Prof Derek Duncan

Professor

Phone: +44 (0)1334 46 3668
Email: ded3@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office: Room 15
Location: United Colleges
Office hours: Tuesday 12-1, Thursday 10-11

Research areas

I took up the post of Professor of Italian at St Andrews in 2012 before which I was Professor of Italian Cultural Studies at the University of Bristol. I grew up in Dundee and attended a local comprehensive school before studying French and Italian at Aberdeen University and completing doctoral studies at Edinburgh.

My research and teaching focus on intersections of sexuality/gender and of race/ethnicity in modern Italian culture which I explore through the interdisciplinary frameworks of queer and critical race theory. Honours modules such as ‘Black Italians’ ‘Fascist Italy’ and ‘Cultures of Migration’ draw on these frameworks to encourage students to research creatively across a wide range of cultural forms.

My current research project was funded by a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Provisionally called Diasporic Displacements: The Mediterranean Afterlives of the Arandora Star, it draws on a diverse body of creative work about the sinking of two vessels almost seventy-five years apart in very different places and circumstances to invoke the complex, transcolonial histories of the Italian diaspora. The sinking off the Irish coast in 1940 of the Arandora Star, a requisitioned liner transporting Italian and German internees and prisoners of war as well as Jewish refugees from Liverpool to Canada is entangled in the more recent sinkings in the Mediterranean, particularly that of 3 October 2013, when a boat carrying mostly migrants from Eritrea, Italy’s former colony in East Africa, sank just off the shores of the island of Lampedusa. My analysis doesn’t see these two shipwrecks as singular historical occurrences but, as cardinal points in an investigation of the transversal geopolitical spaces of Italian colonial occupation.

In many ways this project grew out of the large AHRC-funded project Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures and its follow-on Global Challenges project in Namibia on which I was one of the lead investigators. Through my work on this collective project I became increasingly interested in the field of Creative Humanities and the link between artistic practice and academic research and co-organised Press Play, an integrated conference and exhibition in Rome in 2019. In 2021 I published Italy is out (LUP) in collaboration photographer Mario Badagliacca. The book contains Mario’s portraits of Italians in the global diaspora and the things that connect them to Italy. I am currently collaborating with the Italian artist Davide D’Elia on an extension of ‘Tiepido Cool’, his ongoing exploration of visualisations of temperature. Here is the link to the project flip book and there is more information about our collaboration on the website of the School’s Centre for Poetic Innovation.

I am a founding editor of two influential book series with Liverpool University Press Transnational Italian Cultures and Transnational Modern Languages for which I co-edited the open access core text, Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, a collection of more than 30 essays written by an international team of researchers exploring key aspects of Modern Languages from a cross-cultural perspective. Aim primarily at a student readership, the collection affirms the importance of teaching and research in a transnational frame.

PhD supervision

Mathilde Lyons

Selected publications

Open access

Detached retinas: empathy and the transmedial interstices of RAI fiction
Colombini, J. & Duncan, D., 31 May 2023, In: Studies in European Cinema. 20, 2, p. 138-154 17 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Shades of complicity: archives of the ‘implicated subject’
Duncan, D., 14 Mar 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Modern Italy.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Migration and language: introduction
Duncan, D. E., 21 Nov 2023, The Palgrave handbook of European migration in literature and culture. Stan, C. & Sussman, C. (eds.). Cham: Palgrave, p. 319-323 4 p.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Open access

Transnational perspectives: pedagogical practices
Dahlman, A., Duncan, D. E., Elliot, L., Lyons, M. & O'Dwyer, C., 1 Aug 2023, In: Forum Italicum. 57, 2, p. 397-408 12 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
“Verstummung”: Carmine Abate’s dislocative voices
Duncan, D. E., 21 Nov 2023, The Palgrave handbook of European migration in literature and culture. Stan, C. & Sussman, C. (eds.). Cham: Palgrave, p. 339-352 14 p.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Open access

An introduction
Burns, J. & Duncan, D. E., 13 May 2022, Transnational modern languages: a handbook. Burns, J. & Duncan, D. (eds.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 1-8 8 p. (Transnational modern languages; vol. 7).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Open access

Colonization
Duncan, D., 13 May 2022, Transnational modern languages: a handbook. Burns, J. & Duncan, D. (eds.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 41-48 8 p. (Transnational modern languages; vol. 7).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Ill-apparent: things in the wake of the Arandora Star
Duncan, D. E., 18 Nov 2022, Memory, mobility and material culture. Giuliani, C. & Hodgson, K. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 226-243 18 p. ( Routledge studies in cultural history ; vol. 123).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Open access

Transnational modern languages: a handbook
Burns, J. (ed.) & Duncan, D. (ed.), 13 May 2022, Liverpool : Liverpool University Press. 342 p. (Transnational modern languages; vol. 7)
Research output: Book/Report › Book
Open access

‘Lasting lessons about difference’: diversity, decolonisation and Italian studies
Duncan, D., 7 Sept 2022, In: Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d'Italianistica nell'Africa Australe. 35, 1, p. 111-114 4 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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