Current projects

GEPHRAS2 is the follow-up project to GEPHRAS (romanistik-gephras.uibk.ac.at, headed by Erica Autelli): Both projects are funded by the FWF and are dedicated to the creation of an online phraseological dictionary of Genoese-Italian (Autelli/Lusito/Konecny/Toso 2018-21; in prep.). The aim is to systematically record Genoese phrasemes (collocations, idioms, communicative, comparative and structural phrasemes) with their current Italian equivalents, including details of different variants, metalexicographical information, IPA transcriptions, audio files, example sentences, historical evidence and images for each phraseme of a lemma. Particularly innovative are the numerous search options that allow users to browse the database by single or multiple words, phraseme type or morphosyntactic category - in Genoese or Italian - and also take into account the various graphs of Genoese. The project is intended to contribute to the documentation and preservation of endangered Genoese and at the same time serve as a model for further phraseographic work.

The project "Research as Vocality" aims to emphasise the physical, relational, political and expressive power of the voices of artists and activists with an African background in Naples, both their singing voices and their spoken words, and thereby bring these artists and activists to the fore. The ethnological research line of the project is based on dialogical and performative collaborations in which artists and researchers analyse and question historical documentation. The aim is to focus on the historical relations between Naples and Africa in order to build a new and sustainable understanding of current issues of mobility, nationality, differences in terms of ethnicity or gender, access to rights and opportunities.

Music and songs often play a major role in the organisation and representation of cultural encounters. The aim of the project is to investigate this fact in the context of the second Italian-Ethiopian war. During the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, records were produced in the form of 78 rpm shellacs, intended both for the institutional archive in Italy and for commercial distribution. In addition, an official monograph on Ethiopian music was published in Italian just a few months after Italy's entry into the Second World War. The collections from sound archives and ethnographies from this period are used - both in Ethiopia and in Italy - and serve as a stimulus for participatory research. The question of the significance of these cultural productions in the development of social and societal change processes involving representations, performances, personal as well as collective will be explored.

The FWF project examines the function of literary translations as media of transcultural memory, i.e. their role in the transfer of stories about pasts characterised by political violence across the borders of languages, cultures and societies. The focus is on literary-narrative memories of the Algerian War of Independence and the last military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile and their circulation in French-, Spanish- and German-speaking countries. What exactly do translations "do" as memory media and how does the literarily constructed knowledge of the past change in the course of its memory-cultural "journey" and its de- and relocalisation? Further information can be found at Website of the project.

The aim of my research project is to investigate representations of the Mediterranean (space) in Italian literature and cinema, starting with verismo in the late 19th century up to the present day. The central question is how the Mediterranean region is narrated, conceptualised, reflected upon and shaped in literary and cinematic representations. In addition, the potential of theoretical text and film analyses will be used to describe the contribution of fictions to the formation of Mediterranean discourse and its reflection. The project's research corpus comprises five focal points and begins with a re-reading of Italian verismo: Giovanni Verga's stories and selected texts by the writer and publicist Matilde Serao will be analysed from the perspective of Mediterranean studies. While Verga describes the mythical and archaic world of Sicily in his texts, Serao primarily focuses on the urban space, above all the social problems of the Mediterranean metropolis of Naples. In a further step, the project sheds light on Verdi's Aida in the context of trans-Mediterranean relations; insofar as the opera was the most important popular genre in Italy in the 19th century, an examination of Aida and the context in which it was written will highlight any orientalist implications and also explore how this opera in turn discursively shaped imaginations of the Mediterranean region. A further project focus is dedicated to Italian Mediterranean poetry in the first half of the 20th century and deals with questions of Mediterranean discourse formation and its forms of staging by authors as diverse as Pascoli and D'Annunzio on the one hand, Saba, Montale and Ungaretti on the other. Finally, narrative texts, in particular the Mediterranean novels of Fausta Cialente, as well as films representing Mediterranean harbour cities and Mediterranean passages are at the centre of further considerations.

In the research project "Italian migration cinema: an intersectional analysis", I am analysing an extensive corpus of films on the topic of contemporary migrations to Italy produced by Italian and foreign directors as well as directors of the "second generation". My focus is on analysing the cinematic representation of the constructions of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality as well as social class and aims to differentiate and situate the identities of migrants portrayed in Italian cinema of the last 30 years (1990-2020).

