There I could gather some useful material for my master’s thesis on the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer and her reception in Italy in the 19th century, and I had the chance to meet some of the most important researchers in my field and discuss with them some points of my work.
Moreover, I had some spare time to visit the nice city of Gothenburg and experience the very Swedish Valborg’s night!
In 2021, Alice Traverso, who attended the master’s program in Scandinavian studies at Ca’ Foscari in Venice, spent a visiting period at Humanisten in Göteborg to find materials for her final thesis.
Her research was focused on female body and its relation with feminism, patriarchy and society.
She tried to answer important and difficult, challenging and important questions, such as “What does it mean to be a woman living in contemporary society?”.
In Göteborg she had the possibility to study in the university’s library finding books and articles useful for her dissertation, but she also talked with professors and researchers who are involved in gender studies’ field.
If you want to discover more about her work, you can find her final report on the C.M. Lerici Foundation website
This week it’s time for Pride Festival in Stockholm!
On Saturday, the Pride Parade will cross the city. Thanks to about 50.000 participants and 500.000 spectators, it is the largest Pride Parade in Scandinavia.
Gender studies have also been a field of research for many C.M. Lerici Foundation scholarships fellows, such as Marco Baruzzo Marco Baruzzo, student of Scandinavian Studies in the Language Sciences Master course at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia in Venice. In 2020 he spent four weeks in Stockholm, at Svenska barnboksinstitutet (The Swedish Institute’s for Children’s Books).
His research focused on the way all sexualities and sexual orientations are dealt with in children’s and youth literature. Marco Baruzzo particularly investigated the main trends within the recent “rainbow literature” for children and young people in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, but also how norm-critical sexualities have been presented to young readers.
If you are interested in his work, you can read his final report on the C.M. Lerici Foundation website.
Annalisa Piccolo was a student in Language Sciences, specialization in Literatures and Culture at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Thanks to the C.M. Lerici Foundation’s scholarship, she had the opportunity to spend the month of September 2021 in the Department of Kultur och Estetik at Stockholm University, hosted by Prof. Elina Druker.
Here on the Foundation’s website (Archive projects webpage) you can find and read her final report to discover more about her research project focused on the relationship between the urban landscape of the city of Stockholm and literary texts.
In particular, she investigated the old district of Klara, the cultural and media center of the city where many publishing houses, newspapers editorial offices and cafes were placed. Here, there was the Arbetaren newspaper’s headquarter, where the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman lived and worked for many years as Arbetaren’s director.
In the past few days, you probably read a lot of articles about artificial intelligence and the Google’s engineer who claimed that a chatbot was able to produce “human phrases”.
Francesco Baldassarra is a researcher in product and visual communication design. His research areas include the design of nonverbal emotional communication systems and digital fabrication technologies in the field of Social Robotics and Human- Robot Interaction, Data Driven Design and digital design tools for Industry 4.0.
Thanks to a C.M. Lerici Foundation’s grant, he carried out a six-months research project at Malmö University – School of Arts and Communication Department.
Its purpose was to investigate how robots’ non-verbal communication can trigger an emotional response and to what extent expression and feeling are connected in a human-robot interaction. Communicating, experiencing emotions and empathy are the basic elements of human relationships, but can a robot express emotions and feelings?
These questions at the basis of Francesco’s thesis project led to the design of Pyo, a robotic platform for emotional research in human-robot interaction.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
Discover the results of this project reading Francesco’s final report here on the Lerici Foundation’s website in the Archive Projects section.
IMPORTANT!
If you would like to help out Francesco’s research project, you could fill out this short form here. It is a quick test to collect data on the platform developed in his 6 months of research, but the project is still a work in progress. Thanks for your collaboration!
It has been awarded annually since 1947 for the best prose fiction book written in Italian by an author of any nationality and published between May 1st of the previous year and April 30th.
This year – for the first time in the Strega Prize’s history – 7 books have been nominated for the short list, which usually include only 5 books out of 12 nominated for the first round of voting.
The Premio Strega Prize 2022 will be awarded on Thursday, July 7th at the nymphaeum of Villa Giulia in Rome.
Which one will be the best Italian novel 2022?
It would be nice to see all these books translated in Swedish, maybe with a C.M. Lerici Foundation grant.
Are you an Italian student or researcher and you are soon moving to Sweden?
First, you need an accommodation, isn’t right?
We know that housing search in Sweden can be hard, so here’s 3 recommendations for you:
the Swedish market has high prices and long waiting times, so start to find an accommodation as soon as possible;
be aware of potential fraud: don’t pay in advance unless you are using a real estate agency or after both parties have signed a written lease contract;
find a place near the main public transportation: they will get you ANYWHERE!
What’s your biggest struggle in finding an accommodation in Sweden?
@giulia_mangione is an Italian documentary photographer and visual artist working in Scandinavia.
Thanks to the @cmlericifoundation’s scholarship, she had the opportunity to travel to Sweden to continue working at her ongoing photographic project Black Swan, a visual narrative in the documentary genre that explores what are society’s collective fears towards the future. The grant allowed her to expand her research towards the marine sciences to understand which problems connected to climate change are currently being addressed.
At the beginning of 2022, she visited the research centers belonging to the faculty of Marine Sciences of the @universityofgothenburg, namely Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory, Kristineberg Marine Research Station and the R/V (research vessel) Skagerrak.
At Kristeneberg she met Prof. Eduardo Infantes, who has built wave tanks filled with sea water pumped from the fjord to simulate both waves and currents. His aim is to understand if the growth of eelsgrass (Zostera Marina) in shallow seabeds could reduce the impact of the waves on the coast and coastal erosion as well.
Do you want to discover more about her project?
Visit the “Archive Projects” page here on the Foundation’s website and find out more about Giulia’s inspiring research!
Stiftelsen C.M. Lerici 