News and Blog

The Umbra Institute is equipped with its own library–a great resource for students while abroad.

It’s rare that a study abroad institution has a library of its own for its students. Most institutions rely on public libraries or the local university’s library as sources for their students’ research. Local resources alone would be great…as long as the local language weren’t a barrier.

While students at the Umbra Institute have access to three local libraries–Universita’ degli Studi di Perugia’s library, Biblioteca Augusta—the public library (which houses books up to four-hundred years old!) as well as the library at the Universita’ per Stranieri, students are fortunate to have a library of their own right here at Umbra.

The Institute claims an in-house library with nearly 3,500 books that’s constantly being enriched and expanded by its professors, some of whom have authored the books themselves. Complete with books in both English and Italian, Umbra’s bibliotheca has a rich selection on books ranging in many topics from Italian history, culture and food to politics, art history literature and the arts; photography, music, opera and cinema.

Umbra has furthermore just recently updated its cataloging system, enabling students to access the library’s catalog directly from Umbra’s networked computer lab which now has over 30 PCs and high-speed WiFi coverage throught the Institute.

Even more unique is Umbra’s access to online journals and databases including JSTOR, Wilsons and more. With independent research and honors programs becoming more and more popular at Umbra, it is imperative that students have access to as many research sources as possible. It allows the professors to ask more from our students when extensive research resources at their disposal.

The Umbra Institute will soon be initiating a library development campaign; We hope that alumni and friends of the Institute will help us reach our goal of 5,000 well-selected books by the fall semester 2012.

This Tuesday, November 17th the Umbra Institute co-sponsored a public lecture given by Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation on the state of American foreign policy under the Obama administration.

The fifth in a series of public lectures sponsored by the Umbra Institute and the Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello Foundation, the talk was entitled “Gauging the Course of US Foreign Policy: Has the Obama Bubble Burst?” Mr. Clemons serves as Executive Vice President of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute founded in 1999 in Washington, DC. He also publishes The Washington Note, a well-regarded blog on the politics of foreign policy.

Mr. Clemons spoke on the successes and failures of the Obama administration in foreign policy, focusing primarily on the challenges faced in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and with China. Noting that no other president has ever taken office facing such a multitude of pressing foreign policy situations coupled with an international economic breakdown and a major domestic health care policy debate, Mr. Clemons suggested that by now – just over a year since President Obama was elected into office – there needs to have been what he called a “Nixon to China” moment where the Obama administration demonstrated to the world a significant achievement in at least one of these crises. Mr. Clemons expressed his support for the Nobel Foundation’s decision to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year, and called Obama’s speeches in Cairo and Turkey great successes, but said also that much more needed to be achieved in his first year than has been realized.

Following his lecture, Mr. Clemons opened up the floor to questions from the audience, and Umbra students actively participated in a discussion that continued upstairs at a reception in the Sorbello Foundation library.

An American media group, an international talent agency, and Perugian officials are collaborating to launch a new film festival here in the Umbrian capital, one especially dedicated to cutting-edge film technology.

Stratus Media Group announced today as part of their global expansion strategy, SMDI is collaborating with government officials in Perugia, an international talent agency and local and international businesses to establish the new International Perugia Film Festival in Perugia, a city already a noted center for the arts and culture.

The Perugia International Film Festival, which will be directed by Emanuele Rossi, is intended to be a premiere international film festival focusing on the industry of film and technology. Current plans are to showcase its preliminary launch in 2010 and to have its full-scale festival in 2011. Already in place are regional and international corporate sponsor support, premier venues provided by the city and the support of the city and regional governments of Perugia and Umbria.

This would be another excellent opportunity for Umbra Institute Italian Cinema students to contrast Italy’s cinematographic past with international cinema’s present. Though neither is truly international, Perugia already has two film festivals, both of which are well-attended by Umbra students.

Umbra students to help with a project that will look at how cultural differences can influence the way we process information.

Umbra to participate in Joint Research Project with the University of Perugia and the University for Foreigners
The project will look at how cultural differences can influence the way we process information and it will involve students from China, Italy and the U.S. The research team will use a group of Umbra volunteers and they will fill out a computer-based questionnaire as part of the project.  Umbra students who participate will learn more about how methods of reasoning can differ significantly across cultures.  The research team includes professors from the Psychology department at both universities.

The research team will also use an Umbra student intern who will take part in the preparation of materials, participate in the execution of the experiment and in the analysis of the data.

Professor Adrian Hoch will be representing the Institute at an upcoming conference in Paris.

Academia is sometimes accused of being mainly scholars who only talk to others in their specific discipline.

Umbra Art History professor Adrian Hoch is part of the solution to that problem; Dr. Hoch is a member of an academic organization, the International Medieval Society-Paris, which focuses on establishing links between English and French speaking scholars who do work in France. Each summer the organization organizes a conference with a theme, and this year’s conference, entitledTranslatio (“translation” in Latin), will feature an interdisciplinary approach, bridging the gap between art history, history, religious studies and literature.

Professor Hoch’s research concentrates on, in part, the Angevin dynasty in Naples (late 13th-early 15th centuries) who were originally French. Her specific subject for the conference will be on what one French historian calls “aristocratic Franciscanism,” involving a prince and heir to the throne of Naples, Louis of Anjou, who become a Franciscan favoring apostolic poverty. After his death at the age of twenty-three his family and the more conservative branch of the Franciscans would “rewrite his résumé,” turning him into more traditional and safe figure who also become one of the patron saints of Marseille.

