Circolo Gianicolense is a joint seminar series for young scholars at three international research institutions at the Gianicolo: The Norwegian Institute in Rome, The American Academy in Rome, and Institutum Romanum Finlandiae. Alternating between the three institutions, these seminars present current research in the field of ancient, medieval and early modern studies. The seminars are held in English, will be followed by discussions and refreshments, and are open to everyone upon registration.
About the presentations
Kevin Martín: The Italophone Colonial Subject - Linguistic Evidence from an Ego-Document
The limited existing linguistic research on the Italian colonial period (1882-1947) positions Italy’s East African colonial subjects as only ever capable of speaking an inchoate, contact-induced pidginized Italian, often referred to as “Simplified Italian.” Using an ego-document as its primary source, this study interrogates whether this was truly the case. In this paper, I begin by providing a critical "state of the art" analysis of Italian-African pidgin languages and the scholarship surrounding their study. What aspects of Italian morphology, phonology, or the lexicon impacted the formation of these pidgin languages, and how did sociohistorical factors contribute to their development? I then conduct a linguistic analysis of a hand-written letter by an Eritrean man to show that his Italian proficiency surpasses what the scholarship has thus far acknowledged.
Joonas Kananen: Football in the Shade of Ultranationalism - Approaching Everyday Experiences in Fascist Italy through Spatial History
The interwar period marked a significant spatial reconfiguration of sport. The increasing societal and cultural importance of sport manifested in a shift which moved sport from informal urban spaces towards enclosed and demarcated spaces of stadiums and sports fields. Italy was one of the leading countries in this shift, which was closely linked to the fascist regime’s comprehensive sports policy from the mid-1920s onwards.
Meanwhile, football’s popular appeal in Italy coincided with these changes. In the aftermath of World War I, football captured the attention of the masses of people in an unprecedented manner, which packed the game with multiple meanings. Hence, football marked, among others, a significant form of business, locus to display prestige nationally and internationally, spectacle, distraction, issue of public order, and creative resource for people’s everyday sociability and identities.
Examining these multiple interests as well as their entanglement and overlapping, requires a nuanced understanding of spaces where these social processes condensed. Consequently, the presentation discusses a theoretical approach of spatial history as a means of studying such a dynamic interplay in the spaces of football in Fascist Italy. Besides the strong influence of politics on these spaces, spatial history enables us to reflect the role of their users who actively participated in the production of social and cultural meanings.
About the speakers
Kevin Martín is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Joonas Kananen is a PhD candidate in European and World History at the University of Turku.
Interested in attending?
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