Cultural Studies and Mentalities

People with expertise in this area
Research interests

Chiara Battisti: Associate Professor
Yvonne Bezrucka: Full Professor

Lisanna Calvi: Associate Professor
Carla Sassi: Associate Professor

Research interests
Topic	People	Description
corpo e tecnologia	Yvonne Bezrucka
Diaspora studies	Carla Sassi	Diaspora is a complex concept that foregrounds different meanings and applications. It focuses on migrants’ cross-border connections and flows, as well as on the establishment of social and symbolic ties. It challenges essentialist views of identity, foregrounding ideas of community that are fluid and constantly re-negotiated. Literature is a powerful vehicle for the representation of diasporic experiences. Diasporic narratives (novel, autobiographical writings), located at different points of space and time, grounded in a day-to-day experiences of diaspora, have the ability to relationally construct other places and other times.
Jacobite culture	Lisanna Calvi	Jacobite culture and literature in Britain; the political and devotional writings of James II Stuart.
Literature and Fashion studies	Chiara Battisti	The methodological approach of "Literature and fashion studies" analyses fashion’s mythic dimension and suggests that fashion is a language in itself. The methodological tools offered by fashion studies will be applied to the analysis of different novels in order to explore the impact and meaning of fashion in past and contemporary culture, and to investigate how fashion’s mythologies are constructed and disseminated through fictional texts. It will also examine how fashion, as a form of fiction, can be said to constitute a “power technology”: fashion can consort with hegemonic norms as a regulating force that can incite conformity, but sometimes resistance as well.
Memory Studies	Carla Sassi	Concerned with the social, cultural and political shifts determining how, what and why individuals, communities and societies remember and/or forget.
Postcolonial theory	Carla Sassi	A body of thought concerned with the political, aesthetic, economic, and social impact of European empires between the 18th and the 20th century, and how this has or should have re-shaped our understanding of local/global connections.
regionalismo critico	Yvonne Bezrucka
Slavery studies	Carla Sassi	Focused on providing a deeper understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. An interdisciplinary field intersecting with other field of academic inquiry, such as diaspora studies, globalization, and minority studies.