Italian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Our article maps the increasing prominence of interartistic and intermedial methodologies in modern and contemporary Italy, and advocates the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach for Italian Studies. We map some current trends in cultural, visual and comparative studies and explore the influence of these fields on the development of Italian Studies. We suggest that the future of our discipline is best understood in terms of an ‘interdisciplinary turn’, which entails a broadening of the object of study and opens up new perspectives on familiar and on previously unexplored objects. To conclude, we draw attention to three periods in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian culture that have been especially marked by interartistic experimentation: Futurism, the early postmodernism of the neoavanguardia and digital art. The perspectives we lay out in this article were developed during the first phase of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project, Interdisciplinary Italy 1900–2015: Art, Music Text.