Dr. Fiore Invited to Give a Talk at Yale about Memoria Presente Digital Archive

On April 5, 2023, Dr. Teresa Fiore gave an invited talk in the Department of Italian Studies at Yale University about her current research and teaching project titled “The Memoria Presente Digital Archive: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures.” This open-access digital archive, originally launched with an NEH fellowship, hosts a collection of interdisciplinary materials highlighting the connections between Italy and Latin American countries in the areas of literature, food, film, and botany. This project essentially redesigns Italian geography on a transnational map that results from these linkages and is characterized by the circular mobility of people, ideas, and products over the centuries: colonial exchanges and movements at the time of the early explorations and the establishment of the Spanish Empire, whose legacy has redefined European and American cultures in multiple ways; post-imperial migratory flows from Italy to Latin America and today post-colonial ones from Latin America to Italy.

 

Dr. Fiore used examples that concentrated on materials found in the Beinecke Library at Yale, such as Paola Agosti’s photographs taken in the Italian community in the Argentianian pampa – see photo above: “Freyre (Argentina), 1991” – and also referenced the collaborations developed with Yale students that generated original contributions to the archive Memoria Presente (Zach Aguilar from the Italian Studies Department is working on the translation of a short story by Laura Pariani).

The talk was included in the series “Linguistic Futures,” which was designed a few years ago to stimulate a discussion about language pedagogy with particular reference to the Italian language. Dr. Fiore’s talk emphasized the importance of focusing on the Hispanic population on university campuses, a fast-increasing section of the student body.

In this sense, Dr. Fiore continues to speak from the perspective of a Hispanic Serving Institution like Montclair State University that is refining tools to reach out to, support, and provide targeted opportunities for students with a background that includes many forms of cultural and linguistic affinity with Italy, and that can be fruitfully leveraged for their academic and professional growth.

Dr. Fiore had already presented the online talk “Trans-Language and Trans-Cultural Italian Studies: Addressing a Changing Student Body, Job Market and Society” at Yale during the pandemic, and was subsequently invited by the Department of Italian Studies to teach the graduate seminar “Transnational Italy: Imperial Legacies and Migratory Routes” as Visiting Professor in Spring 2022 (see post).

See the digital archive Memoria Presente here.

Short link to this post: https://tinyurl.com/FioreYaleSP23