Professor Michael Caesar
Serena Professor of Italian
I graduated in modern languages at Cambridge and moved from a post at the University of Kent to the chair of Italian at Birmingham in 1994, where I have been head of department from 1994 to 2002 and again from 2005 to 2008. My interests in Italian Studies have ranged from the reception of Dante since the Middle Ages to contemporary literature and the work of Umberto Eco, with a strong research focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I teach both undergraduates and postgraduates in all of these areas.
I am currently working on two large research projects. The Improvisers, or Italy: Orality, Text and Performance 1700-1870 is investigating the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of improvised oral poetry and the unexpected ways in which oral and written culture interacted during that period. The research has been supported by the British Academy and by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2002-2005) and will result in a monograph to be published in 2009. The second project is the production of the first complete critical English edition of Giacomo Leopardi's notebooks, the Zibaldone, with an introduction, notes, commentary and indexes. I am jointly responsible for this with my colleague Franco D'Intino, and publication is expected in 2012.
I continue to work on more recent literature and on literary theory. Modern Italian Literature, a new history of Italian literature from the 1690s to the twenty-first century, which I wrote with Ann Hallamore Caesar, was published by Polity in 2007.
The department's research interests are directed to literary studies and to film, media, cultural theory and contemporary political studies. My own work falls largely within the literary domain and is specifically linked to the work of the Leopardi Centre at Birmingham.
I am convenor of the joint Birmingham-Warwick MA in Italian Studies: Culture and Communication, a distinctive collaborative programme which was pioneered by the two departments in 2001.
Literary theory, problems of reception and transcultural adaptation, textual interpretation, the relations between oral and written culture in modern (post-18th century) culture.
(with Ann Hallamore Caesar): Modern Italian Literature, Cambridge, Polity, 2007.
(with Marina Spunta, eds.): Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture, Oxford, Legenda, 2006.
(with Franco D'Intino, eds.): Leopardi e il libro nell'età romantica, Roma, Bulzoni, 2000.
Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction, Cambridge, Polity, 1999.
'Franco Moretti and the World Literature Debate', Italian Studies 62, 1, spring 2007, pp. 125-35.
'Poetic Improvisation in the Nineteenth Century: Giuseppe Regaldi and Giannina Milli', Modern Language Review, 101, 3, July 2006, pp. 701-14.
'Voice, Vision and Orality. Notes on Reading Adriana Cavarero', in Caesar and Spunta (eds), Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture, Oxford, Legenda, 2006, pp. 7-17.
'Poetic Improvisation and the Challenge of Transcription', in B. Richardson (ed), Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present, Leeds, Maney, 2004, pp. 173-84.
'"Mezz'ora di nobiltà": Leopardi e i suoi lettori', in L. Melosi (ed), Leopardi a Firenze, Firenze, Olschki, 2002, pp.461-472.
'"The central man of all the world": l'esaltazione di Dante nell'Ottocento europeo', in I. Balzelli et al (eds), La cultura letteraria italiana e l'identità europea, Roma, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2001, pp. 31-38.
'The Node: Eco and the Meaning of Joyce', Journal of Romance Studies 1, 2, summer 2001, pp. 53-72.
'Leopardi e l'organizzazione del tempo come tema nello Zibaldone', in Lo Zibaldone cento anni dopo. Composizione, edizioni, temi. Atti del X Convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani, Firenze, Olschki, 2001, pp. 665-671.
'Eco et la mort de l'avantgarde', in J. Petitot (ed), Au nom du Sens: autour d'Umberto Eco, Paris, Grasset, 2000, pp. 407-420.