Annie Chartres Vivanti (Norwood, 1866 - Turin, 1942) was a cosmopolitan and polyhedral writer who lived in Italy for a long time and published many of her works in Italian. Although she was very famous at the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, she fell into oblivion after her death, partly due to the entry into force of the racial laws in Italy (1938), which banned the works of many authors of Jewish origin (including Annie Vivanti) from libraries and publishing houses. Today, in the wake of the interest in "scrittura femminile", Annie Vivanti has been rediscovered along with many other female authors. Detached from a national context, this author moved across borders early on. Her perspective is therefore never completely "internal", as she always maintains a very special cosmopolitan view. Annie Vivanti has dealt with various themes, including the colonial theme (alterity, hybridity, identity, etc.). This is dealt with in three texts in particular: in the novels Terra di Cleopatra (1925), Mea Culpa (1927) (on British colonialism in Egypt), and in the novella "Tenebroso amore" (1920) (on Italian colonialism in Libya). With my work I would like to offer a systematic, as yet unrealised, postcolonial reading of Annie Vivanti's production, with a particular focus on the role of women and the female body within the (post-)colonial imaginary and discourse. In doing so, I would like to emphasise the innovation and, above all, the modernity of Annie Vivanti's literary achievements and demonstrate the scope of her writing back.

This dissertation project is concerned with analysing the linguistic construction of tourist locations in (digital) space. It examines the extent to which there are similarities and/or differences in the linguistic valorisation of places in tourist areas in Andalusia. The investigation is supported by a tripartite corpus, which is used to analyse language-bound place-making from multiple perspectives and methods. The project's focus on Spanish Andalusia provides a necessary perspective on Spanish localities, which have hardly been considered in studies of multilingualism in (digital) space to date.

Based on the question "How to be a lesbian poet?", the hitherto little-researched lyrical work of the authors Gloria Fuertes (Madrid, 1917- 1998) and María Elena Walsh (Buenos Aires, 1930-2011), who are primarily known for their children's literature, will be examined with regard to their self-conceptions and authorisation strategies as poets. The focus is on the conceptual entanglements between cultural authorship and gender/heteronormativity. The project thus builds on the authorship studies that have been increasingly received in Hispanic studies in recent years and subjects their methods and concepts to a queer-feminist revision.

By interweaving ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies, the representations and actions of tropical climate phenomena in Latin American novels will be analysed. Instead of the representation of space and landscape, tropical heat, rain and hurricanes will be focussed on, a desideratum in previous research and a more than topical subject in view of the increasingly frequent occurrence of extreme weather phenomena in the course of climate change. The aim is to take a diachronic perspective with literary works from the 20th and 21st centuries that thematise the tropical nature of Latin America and not only provide insights into the present, but also show prospective representations.

In my dissertation project, I am analysing the category of evidentiality and its individual linguistic manifestation in Spanish using a corpus of journalistic texts and other media about Ayotzinapa and Teltecingo. I ask myself to what extent evidentiality is expressed on the discursive level in a language in which the category has no morphological equivalents, and what textual dimensions it reaches; I also want to investigate what repercussion evidentiality has on the syntactic level. A comparative oral corpus will provide information about the realisation of evidentiality in oral versus written language.

The study of texts explicitly aimed at children and young people has only increasingly become the focus of academic interest in recent years. In Italian literary studies in particular, this subject area has so far led a niche existence, if at all - mainly in didactic research projects. However, the central postulate of this research project is that literary studies can no longer avoid turning its attention to books for children and young adults by Italian authors. "Literary studies' fear of children's and young adult literature" is still both evident and urgently needs to be remedied, and the working title of the project is derived from this finding, which refers to the young adult novel and film Io non ho paura by Niccolo Ammaniti and a systematic rehabilitation of Italian children's and young adult literature in literary studies.

In her habilitation Fraseografia bilingue e delle varietà. Riflessioni diacroniche e sincroniche su esempio di alcune lingue e varietà romanze, Erica Autelli focuses on phraseology and phraseography and provides an overview of their development and terminological history. She analyses phraseographic works from various centuries in Italy, France and Spain and develops metalexicographical guidelines for the creation of modern bilingual dictionaries, with a particular focus on diatopic varieties as well as phraseodidactic and computational linguistic aspects.

This project is dedicated to the analysis of cinematic modelling of corruption in contemporary Mexican cinema - in close connection with the neoliberalism that has been virulent in Mexico since the late 1980s. The focus on Mexico results from two main criteria: the importance that the phenomenon of corruption has gained in the public debate in this country in recent years, and Mexico's position as one of the Latin American countries in which the questioning of the neoliberal model as the cause of the current extent of corruption has recently gained weight in the discussion. For this study, filmic representations of corruption should therefore not be understood as a moral problem, but as a sign of the depoliticisation of the public sphere and the commercialisation and privatisation of the state, which are driven by neoliberalism. The aim of this project is to analyse and systematise the aesthetic and narrative means used in the selected films and series to portray corruption in Mexico. In particular, one of the fundamental questions is how neoliberal patterns of interpretation of corruption are reproduced and legitimised or criticised and resisted through different aesthetics in the 21st century. Three groups of aesthetics were identified in this project: the aesthetics of initiation, the aesthetics of outrage and the cynical aesthetics. In this context, it is also important to examine how the processes of screening and streaming have affected these representations, taking into account the particularities of the different film formats and media platforms in which these cinematic narratives of corruption are presented.

