Ms Linde Luijnenburg
PhD Student
Part-Time Teaching Assistant
Email: L dot M dot E dot Luijnenburg at warwick dot ac dot uk
H4.13
Humanities Building, University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
About
I started my PhD (fully funded by a Chancellor's Scholarship) in the Department of Italian in October 2013 under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Burns and Dr. Loredana Polezzi. My research centres on the representation of the Black Other in the commedia all’italiana, a group of films by critically and politically engaged Italian film directors who both ridicule and question the concept of ‘Italianness’ by exaggerating it in their films, pointing out a constructed Otherness through physically distinguishing characters which mark them as different from the ‘italiano medio’. The imperial narrative and the accompanying prejudices about former colonies, as well as former colonised people, were never refuted in Italy. The research examines the deconstruction of this narrative in several films of the commedia all’italiana. In my thesis, I aim to demonstrate that filmmakers criticise the lack of a national debate about Italy’s colonial past through the caricatures of the other in the commedia all’italiana.
Research interests
My broader research interests include:
- Postcolonial Theory and the notion of 'National Identity'
- Film Studies and Film Making
- Comedy Studies
- Comparative Literature
- The concept of 'Migrant literature'
Teaching and supervision
IT309 Comparative Literature: Italian and English Short Fiction
Cineforum: Modern Italian Cities/ Italian Insiders and Outsiders
Selected publications
- "The Other in Italian Postcolonial Cinema. Pasolini and Fellini: Two Case Studies", in: Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2013), pp. 34-43.
- "The Grotesque as a Tool: Deconstructing the Imperial Narrative in Two Commedie all'italiana by Ettore Scola", in: Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2014), pp.
- "New Postcolonial Art Forms: Timira as Multi-Genre Object Between Cinema and Literature", with Daniele Comberiati, in: Emma Bond, Guido Bonsaver and Federico Faloppa (eds.), Destination Italy. Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, Oxford, Peter Lang (series Italian Modernity), 2015: pp. 271-285.
Academic Memberships
- Member of the Board of Editors of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani
- Collaborator for Italinemo. Riviste di Italianistica nel mondo
- Collaborator for InteRGRace (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms)
Qualifications
- MA in Comparative Literature (Leuven)
- MA in History of Art (Amsterdam and New York)
- BA in Italian Studies (Amsterdam and Rome)
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BA in History of Art (Amsterdam)
Awards
- HRF Award for funding a conference trip to the US (2016) and to Durham, England (2015)
- HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition for organisation of a conference on the Short Story Cycle (2016)
- Postgraduate Award: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Learning Development Centre, University of Warwick (2015)
- Chancellor's Scholarship (now CADRE)
Organised Conference
The Short Story Cycle: Circling Around a Genre?, 6 February 2016, Warwick University, co-organised with Dr. Elio Baldi
Documentary project
Between 2014-2016 I produced the documentary Africa is You on the Somali-Dutch community in Birmingham, UK, together with Ahmed Magare, Dennis Mulder and Anna van Winden. © BrollB Productions, 2016.
The spoken word performance of Somali-Dutch artist Ahmed Magare brings its viewers to the Somali-Dutch community in Birmingham, UK. In the shape of a short story cycle, and through the poetry of Ahmed Magare, we hear various voices sharing their stories of migrating in and through Somalia, the Netherlands, England, and possibly back to Somalia.