminar provided doctoral students with a comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to the Harlem Renaissance. It began with a discussion of Gertrude Stein’s early stylistic experiments with repetition, pattern and rhythm, as well as her deep engagement with innovations in the visual arts. Professor Rubeo then presented a series of key figures from the Renaissance, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown. The seminar usefully emphasised the diverse and heterogenous nature of the Harlem scene, including debates between writers and intellectuals of the time, whilst also considering its roots and resonances in American culture.
Tutorial no. 15
Instructor: Alice Balestrino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Title: ‘“History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark”: Philip Roth and the Holocaust’
Date: 24
th May 2022
The lecture focused on Philip Roth’s interest in the Holocaust as part of, and corresponding to the narrative of Holocaust reception in the United States. It concerned specifically the so-called ‘Zuckerman novels’ – such as
The Ghost Writer and
The Anatomy Lesson, featuring Nathan Zuckerman, an alter ego of the author, as a character and narrator – and ‘Roth books’ – such as
Patrimony and
The Plot against America, featuring Roth himself as a character and narrator. The lecture illustrated how these novels try to fill in the ‘unbridgeable distance’ between the Holocaust and American life and to explore the inauthenticity of most attempts to lessen that distance.
Tutorial no. 16
Instructor: Alice Balestrino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Title: ‘From the Dissertation to the First-Book Project’
Date: 31
st May 2022
The seminar aimed to advise students (especially third-year students) on how to have one’s dissertation published as a book after graduation. The first part looked at the differences between dissertations and books, focussing on the following aspects: purpose; length; audience; scope; literature review and methodology section; use of images and citations. In order to frame dissertations and books as two different genres, the instructor took several defended dissertations turned into published books (including her own) as examples. In the last part of the seminar, she provided students with practical advice on how to write a book proposal, also based on her very recent first-hand experience.
Sapienza University of Rome
Conferences
Conference no. 1
Title: ‘Translators as Authors: Creativity in Media Localization’
Dates: 24
th and 25
th November 2021
Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/?q=it/node/4029
This two-day international conference addressed the topic of creativity in audiovisual translation from different perspectives and in all phases – from production to post-production. It explored most of the modalities through which this type of translation is conveyed: dubbing, subtitling, accessibility modes and voice-over, as well as recent modes such as fansubbing and fandubbing, cybersubtitling and cyberdubbing, transcreation. It also tackled the issue of audiovisual translation as a creative tool to enhance foreign language acquisition, as well as the didactic implications of creative audiovisual translation.
Conference no. 2
Title: ‘Translation through History and History through Translation’
Date: 27
th April 2022
Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/sites/default/files/allegati_notizie/2022%20Traducibilità-Intraducibilità.pdf
This seminar consisted of two talks, by Professor Christopher Rundle (University of Bologna) and by Professor Serenella Zanotti (Roma Tre University) respectively, which explored the crossroads of translation and history. Entitled ‘History through the Lens of Translation: A Case Study of Four Fascist Regimes’ and situated at the intersection of translation studies and fascist studies, Professor Rundle’s talk addressed the issue of hostility towards translation in four fascist and para-fascist regimes (Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal). In her talk entitled ‘Translating the Untranslatable: An Archival Perspective’, Professor Zanotti adopted an archival perspective to investigate the role that Joyce played in the translation of
Ulysses into French.
Conference no. 3
Title: ‘Imagining Poetry Today: Responses to P. B. Shelley’s
Defence of Poetry (1821)’
Date: 23
th May 2022
Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/sites/default/files/allegati_notizie/Locandina_Shelley.pdf
This conference was divided into two sessions. In the first session, Professor Lilla Crisafulli, Professor Michael Rossington and Professor Paolo Bugliani historicised Shelley’s
Defence of Poetry by looking at its context of publication and its English and US reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the second session, which took the form of a roundtable discussion in Italian, Franco Buffoni, Laura Pugno and Guido Mazzoni shared their views on Shelley’s essay, followed by readings of Shelley’s as well as their own poetry.
Conference no. 4
Title: ‘Shakespeare, Austen and Audiovisual Translation: The Classics Translated on Screen’
Dates: 30
th June, 1
st and 2
nd July 2022
Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/?q=it/node/4037
While adaptation and intersemiotic studies about the classics on screen have been flourishing, audiovisual translation has comparatively neglected adapted classics, arguably preferring to focus on TV series, video games and films of all times not necessarily referred to an illustrious hypotext. This three-day international conference thus attracted contributions which analysed adapted literature in various media from the point of view of audiovisual translation. Audiovisual texts inspired by the works of a variety of writers (including the most adapted authors such as Shakespeare and Austen), their adaptations and their translations into a number of languages were discussed.
