Chair of Italian Literatures and Cultural Studies

Welcome to the website of the Chair of Italian Literature and Cultural Studies.

Overview of the professorship

Chair holder

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Tiller has held the Chair of Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the Institute of Romance Studies since 01.01.2014.

Teaching

Our courses aim to convey the full range of Italian literary and cultural studies and are supplemented by guest lectures, excursions and the like.

Team

The Chair of Italian Literature and Cultural Studies is supported by academic and student staff as well as by the secretariat run by Almuth Kahl.

The chair introduces itself

The Chair of Italian Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on cultural productions such as literary texts, films, images, maps or graphic novels, as well as on historical modes of functioning and constellations of culture and knowledge that constitute such aestheticized representations. The historical window for teaching and research extends from the Middle Ages to the present day. The focus is on cultural phenomena, media processes and historical transformations of society, which are examined from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, discourse analysis, fiction theory and gender studies.

Research projects

SFB sub-project: Invectiveness in literary and cinematic representations of migration in 20th/21st century Italy

The sub-project examines literary and cinematic narratives of migration in the Italian narrative community in order to analyze the aesthetic staging of invective social conflicts since the beginning of the 20th century. The project asks how invectives are narratively functionalized, how social conflicts, political identifications and cultural scripts are negotiated and made plausible in the media, and which historical discourse politics, knowledge regimes and affective dynamics underpin this.

Travel and explorer reports from Italy (15th/16th century)

The Venetian Marco Polo was neither the first late medieval traveler from the Italian peninsula to undertake long journeys to distant regions of the world, nor the first to write about them. Nevertheless, he initiated a tradition that would shape a large number of travelogues written by merchants and bankers, seafarers, cartographers and other travelers after their return to Europe and the Italian peninsula until the end of the great discoveries around 1530. The research project examines these travelogues of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Fictionality and factuality

The project focuses on the interferences of reality and representation that develop between political, economic or social events and their representation in the media. The object of investigation is literary or cinematic narratives from the Italian cultural sphere that explicitly deal with the political reality of the country.

Office hours during the semester

Consultation hours in summer semester 2024:
Wed., 17:00-18:00 hrs.

Lecture-free period:
Mon, 12.02.24 12:00-13:00
Thu, 07.03.24 17:00-18:00
Thu, 04.04.24 12:00-13:00

For short-term changes, please refer to the notices at the Institute or the general information on the Institute homepage.