This explorative-qualitative study uses a video corpus to investigate the L2 interactional competence of learners in French lessons. The conversation-analytical study provides a comprehensive description of linguistic and multimodal action patterns in L2 interactions at school, presents longitudinal case analyses of selected aspects of foreign language oral competence and discusses implications of the empirical results for the teaching and learning of foreign languages.

In her habilitation project, Monika Messner analyses how tourist spaces are staged multimodally in print and online media from the perspective of linguistics and semiotics. Furthermore, approaches from cultural studies and media linguistics are also included. The focus is on the analysis of language (moving) image combinations for the strategic visualisation of the tourist area as an attractive holiday destination. The aim is to look at this type of advertising - tourism advertising/destination advertising - from different points of view - and possibly from a contrasting perspective - for example, how spatiality, temporality or synaesthesia are articulated through the use of different modalities.

Literary studies' fear of children's and young adult literature is still both evident and urgently needs to be remedied. The project "Taboo? Reading what people prefer to keep quiet about" aims to contribute to this and pursues several objectives. The academic debate on children's and young adult literature (YA) is to be revalued, as this subject area has so far had a niche existence, if at all, in Italian literary studies and literary didactics. This taboo project therefore has the pioneering function of basic research, as there are no relevant studies for Italy to date that investigate which texts are read at all in Italian schools or whether they deal with taboo topics. Studies, all of which originate from mother-tongue Italian contexts (bilingual schools in Innsbruck, as well as schools in the target country Italy), will be used to determine the extent to which young adult literature that deals with taboos can also be used in Italian foreign language lessons.

The following research questions will be analysed first:

FF1: Which texts are read in Italian lessons at school (in Italy)?

FF2: Are taboos thematised in these readings?

FF3: Whether and to what extent there are discrepancies between pupils' and teachers' views regarding the relevance attributed to Italian literature lessons in schools by the respective groups?

FF4: Does dealing with contemporary taboo topics have a motivating function for reading in general among pupils or not?

FF5: Are there regional/sociocultural differences in the selected regions (Tyrol, South Tyrol, Northern and Southern Italy) in terms of openness towards the thematisation of taboos in Italian lessons?

This is therefore primarily a status quo survey based on the hypothesis that picture books can also be used for teaching literature (and foreign languages) at school and are particularly suitable for thematising 'difficult' content due to their easier accessibility. Precisely because it promotes the ability to reflect on current topics, this literature has a not inconsiderable intercultural significance, not least for foreign language lessons, in which knowledge about cultural differences (and similarities) is taught alongside pure language skills. This serves not least to promote diversity, a fundamental socio-political concern that is practised across borders by institutions such as the EU (cf. https://www.eudiversity2022.eu/). It is the task of the state to allow diverse ways of life to coexist. Universities and schools, as state educational institutions, have a contribution to make to this, which is highly relevant and which - according to one of the initial theses - can also be fulfilled through the teaching of literature.

The project aims to use qualitative (interview analysis) and quantitative (statistics) methods to investigate the type and form of vocal demonstrations or vocalisations used by conductors in orchestral rehearsals and to show where, why and for what purpose they are used during the rehearsal. For this purpose, video data from rehearsals of (professional) symphony orchestras based in France, Italy, Belgium and Spain will be used. Conductors use vocal demonstrations to convey to the musicians what they want to hear. When they sing a certain passage from the score with the interpretation they have in mind, they imitate what the musicians play on their instruments and can thus demonstrate or represent different musical aspects (e.g. tempo, rhythm, melodic lines, etc.). This project aims to explore in depth the dimension of the individual syllables or sequences of syllables that conductors use for auditions. It also aims to investigate how vocalisations are organised interactively and sequentially. This project aims to show how singing and speech are sequentially coordinated during interruptions in the music and how these two (and additional) modalities intertwine. In addition, the specific functions that vocalisations can fulfil in comparison to speech (e.g. representation vs. description) will be investigated. In addition, it will be examined how vocal demonstrations by the conductor and the music of the orchestra relate to each other in playing parts and how such vocalisations differ from those used in discussion parts. The aim of the project is to create a 'simple classification' of the sung syllables that appear in orchestral rehearsals according to parameters such as type and form, function and performance as well as sequential organisation. This systematisation is intended to highlight the importance of vocality as an (additional) multimodal resource and its interactive-instructive power in musical settings.