The Clorinda Donato Center Receives NEH Grant for New Project

The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Planning Grant. The grant has been awarded in conjunction with the University of Naples, Federico II for the project, “Rethinking Eighteenth-Century Italian Culture and Its Transnational Connections.” The Co-Principal Investigators, Clorinda Donato (CSULB) and Pasquale Palmieri (University of Naples), will lead a team of 12 scholars, evenly divided between Italian and US universities, to produce an interpretive volume of studies on the rethinking of eighteenth-century Italian culture and its transnational connections. The volume will place an emphasis on transmissions and reciprocities across borders, the transnational perspective has been redefining the parameters of eighteenth-century studies for the past 25 years.

The goal of the project is to establish a strong foothold for Italy in the cultural panorama of the transnational eighteenth century, altering our erroneous sense of a field that at first appears to be British and French-driven. In addition to a volume of essays, project scholars will also establish a priority list of salient eighteenth-century Italian texts that have either never been translated into English or need retranslation with a scholarly apparatus for future use by academics and students. This list will become the basis for future grant applications within the study of scholarly translation and publication.

The grant highlights a particular area of expertise of the Donato Center: scholarship and translation in eighteenth-century studies. The current Donato Center projects include the translation of academic volumes about the eighteenth century from Italian into English, with a focus on global Romance languages and translation studies. The Donato Center has become a unique resource for the State of California to train students who wish to pursue careers in the translation industry. The exchange of scholars and students committed to perfecting their language proficiency and acquiring, in tandem, the multidisciplinary expertise that only a university like CSULB can offer, is a goal of the Donato Center.

The current NEH grant is a testament to the power of scholarly exchange since the idea to pursue the project was first developed about seven years ago during the academic year that Dr. Pasquale Palmieri spent at CSULB in the Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures as a Fulbright Scholar in Residence. We encourage alumni and current CSULB students to follow us along on the project through the CLA social media pages and website.