Umbra is proud to encourage both excellence in the classroom as well as a continued commitment by its faculty to research and publication.

Image: Simone Martini, “Altar of St Louis of Toulouse,” c. 1317
Tempera on wood, 200 x 138 cm (with predella)
Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

A newly-published anthology about Perugia seen through foreigners’ eyes has submissions from a number of Umbra students and professors.

With a trip to any local bookstore here in Perugia one can find quotes from famous travellers about Perugia and Umbria. Most of the citations are from seventeenth and eighteenth century luminaries, writers and philosophers who were all enchanted with the “green heart of Italy” and its capital city. Ironically, however, despite the existence of the University for Foreigners since 1921, there is no recent testimony about Perugia from its many “temporary citizens.”

Last year Umbra staff member Zach Nowak decided to remedy this gap in Perugia’s collective memory. Nowak’s publishing company, Green Door, set up a contest for an anthology that would show the city through the eyes of the city’s many “temporary citizens.” The resulting anthology, entitled “Within These Walls” and edited by Australian Alan Whykes (himself a former student in Perugia), has twenty-one pieces: short stories, essays, cabaret sketches, poems, and even watercolors. Among the submissions chosen for the anthology are short stories by two Umbra professors (Prof.s Cynthia Clough and Naoimh O’Connor) and former students Macy Weiser, Emily Stouffer, and Megan Sangster.

Within These Walls will be an ongoing project of Green Door Publishing, one which we hope will grow over the next several editions. The anthology demonstrates the contribution made not only by foreigners in general, but by the Umbra Institute in particular, to the cultural life of the city. The book is already in local bookstores but the official presentations will be next week on Tuesday, March 16th at 6pm at the Feltrinelli of Perugia, and on Wednesday at 9pm at Caffè Morlacchi. Two copies of the book are available in the Umbra Institute library, as well.

The Umbra Institute has once again appeared in the Italian news, this time in the regional paper Giornale dell’Umbria.

The article, which focuses on the open house that Umbra will be hosting on April 1^st to welcome and inform the community that has for so long hosted its students, also explains Umbra’s role in the community. “The Umbra Institute,” explains the Assistant Director for Italian Institutional and Community Relations Francesco Gardenghi, “greatly wants to offer its students the chance to weave themselves into the social fabric of the city.” In fact, Perugia was chosen as the site for Umbra specifically because of its long history of being open to foreigners and its genuine representation of the Italian culture and lifestyle.

It goes on to explicate how Umbra has worked to give back to the city that has given it so much; one way, Gardenghi adds, is through its offer of free admission to Umbra courses – taught in English – to Italian students studying at the University of Perugia.

Umbra Fine Arts professor William Pettit III will be hosting a joint exhibition.

As the bohemian press release states, “Serafino and Bill have known each other for a short period of time. It was a casual meeting, like those that happen on the street, and like those that happen, inevitably, on the streets of Art. They don’t really have much in common. They are different in appearance, age, and culture. One is Italian and one is American. One is more than fifty, the other not yet 40. One is tall and thin, the other perhaps less so. But something brings them together.”

Professor Pettit describes his artistic journey as a sort On The Road-esque. Nostalgic physical, and temporal, through recollection and recycling the past, even if imaginary, parallel to the traces in snapshots and scraps pinned to the wall. His language too is cyclical: he writes the same poems, sings the same songs, paints the same pictures again and again, and there is no distinction between them. The exhibition will be on April 16th in Tuscania at the gallery “I magazzini della lupa.”

The exhibition is accompanied with a text by Yvonne Dohna, art historian and critic.

Umbra Institute students have been, for the past several years, subjects in a study undertaken by the University of Perugia and La Sapienza University in Rome.

Previous research has demonstrated that Asians tend to process information more holistically than Westerners. The goal of this study was to determine if there was a within-Western culture difference similar to this between culture difference. Researchers from the joint team from universities in Perugia and Rome wanted to compare data from Asians to both Italian and non-Italian westerners.

Given the excellent relationship between the University of Perugia and the Umbra Institute, professors from the former asked permission to use Umbra students as guinea pigs for their comparison. Over the last three years over 140 students have filled out surveys for the study, the results of which was just recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Process. The findings indicate a within-Western culture difference in reasoning style and indicate that foreign context can influence one’s reasoning style.

Colorado student Kylie Bearse wins two-hundred and fifty Euro prize for her presentation!

For The Umbra Institute “community engagement” means forging meaningful bonds between students and schools, businesses and other local institutions. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to broaden students’ cultural perspectives as a way of developing intercultural awareness and sensitivity with the hopes that students will see their own communities from a more comparative, global perspective. With all this in mind, each semester Umbra personalizes both group and individual projects to meet community and student needs to create a memorable experience and important exchange for all involved.

This semester’s Community Engagement efforts were showcased in a series of final presentations held at the Uggucione Sorbello di Ranieri Association on Tuesday afternoon. The“Romeyne Robert Academic Prize,” offered by the Ranieri di Sorbello Foundation was awarded to Kylie Bearse, a Broadcast Journalism major and graduating senior at Colorado University at Boulder. Ms. Bearse completed an independent study in Italian Media with Professor Antonella Valoroso. Her presentation, “Italian Media – Ieri, Oggi e Domani,” was an informational overview of the media in Italy including insights on her experience as an intern working with Perugia’s International Journalism Festival, an event held annually in Perugia, attracting over one-hundred journalists from all over the world.