Research areas
I took up the post of Professor of Italian at St 糖心logo 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 鈥楤lack Italians鈥� 鈥楩ascist Italy鈥� and 鈥楥ultures of Migration鈥� 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鈥檚 former colony in East Africa, sank just off the shores of the island of Lampedusa. My analysis doesn鈥檛 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 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 , an integrated conference and exhibition in Rome in 2019. In 2021 I published (LUP) in collaboration photographer Mario Badagliacca. The book contains Mario鈥檚 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鈥橢lia on an extension of 鈥�, his ongoing exploration of visualisations of temperature. Here is the link to the and there is more information about our collaboration on the website of the School鈥檚 .
I am a founding editor of two influential book series with Liverpool University Press and for which I co-edited the open access core text, , 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.
Selected publications
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Open access
Burns, J. (Editor) & Duncan, D. (Editor), 13 May 2022, Liverpool : Liverpool University Press. 342 p. (Transnational modern languages; vol. 7)
Research output: Book/Report 鈥� Book
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Badagliacca, M. & Duncan, D. E., 1 Sept 2021, Liverpool : Liverpool University Press. 102 p.
Research output: Book/Report 鈥� Book
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Open access
Colombini, J. & Duncan, D., 31 May 2023, In: Studies in European Cinema. 20, 2, p. 138-154 17 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Duncan, D., 9 Oct 2024, In: Modern Italy. 29, 3, p. 329-344 16 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Duncan, D., 1 May 2024, Crazy fish sing. Brioni, S. (ed.). Rome: Yoghurt Editions
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding 鈥� Chapter