George Talbot
Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science
George Talbot is a professor of Italian, with active research interests in modern history, literature and culture, George grew up in Ireland, studying at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated with a BA in Italian and Philosophy (1985) and a PhD in Italian (1991), having spent some time in between at the University of Pavia, in northern Italy. George’s first academic job was a post-doctoral researcher at Dublin City University (1991-94), very shortly after that institution had received university status. At DCU he worked in an interdisciplinary team alongside computer scientists and linguists on EUROTRA, the EU’s ambitious research and development programme in the area of machine translation. In 1994 he moved to the University of Hull, as a lecturer in Italian, progressing to a senior lectureship (1999) and a personal chair (2007). He became Head of Modern Languages in January 2000, at a particularly challenging moment for the modern languages community in the UK, which saw undergraduate applications enter a steep decline. In four and a half years as Head of Modern Languages, George set about restructuring the department and the curriculum, with a focus on excellence and innovation, leading by example in the case of a HEFCE-funded collaborative project (Universities of Hull and Leeds) to develop web-based materials to support the learning of students taking modules on Italian culture. The department won European Awards for Languages in 2004 and 2005, and has seen its student applications rise, against the current. From 2004 to 2010 George was Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Hull, leading the Faculty through phases of expansion, growth and consolidation, in which it enhanced its academic reputation and its financial performance. He is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and of the international editorial board of the Troubador series of publications in Italian Studies. His most recent monograph, Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922-43 appeared in 2007.
Publications
Books
- Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922-43 (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007)
- Essays in Italian Literature and History, edited by G. R. Talbot and P. A. Williams (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002)
- Essays in Language, Translation and the Digital Learning Technologies, edited by G. R. Talbot and P. A. Williams (Market Harborough: Matador, 2002)
- Lord Charlemont's History of Italian Poetry from Dante to Metastasio, edited by George Talbot, 3 vols, with a Foreword by Prof. Peter Brand, (Lewiston NY-Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press Historical Texts and Manuscripts series, 2000)
- Selected Poems of Eugenio Montale, edited by George Talbot (Dublin: Belfield Italian Texts, 2000)
- Montale's ‘mestiere vile': The Elective Translations from English of the 1930s and 1940s (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995)
Papers
- ‘Misteri d'autobiografismo!: Montale's seaside palimpsests', The Italianist,29 (2009), i, 69-87
- ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate', Modern Italy 11 (2006), 2, 127-45
- ‘Italian Film Culture in the English-speaking World: Translations and Transpositions', in Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations, edited by C. Salvadori, C. Ó Cuilleanáin and J. Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), pp. 197-211
- ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst', in Censorship, Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, edited by G. Bonsaver and R. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86-95
- ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce', Italian Studies 60 (2004), 112-131
- ‘Montale's critical friendship with Henry Furst', Spunti e ricerche 17 (2002), 65-80
Recent Presentations and Invited Lectures
- ‘Carlo Linati e John M. Synge’, invited lecture, Varese, Italy, May 2010
- ‘Croce, Gentile and the archives’, International conference on Idealism and the Archives, Hull, December 2009
- ‘Montale fra i miraggi e i paesaggi’, invited paper, Cinque Terre, Italy, December 2009
- ‘Some reflections on the afterlife of Piccolo mondo antico', SIS conference, Royal Holloway, April 2009
- ‘Montale's camera obscura', Enlightening Encounters conference, Warwick, 13 March 2009
- 'Henry Furst's Simun', NeMLA, Boston, 27-29 February 2009
- 'Dante, Irish Whigs, the Sublime and the Beautiful', University of Hull, 8 October 2008
- 'Dante's Irish reception', University of York, 14-15 July 2008
- ‘The Duce's Body: Mussolini and the Media', University of Hull 27th February 2007
- ‘Su una lettera non scritta: Culture and Anxiety in Wartime Florence', University of St Andrews, 1 March 2007.