BLACK
ITALIA
Dr. Debora Bellinzani
Ph.D. Candidate in Italian
University of Wisconsin
United States
I attended Teaching Black Italy in its first edition in Summer 2021, sponsored by the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it was an extremely enriching experience. All the classes were well organized and structured in a way that made them extremely varied, interesting and rich as regards the contents and the info provided. The group of the invited guest speakers was large and made the experience lively and tight to the real contemporary world; in order to make the classes even more lively and close to us, at the end of every talk we were invited to interact with the guests and to ask them questions. From cinema to TV series, from art to literature, from music to life, Fred Kuwornu and the various speakers brought us into many different realms where black Italians left and are leaving a footprint that still need to be acknowledged. I haven’t had the chance to embed some of the contents in the syllabi I created for my courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison yet, but I have taken with me the need to do it and the urgency to bring to class contemporary issues with which the students can engage
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