A new season of Modern Italy started in early 2021. We wish to thank Penny Morris and Mark Seymour for the amazing job they have undertaken in the past years. We are living through a period full of challenges affecting not only the academic profession, but also culture (and society obviously) at large. Depressing as it sounds, despite putting at risk jobs as well as research pathways – and far too many cultural institutions – the current pandemic has at least offered academia fresh opportunities coupled with new, enhanced collaborations, discussions, networks and public webinars across fields and geographical spaces in ways and formats unknown to us before. As online technology has become a prominent feature of these ‘pandemic’ days, we aim to use it to expand Modern Italy's readership and to reach wider audiences. Such change comes under the guise of a new Twitter account and of new digital sources. Specifically, the journal seeks to offer brief video interviews on research, monographs, archives and exhibitions.
Our vision for Modern Italy is quite clear. As new editors, with similar professional trajectory – as Italians working in the UK, while maintaining close academic links in Italy – we have established broad networks in Europe, North America, and Australia, which we hope to maintain over our editorship. Naturally, we especially want to attract the best scholarship and the journal ought to be involved in many academic, scholarly, intellectual and cultural debates of the highest quality. But we have some further objectives. Firstly, given the scholarly tradition Modern Italy has been championing, we hope to become one of the leading hubs for the study and understanding of Italy in the English-speaking world. While we have been and continue to be very impressed by the quality of work which has appeared in Modern Italy over the past decades, we would like to help expand the journal's topical coverage to address current intellectual trends within Italian contemporary historical and cultural studies. Secondly, we would like to include more contributions adopting transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, and focusing on topics such as gender, postcolonial studies, visual arts, architecture, and forms of economic and social inequalities. In 2021, we will similarly publish some articles stemming from an ASMI conference which will be discussing populism in Italy from various perspectives. Other special issues under discussion will focus on Italy's cultural and artistic relationships with the Middle East and the Americas.
We will shortly expand further the journal's remit by introducing a section specifically dedicated to discussions on contemporary historiography. We will inaugurate this new platform in the next issue with a round table, originally held online at the Fondazione Gramsci, on Umberto Gentiloni Silveri's Storia dell'Italia contemporanea. And we will organise a follow-up to this event in the last issue of 2021 comprising a similar discussion on Filippo Focardi's Nel cantiere della memoria. These new features are also part of a new collegial approach which calls for a sustained collaboration and dialogue with book review editors, publishers, cultural and academic institutions, and of course authors.
All that remains to be said is, then, good luck to us: we hope you will enjoy reading and, crucially, listening and watching Modern Italy for the next few years.