University of Silesia in Katowice
Courses
Course no. 1
Instructor: Marlena Jankowska-Augustyn
Title: ‘Intellectual Property Law’
Semester: Winter (15 hours)
The online course provided an overview of current intellectual property law and practice, including patents and trademarks, with a particular focus on copyright law in Europe and the United States. It covered issues of copyright protection, the rights of authors, users and other entities, as well as specific topics such as legal regulations contained in ethical codes that regulate the attribution of authorship to scientific works. It also included the analysis of contracts and the possibility of non-contractual use of protected works. As part of the issues of industrial property law, it examined intangible goods registered at the Patent Office, i.e. inventions, trademarks and designs. The course also featured students’ presentations on specific issues related to their research interests and/or to the copyright laws of their own country of origin.
Course no. 2
Instructors: Monika Jagielska, Mariusz Jagielski, Natalia Galica
Title: ‘Ethics in Research’
Semester: Summer (15 hours)
The online course covered the principles of ethical research and was divided into two blocks, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical part consisted in frontal lectures that illustrated problems that may arise when conducting scientific research and how to handle them. Topics covered included: ethical issues involving personal data protection, research data management, recruiting vulnerable participants and gaining consent. The practical part involved learning how to prepare the documentation required by the Ethics Committee of the University of Silesia and by grant entities (such as the National Science Center).
Course no. 3
Instructor: Przemysław Marciniak
Title: ‘Scientific Career Planning and Personal Development’
Semester: Summer (15 hours)
The online course consisted in guiding the doctoral students in planning and reflecting upon their academic career, and in fostering their own professional development through interactive discussions. The topics that have been touched upon include: defining what an academic career is; the modalities of publishing articles to advance one’s own professional development; how to take advantage of national and international mobility opportunities; how to find and employ funding resources available to doctoral and postdoctoral students; participating in conferences, starting from the writing of conference abstracts.
University of Silesia in Katowice
Facultative Modules
Facultative Module no. 1
Instructor: Sławomir Masłoń
Title: ‘Antinomies of Sexual Difference: Sexuality, Ontology, Subjectivity from Lacan to Žižek’
Semester: Summer (15 hours)
This online course provided an overview of psychanalytical and philosophical theories about sexuality and was particularly devoted to the discussion of basic Lacanian concepts (such as ‘object a’, ‘castration’ and ‘not-all’) that map out the ontological deadlock produced by sexual difference. The following questions were addressed. What does sexuality mean to human beings? What is still ‘natural’ about it? How does it separate us from and unite us with the other animals?
Facultative Module no. 2
Instructor: Mariola Sułkowska-Janowska
Title: ‘Philosophy of Contemporary Art’
Semester: Summer (15 hours)
Online classes were held in the form of an interactive seminar based on source texts that comment on the philosophical context of contemporary art (i.e., Lyotard, Bauman, Welsch, Baudrillard.) The latest artistic propositions that often arouse social controversy and philosophical or ethical dilemmas were discussed (e.g., bio art, kitschy art, performance art, plotting architecture and urban heterotopias). Additionally, the specific mutual inspiration and cooperation between some contemporary philosophers and artists were explored (Tschumi and Deleuze, Gehry and Foucault, Liebeskind and Eco, Aronofsky and Baudrillard).
Facultative Module no. 3
Instructor: Michał Krzykawski
Title: ‘Technics, Technologies, and Life on the Artificial Earth’
Semester: Summer (15 hours)
This online transdisciplinary course consisted in lectures and seminars and covered the following fields: philosophy of technology (Stiegler, Simondon, Hui), continental philosophy, philosophy of science, anthropology, some elements of theoretical biology, psychology and neurosciences, political economy and political ecology. The course explored how the rapid technological development (algorithmisation, automation, AI, VR), tightly related to the reality of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene) and of digital capitalism, requires us to redefine the relation between biological life and technical life, and between psychic life, technical system and social organisations. The goal was to diagnose (epistemological, psychosocial, educational, environmental and political) challenges related to the ongoing transformations of the Technosphere in the age of technological disruption.