Maria Elena Minuto, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Historical Sciences and the Department of Modern Languages at the Université de Liège, has received an Excellence grant funded by Wallonia-Brussels International (InWBI) since autumn 2020. This contemporary art historian conducts research on concrete and visual poetry.
Her interest in this movement that combines plastic art and poetry was born during her doctorate in textual analysis and theory at the University of Bergamo (Italy). This research area led the Italian researcher to travel frequently to Belgium, where she settled permanently during her doctorate.
"After defending my thesis project, I was co-curator of an exhibition at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Brussels, an organisation responsible for disseminating and promoting the Italian language and culture in Belgium. I spent three years working on a project [...] which aimed to initiate dialogue between a series of contemporary Italian and Belgian artists," explains Dr Minuto.
In 2019, she was awarded an InWBI Excellence Scholarship to study concrete and visual poetry at ULiège.
"I chose this university because it has internationally renowned research units for the study of this artistic movement, namely the Department of Contemporary Art History, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Applied Poetics (CIPA)."
"Joining these two laboratories gave me the opportunity to collaborate with other Belgian and foreign researchers, which has significantly enhanced my research. It has also allowed me to take on a different way of working. There are no similar research centres in Italian universities."
"This scholarship has also given me the opportunity to work with Professors Julie Bawin (Director of the Department of Contemporary Art History) and Michel Delville (Director of CIPA), two leading experts in their field," says Dr Minuto.
Sources:Researchers at the end of the world 2/6 and Series of six articles proposed by Christian Du Brulle in the Daily Science magazine