Örebro University

“Framing the Past: Weaving Memory and Experience into Historical Writing”.

Izabela A. Dahl is an associate professor and senior lecturer in history, affiliated with Örebro University and Södertörn University in Sweden. She studied and worked at several universities in Poland, Germany, Holland and Sweden.

Her main research interests concern modern and contemporary European history. Her research encopasses the fields of migration and refuge studies, humanitarian aid and relief activities, the history of anti-Semitism, Jewish history, European memory culture, and international relations in the Baltic Sea area, with special attention given to democratization processes.

Her analysis is driven by the interest in social power structures and social categorisations that pre-condition cultural and social contexts. Epistemologically, her work is inspired by discourse analysis, intersectionality, narrativity and the use of oral sources in history writing, as well as source pluralism. Approaches that are often applied in her investigated empirical studies include sensitivity to the gender dimension, processes of social inclusion and exclusion, and social categorization.

Universidad de Zaragoza

“Back in Ithaca: Mediterranean Stories and Film Spaces”

Celestino Deleyto is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza.

He has published widely on romantic comedy, film genre theory and history, transnational cinema and cosmopolitan film theory, including The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester, 2009), Alejandro González Iñárritu, for the Contemporary Film Directors series (Illinois, 2010), co-written with María del Mar Azcona, and From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film (Wayne State, 2016). He has contributed to recently edited volumes on Pedro Almodóvar and Film Comedy for Wiley-Blackwell, and to the Film Genre Reader (ed. Barry Keith Grant) for The University of Texas Press, among many others. He has published his research in Cinema Journal, Screen, PostScript, Critical Survey and Film Criticism, among others.

His most recent work on transnational cinema and cosmopolitan theory has appeared in Transnational Screens, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas and New Review of Film and Television Studies.

ABSTRACT

This talk offers a reading of the film Nostalgia (Mario Martone, 2022) as a Mediterranean narrative that draws much of its power from the use of location shooting in the Neapolitan neighbourhood of La Sanità. As in The Odyssey, one of the foundational Mediterranean narratives (Ruiz-Domènec, 2022), the hero returns home after a long time away, in this case forty years. What turns Homer’s poem into a central work of European and western culture is the journey—the “odyssey”—rather than the place where he is returning—Ithaca—, a meaning reinforced by Konstantinos Kaváfis’s famous poem “Ithaca” (1935) in which the Ionian island is openly described as no more than an excuse for the journey. In Nostalgia, on the other hand, the various journeys are only important in so far as they have shaped the identity of its protagonist, Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino), as a Mediterranean hero and as a personification of a cultural space shaped by a multitude of journeys, both individual and collective (Abulafia, 2014). The bulk of the the story, based on Ermanno Rea’s novel of the same title (2018), takes place in Naples, mostly in the Rione Sanità, whose history, urban a cultural identity, takes centre stage. This shift of perspective, from journey to destination, from narrative to space, conveys not only a quintessentially Mediterranean dynamic: a territory shaped, in the course of history, on the one hand, by constant human mobilities, encounters, clashes and fusions and, on the other, by places such as coastlines, islands, cities and borders. It also succinctly reminds us of the combination of plots and spaces that is at the heart of all stories.

My approach today is part of a project that explores the interface between film space and real places, in this case the Mediterranean Sea. My starting hypothesis is that the real world speaks to us through cinematic spaces, particularly in those films shot on location. Following insights by geographer Doreen Massey (2005), film theorist and historian Geoffrey Nowell Smith (2001) and the writing of director Mario Martone himself (2004), among others, I argue that while characters and plots have largely dominated the study of all narrative forms, including films, film space has been under-researched. The “spatial turn” that has, since the turn of the century, become visible in academia, provides a good opportunity to redress this balance, particularly since, as Mark Shiel asserts, film is first and foremost a “spatial system” (2001). The project from which today’s talk originates seeks, first, to highlight the centrality of space in the cinema, secondly, to argue for the proximity between cinematic space and the real world and, as a consequence, finally, to look at film space as an open window for spectators to access knowledge about the real places that films reveal to us.

References:

Abulafia, David 2014 (2011). The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. Harmondworth: Penguin.

Martone, Mario 2004. Chiaroscuri: Scritti tra cinema e teatro. Ada di Adamo, ed. Milano: Bompiani Overlook, 2004.

Massey, Doreen 2005. For Space. London: Sage.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 2001. In Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurize, Tony, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Blackwell, 99-108.

Rea, Ermanno. Nostalgia. Fetrinelli, 2018.

Ruiz-Domènec, José Enrique, 2022. El sueño de Ulises: El Mediterráneo, de la guerra de Troya a las pateras, Taurus.

Shiel, Mark 2001. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” In Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurize, eds., 1-18.

Universität zu Köln

“AI, Well-being and the role of the humanities”

Beatrix Busse is Professor of Diachronic English Linguistics and Vice-Rector for Teaching and Studies at the University of Cologne. She is the Chief Development Officer of the European University for Well-Being (EUniWell).

Beatrix Busse studied English and history at the universities of Osnabrück and Keele (GB). She received her doctorate in English linguistics from the University of Münster in 2004, and she obtained her Habilitation at the University of Bern (CH) in 2010. In 2011, Beatrix Busse was appointed a full professor for English linguistics at Heidelberg University.

From 2013 to 2019 Beatrix Busse also held the position of Vice-Rector for Studies and Teaching at Heidelberg University. Her research areas include Corpus Linguistics, the History of the English Language and language in Urban Space. She is a British Academy Visiting Fellow. She is the Co-Founder of the Heidelberg School of Education and was a founding member of the DFG-funded research training group “Authority and Trust in American Culture, Society, History and Politics. Among others” She is the  reviews editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on the editorial board of the Continuum series Advances in Stylistics.

Beatrix Busse’s scholarly interests include the history of English, (historical) sociopragmatics, stylistics, corpus linguistics, transfer linguistics, and language in urban space. Her DFG funded project heidelGram is a corpus-based network analysis of English grammar books between 1550 and 1900. Among her other recent projects are speech, writing, and thought presentation in the history of English, language in urban place, and discursive place-making in Brooklyn, New York.

Beatrix Busse is also the Deputy Chair of the Executive Board of the Coimbra Universities Group. She chairs the board of FOREU4ALL which represents 65 European University Alliances.