Find out more
Italian
In Italian at Exeter we take pride in offering a high quality of teaching within a friendly, supportive and challenging atmosphere.
Whether you are attracted to Italy’s Medieval and Renaissance culture, that produced the likes of Dante and Michelangelo, or to Italy’s cinematic heritage, from Federico Fellini to Sophia Loren, the modules on offer in the department will give you the opportunity to build up your knowledge of Italy’s rich past, language and culture.
You will be able to choose modules that give you an insight into its history, contemporary political scene, art history, gender relations, cinema and literature. Understanding this nation and its language will be both richly rewarding in itself, and a valuable asset in the increasingly international world of the 21st century.
The Italian department at Exeter has one of the highest percentages of native Italian speaking staff in the UK and we offer a friendly, supportive and challenging atmosphere that provides high quality teaching. We value our extensive contacts with universities and other institutions in Italy that our students can choose from as destinations for their year abroad. Thanks to these exchanges there is a constant presence of Italian students in the department, giving it a distinctive atmosphere and making Italian the language of much of its day-to-day life.
You can study Italian through three pathways
Find out more
Modern Languages at Exeter ranks among the top UK institutions for student satisfaction, teaching and research. We offer excellent programmes and boast a Language Centre with state-of-the-art language-learning facilities. Our MA in Translation is taught by published literary translators, experienced practitioners and specialists in the use of computer-aided translation tools, helping prepare our students to undertake further study and become professional linguists. All teaching is directly related to our research. Modern languages postgraduates benefit from regular research seminars and scholars of international repute are frequent visitors.
Our research, and research supervision, ranges across a wide variety of disciplines including European Literature and Culture, Film, Linguistics, Medieval Studies, Gender Studies, and Translation, and reaches across time from the medieval to the contemporary. Our research-active academic staff, supported by a team of language teachers which includes native-speaker teachers, are highly successful in winning prestigious research awards from funding bodies including the AHRC, British Academy, EU, Leverhulme, and Marie-Curie.
Postgraduate taught programmes
Postgraduate research
Research interests
- Postwar Italian cinema and television from the perspective of audience studies and feminist theory (in particular Girlhood Studies)
- Multilingualism and language contact in immigrant communities, and the sociolinguistics of the Italian diasporas.
- Italian literature (in particular modern and contemporary fiction; women’s writing; literature, law and medicine; transmedianarratology; crime and science fiction; Galileo, Manzoni and the manzonian tradition, Moravia, Deledda, Drigo, Ferrante)
Research Centres
Research projects
- Investigating Italian cinema audiences of the 1940s and 1950s (joint project involving researchers from the universities of Exeter, Bristol and Oxford Brookes)
- A Girls’ Eye View: Girlhood on the Italian Screen since the 1950s
- Narratives of Child Sexual Abuse in Italy (1902-2019)
- The Epic Component of Contemporary Italian Novels
- Onward migration from Italy to the UK: a sociolinguistic perspective
- Italo-Romance dialects in the linguistic repertoires of immigrants