In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions - Exiles and Emigrés

13-15 April, 2007
University of Leicester

From 1995 to 2003, under a Bilateral Agreement to encourage collaborative research, the Universities of Leicester and Pisa hosted an Anglo-Italian colloquium on methodological and ideological issues: Studies in European Cultural Transition, funded for its last three years by the British Academy. From 2004 this was replaced by another British Academy project: In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions.

Four interdisciplinary colloquia – Performing National Identities (Berlin, 31 March – 2 April, 2006), Exiles and Emigrés (Leicester, 2007), Translations and Travels (Paris, 2008), and East/West (Pisa, 2008) – will result in a volume of proceedings for each meeting, and, finally, a comprehensive book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural cross-fertilisation between the two nations.

Exiles and Emigrés

Our subject here will be liminal figures such as John /Giovanni Florio who have mediated between the two cultures. We shall look, for instance, at Italian communities in Britain and British communities in Italy, investigating, for instance, cultural ambassadors and displaced persons, terms that might be interchangeable. We intend to analyse only in this context the work of canonical authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and architects etc. who have moved back and forth between Britain and Italy. Go-betweens – diplomats, politicians, fine art traders, explorers, merchants, servants – will be of particular interest, as will the problems of exile and of assimilation.

If you would like to contribute a twenty-minute paper to this, or to the Paris or Pisa colloquia, please contact:

Prof. Martin Stannard
Department of English
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RH
Tel: (0116) 2522621
Fax: (0116) 2522065
E-mail: maj@le.ac.uk