AHRC Awards: The Italian Sub-Faculty has been awarded 2 Doctoral grants and 1 Master's grants as part of the AHRC awards... read more
.Italy's language, literature, history, and culture have proved a constant source of admiration and study in Britain. From Chaucer and Shakespeare, through Milton and the Romantics, down to E. M. Forster and Seamus Heaney, writers of English have regularly turned to Italy for inspiration.
Italian at Oxford allows you to learn this language of poetry and music, and to study in the original not just the great works of the past (of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli), but also famous recent writers (Pirandello, Calvino, Primo Levi), as well as renowned exponents of the visual arts (Alberti, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Cellini) and cinema (Pasolini, Bertolucci). Contemporary Italy still has much to teach us, and students who spend their year abroad in Italy enjoy a unique, culturally enriching experience (not to mention the food, fashion and sport), regularly form lasting friendships with Italians, and often return there to live and work.
As in the 2001 RAE, Italian at Oxford achieved an extremely high score in the 2008 RAE. The Sub-faculty achieved the second highest percentage (30%) nationally of 'world-leading' (4*) scores for its research publications and activities, while 60 per cent of its work was classed as either 'internationally excellent' or 'world-leading'.