Research & Collaboration

The Department of French & Italian's scholarship includes:

  • Premodern era (especially medieval literature and intellectual history, and 17th-century performance history and philosophy)
  • French and Francophone film theory and history of cinema
  • French modern poetry in its relation to the emergence of the film medium
  • African theater and theater theory
  • Francophone literatures and cultures (French outside of France, including North Africa, Quebec, the Caribbean, West and Sub-Saharan Africa), politics and aesthetics
  • French linguistics with emphasis on second language acquisition and sociolinguistics of French
  • French Jewish studies, studies of anti-Semitism, modern and contemporary French literature and thought
  • Performance and theater studies, history of literary theory and postmodern thought
  • Francophone and Italian gender, sexuality, and feminist studies
  • 19th-century Italian literature, Risorgimento studies, and Italian film studies

FRIT Lab: A research and work-in-progress discussion group

FRIT Labs are spaces of ongoing exchange between faculty and students within French and Italian. They provide regular opportunities for informal discussion of seminal texts, recent publications, new ideas, trends in the field, challenging problems, pedagogical strategies, and works-in-progress. FRIT Labs aim to offer participants valuable feedback and help foster collaboration and creativity.
 

L'Esprit Créateur

Founded at the University of Minnesota by John Erickson in 1961, L'Esprit Créateur represents the major fields of the discipline of French and Francophone Studies. The journal returned home in 2003 and is edited by Daniel Brewer and Mária Brewer.

Key French & Italian Affiliations

The Department of French & Italian collaborates with several University centers, exploring topics that are intertwined within the realms of both institutions.

Italian Program Project in Sources of Immigration History

 

Italian Program Project in Sources of Immigration History
The Immigration History Research Center Archives on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota contain a number of documents about the experiences of both contemporary and past Italian immigrants to the United States, and particularly to Minnesota. While the archives are a wonderful resource for researchers, the Italian Immigrant Stories project was created by Doctor Susan Noakes to create a resource that would help make the documents more accessible to anyone interested in researching the experiences of Italian–Americans.
 
Information about the project and a listing of the currently indexed documents can be found here. The website currently contains information about over fifty documents in the archive and is being continuously updated — it currently includes information about memoirs, meeting minutes, convention records, correspondence, and other documents from Italian–American institutions and Italian–Americans themselves that are in the archive.
 
The materials in the archives do not circulate but are available for viewing at the Immigration History Research Center Archives in the Governor Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University's West Bank. The archives at Andersen Library are open on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, along with Wednesday and Thursday from 8:30 am to 7:00 pm.