Annual Report 2008-9 - The British School at Rome

M ODERN S TUDIES
Icompleted my last year at the BSR as Research Professor
in Modern Studies engaged on the three-year project
‘Language, Space and Power in Italy since 1800’. The final
stages involved a second round of filmed interviews with
recent migrants from Romania, as well as with some of
their Italian neighbours, in three suburban areas of Rome.
It also involved research on photographic representation
in Italy’s colonies during the 1930s. For the latter I used
the archives in Rome of the Società Geografica Italiana,
Istituto Italo-Africano, Archivio dell’Ufficio Storico dello
Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito and Istituto Luce. I also
worked in the archive of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies
in Addis Ababa, which contains an important collection of
unofficial photographs confiscated from Italian soldiers at
the time of the liberation of Ethiopia in 1941 by the
British army and Ethiopian patriots. Some of these
materials will be used in the book arising from the
research and the exhibition that will open at the BSR on
25 June 2010, together with photographs and film extracts
relating to the other three main case-studies in the research
project: slum housing in Rome in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, ethnographic investigations of
rural areas in the south of Italy in the 1950s, and
psychiatric institutions and the movement to close them in
the 1960s and 1970s.
The remainder of my time on the project was spent on
the dissemination of the research findings both within the
BSR and outside. Between October 2008 and May 2009 I
gave three lectures at the BSR on the three main strands
of the research. In November I talked at the British
Academy about Italy’s new anti-immigrant policies. In
January I began planning the exhibition for the summer
of 2010, and managed to secure the collaboration of three
audiovisual and photographic archives: Teche Rai, the
Istituto Luce, and the Laboratorio per la Ricerca e
Documentazione Audiovisiva (Roma Tre). In July I
finished the illustrated book arising from the project,
entitled Italy Family Album: Texts and Images on the Margins,
Courtyard of a tenement in Via di Porta Labicana, Rome, before and
after risanamento in 1909
1861–2010, for which I have a publishing agreement with
Cambridge University Press. Lastly, I began organising the
conference related to the themes of the research, to be
held at the BSR on 24–25 June 2010. As well as sending
invitations to selected speakers, I circulated two calls for
papers, in April and June 2009. Over 100 proposals were
submitted, of which no more than 35 can be included,
and a provisional conference schedule is now in place.
I considers my three years based at the BSR to have been
without doubt the best research opportunity I have had in
my academic career since I finished my doctorate in 1978,
as well as a uniquely rewarding social and intellectual
experience. I have had time and freedom to think, read,
look at images, listen to people, exchange ideas with experts
and write. I hope I have been able to contribute to the
School and its community as much as I have taken from it
in ideas, suggestions and stimulation.
David Forgacs
Research Professor in Modern Studies
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