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Prof. Giancarlo Tursi Wins Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome

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We are delighted to announce that our colleague, Prof. Giancarlo Tursi, Assistant Professor of Translation Studies and Translation Theory, has been awarded the prestigious 2024-2025 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome. Congratulations! Professor Tursi will spend the next year at the Academy working on his book project, "Dialectal Dante: The Politics of Translation in Risorgimento Italy."

These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the Rome Prize—the gift of “time and space to think and work”—was awarded to thirty-one American artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for five to ten months at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting this September.

For more about the Prize and Prof. Tursi's work, please click here.

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Postcolonial Translation: Ubah Cristina Ali Farah in conversation with Laura Sarnelli and Giancarlo Tursi

Tuesday, April 16th, 4-6pm, 6020 HSSB, McCune Conference Room

Please join us for a conversation with writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah on the recent translation of her book, Commander of the River.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is an acclaimed Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, and oral performer. She holds a Ph.D. in African Studies from the University of Naples "L'Orientale." Winner of prestigious literary awards, she has participated in many residencies and writing programs around the world. Ali Farah's publications include short stories, poems, and three novels, including Little Mother (Indiana University Press, 2011) and The Stations of the Moon (66thand2nd, 2021).

Commander of the River is a timeless and compelling coming-of-age story set in contemporary Italy; it explores themes of racism, trauma, adolescent angst, and the rebellious torments of young people in the Somali diaspora.

Organized by the Transnational Italian Studies Program, co-sponsored by IHC GCLR, Program in Comparative Literature, and the Department of Black Studies.

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Prof. Giancarlo Tursi wins Franklin Research Grant!

A hearty congratulations to Prof. Giancarlo Tursi, Assistant Professor of Translation Studies and Translation Theory who was awarded a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. Prof. Tursi will conduct research in the archives of the National Library of Naples on Domenico Jaccarino's 1870 Dante Popolare, a complete translation of Dante's Divine Comedy into Neapolitan dialect. Congratulations!

Professor Jody Enders Wins MLA's Lois Roth Award for Translation!

A hearty congratulations to our department's own Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French and Theater, for winning the prestigious Lois Roth Award for Translation from the Modern Language Association for her book, Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The prize is awarded annually for a translation into English of a book-length literary work and will be conferred to Prof. Enders at the MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia on January 5, 2024.

The selection committee praised Enders's masterful translations of medieval French farces, noting that she "not only researches, compiles, edits, annotates, and translates [the farces] into contemporary English," but that she goes one step further by "adapting them for performance with stage notes and suggestions for accompaniment."

The committee continues its praise, writing that thanks to Enders, "these works, which have lain in relative obscurity for more than 700 years, now sizzle with provocative prompts for classroom critical debates on contemporary culture."

Immaculate Deception expertly blends Enders's scholarly expertise in medieval French literature, public speaking, and theater studies, and puts on a veritable master class in"technical translation prowess, scholarly rigor, and guffaw-inducing creative humor that capture the timbre of these uncomfortably entertaining plays," according to the committee.

In the translation, Enders takes on weighty matters like power, promiscuity, and abuse, and renders them at once hilarious and profound. The committee continues: "[She] is undaunted by the significant translation challenges of situational jokes, euphemisms, and puns, which recur at every turn."

The Lois Roth Award is Professor Enders's second MLA book prize; she was previously awarded the Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992).

FRIT to offer Discovery Seminar in winter 2024

Come meet the faculty in the Department of French & Italian, and discover what they research as well as what you can learn as a major or minor in French and/or Italian here at UCSB!

"Croissants & Cappuccinos: Cultural Exchanges between France & Italy"

INT 87AJ, Winter 2024, Wednesdays, 5-6:50pm, Arts 1353

Of all the European nations, Italy and France are clearly those whose cultures and histories are the most closely intertwined. Theirs are entangled stories of empires, rebellions, religions, nation-states, languages, literatures, art, cuisine, and more—stories that have been the backdrop to some of the most important events in world history. 

From Paris to Rome, Napoléon to Mussolini, gli Azzurri to Les Bleus, croissants to cappuccinos, this interdisciplinary course offers a broad-based introduction to the cultural and historical relationship between France and Italy. It highlights the differences that have existed and still exist between the French and the Italians, and at the same time, spotlights the many values, practices, and ways of life they have in common. Our comparative study of France and Italy offers a view into what makes both of these countries unique in our present day. We explore the reasons why both have become so captivating that they are the only two countries in the world that attract more tourists than inhabitants. Over the centuries, France and Italy have had turbulent political and military relations, but they have also been increasingly interwoven culturally, with shared tastes in art, music, food… and soccer. Therefore, the proximity of France and Italy has not led to a rivalry, but rather to a kind of mutual esteem and even friendship.

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FRIT Launches New Website

The Department of French & Italian is pleased to announce the launch of its new website. The site showcases the interdisciplinarity and collegiality of our department, and highlights our faculty and students. We invite to explore the site and discover our ongoing research projects, our innovative courses, and everything else FRIT has to offer.

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Screening of Stonebreakers (2022)

The Transnational Italian Studies program & the Carsey Wolf Center are delighted to host filmmakers Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak Liptzin to screen and discuss their documentary, Stonebreakers, on December 5, 2023 at 7PM in the Pollock Theater. Please join us for this insightful film on the contemporary politics of memorialization and monuments in the U.S.

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S.C. Kaplan Publishes Book on Women's Libraries in Medieval France

We are delighted to announce S.C. Kaplan's publication of Women's Libraries in Late Medieval Bourbonnais, Burgundy, and France: A Family Affair (Liverpool University Press, 2022). Combining literary, historical, and cultural studies, this book explores how aristocratic women in the late French-speaking Middle Ages developed their libraries, taking into consideration the wide cultural, literary, and familial webs in which they socialized and how cultures of reading, gifting, borrowing, and acquisition played a role in building their collections. Read more about the book here.  

S. C. Kaplan is a Lecturer of French Studies and co-creator of Mapping Women Book Owners in Francophone Europe: 1350-1550, https://booksofduchesses.com.

Prof. Renan Larue publishes new book, Anthologie végane

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Congratulations to Prof. Renan Larue on his new book, Anthologie végane (A Vegan Anthology - 100 Essential Texts), which was published by the illustrious Presses Universitaires de France in September 2023. This first-of-its kind anthology allows us to grasp the vast ambition of the vegan movement, today and yesterday alike, and the many questions it raises in virtually all areas of human knowledge. The purpose of this book is to bring together one hundred of the most striking vegan pleas, present them, and organize them thematically into 14 chapters, for example: “The Violence of Slaughterhouses,” “Justice and Animal Rights,” “Veganism in Antiquity,” “The Abrahamic God and Veganism,” “Vegan Epiphanies,” “India, Cradle of Veganism,” or “The Anti-vegan Rhetoric.” Read more about Anthologie végane.

Prof. Stephanie Malia Hom Wins Bogliasco Fellowship, Barbieri Grant

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Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies, Stephanie Malia Hom, was awarded two external fellowships in 2023-24 to conduct research for her ongoing book project tracing the unexplored relationship between slavery and colonialism in Italy. She received a prestigious Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, which provides residential fellowships at the foundation's study center in Liguria, and an Ad Hoc Barbieri Grant in Modern Italian History from the Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture. Read more here about the awards and Prof. Hom's research project.