Executive Summary

The visit to the Estorick Gallery forms part of the teaching of a first year module in Italian Studies, Representations of Modern Italy. I hope to engage the students more directly in the study of Italian cultural movements of the early twentieth century by taking the teaching out of the lecture theatre and into the public space of the art gallery.

The visit and teaching is committed to interdisciplinarity as it crosses Italian Studies, History of Art, Historical and Literary Studies. Students will gain an appreciation of how artistic movements were influenced by the historical context in which the artists were living, and how movements in art were reflected in other forms of cultural production such as poetry and literature.

The talk will also emphasise the connections between Italian art and culture and international avant-garde movements of the early twentieth-century.

The visit to the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art forms part of the teaching of a first year module, Representations of Modern Italy. The study of modernist movements including Futurism and their influence on Italian and European cultural production forms a key part of the teaching of this module in Term 1. The Estorick Collection is one of the finest collections of Italian Futurist art and the visit to the gallery will allow students to have direct contact with the works that we will be discussing. I hope to foster their interest in Italian cultural movements of the period and encourage them to make wider connections between these artworks and other European art and literature of the early twentieth century. The visit will benefit not just their study of Italian, but also inform their study of other European cultures. It will also develop my own knowledge and appreciation of the period which will feed into teaching the module in future years. I hope that the visit would prompt interest in Futurism and Futurist art which would lead into student dissertations and research projects at Honours level.