Presenting at 100 Years of Pier Paolo Pasolini Symposium

Author: Cesca Craig | Major: Anthropology | Semester: Fall 2022

My name is Cesca Craig and I’m an Anthropology major in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. During the Fall 2022 semester, I worked alongside Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and a team of fellow students on a Digital Humanities project focused on influential Italian film director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini’s life and work. Pasolini is best known for his filmography, but his oeuvre consists of much more, including poetry, novels, journal articles, literary translations, and plays. At the beginning of the semester, we each researched a chosen theme of Pasolini’s oeuvre and prepared a presentation for the 100 Years of Pier Paolo Pasolini symposium which took place here at the University of Arkansas on October 21, 2022. I had never been to a symposium before, let alone presented at one, so this was a great learning experience for me. For my presentation, I analyzed connections between Pasolini’s film Medea and the dynamics of Western colonial encounters. It was very interesting to see how the ideas I explored tied into Pasolini’s political and personal ideologies and their manifestation in his creative works. While I enjoyed watching others’ presentations more so presenting myself, I was able to overcome my fear of public speaking enough to give my presentation without visibly shaking, which to me marked success. As I walked home after the symposium, I felt very inspired by the dedication of the scholars who presented and their desire to share their expertise with a larger community.

After the symposium, we began to construct a timeline of Pasolini’s life, creative works, and connected historical events. We each focused on documenting a decade or so of Pasolini’s life and are currently working on compiling our individual sections into one interactive timeline. While researching both for my section of the timeline (the 1960s) and my symposium presentation topic, I realized the immense value of a Digital Humanities website, particularly on the subject of prolific creative minds like Pasolini’s. Having a comprehensive timeline of Pasolini’s life and works to reference would have significantly sped up my initial research and helped me to understand Pasolini’s level of influence much sooner. Along with this timeline, we plan to create an interactive map to show locations of significance for Pasolini studies, write about our individual research topics for website publication, and translate some of Pasolini’s untranslated poetry as a contribution to English-language-based Pasolini studies. Ultimately, we intend for this Digital Humanities website to serve as both a reference for future researchers and as an educational resource for those unfamiliar with Pasolini. We will continue this work during the Spring 2023 semester.

I’m very grateful to the Honors College for supporting this project through a Team Research Grant. Because of this project, I attended and presented at my first symposium, improved my research and critical thinking skills, learned the value of Digital Humanities and its positive impact on all levels of education, watched compelling films I may not have ever found on my own, and met a lot of very smart and wonderful people.