Faculty of Arts
Recent scholarship has seen an increasing interest in the use of Latin under Italian Fascism. The Fascists regarded the language of ancient Rome as an important component of their ideal of romanità. The use of Latin, ranging from brief inscriptions or short mottos on stamps to entire Latin odes in honour of Mussolini, can be regarded as a means of ‘anchoring’ the revolutionary ideology of Fascism in the Roman past.
The PhD candidate will investigate how exactly the Latin language and Latin texts could serve as a cultural anchor for Fascist ideology in Italy between 1922 and 1943. We assume that anchoring strategies employed in different media and contexts differed according to the type of intended audience. How was Latin used to address, for example, the intellectual and academic elite able to peruse Latin compositions, secondary school students reading Fascist school books in Latin, or the general public, who were exposed to Latin inscriptions or mottos on stamps, even when they knew little or no Latin?
Candidates are invited to design their own research project around these questions. They are free to adopt a more literary or more historical perspective. In their proposal, they should outline their suggested approach, main research questions, and expected original contribution to the field.
Primary and secondary material about this subject can be hard to come by. If you would like to apply for this position, we therefore advise you to contact Dr B.L. Reitz-Joosse,
B.L.Reitz-Joosse@rug.nl informally and request a small dossier of selected articles and an example of the type of source you would be working with.
More information about the Anchoring Innovation research agenda of OIKOS can be found on the OIKOS website (
www.ru.nl/oikos/anchoring-innovation/), including an article by Ineke Sluiter, entitled “Anchoring Innovation: a Classical Research Agenda” (
www.ru.nl/oikos/anchoring-innovation/publications/).
Supervisors:
Dr B.L. Reitz-Joosse (RUG), Dr H. Lamers (University of Oslo) and Prof R.R. Nauta (RUG).