Serena Professor of Italian

The Serena Professorship of Italian is the senior professorship in the study of Italian language, literature and culture at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Manchester and University of Birmingham. At Cambridge, it was founded in 1917 by a donation of £10,000 from Arthur Serena (died 1922), a shipbroker and son of the Venetian patriot Leone Serena. He also endowed the Serena Medal awarded annually by the British Academy for furtherance of the study of Italian history, philosophy, music, literature, art and economics.[1]

Serena Professors at Birmingham

Serena Professors at Cambridge

Serena Professors at Manchester

(The Chair was vacant between 1944 and 1961)

Serena Professors at Oxford

When after Grayson’s retirement the Serena Chair was ‘frozen’, because of government funding cuts, Gianni Agnelli, head of Fiat, agreed a contribution of £750,000 to ‘unfreeze’ the Oxford Chair. In recognition of this benefaction, the name of the Chair at Oxford became the Fiat-Serena Chair of Italian Studies.

In the summer of 2009 there was a further modification in nomenclature when the name changed to the Agnelli-Serena Chair of Italian Studies, a change which reflects more directly the role of the two great benefactors at the beginning and end of the twentieth century.

References

  1. ^ "Serena Medal".
  2. ^ Professor E. R. Vincent was awarded the John Florio Prize for A Diary of One of Garibaldi's Thousand by Giuseppe Cesare Abba; London: Oxford University Press, 1962
  3. ^ Professor Eric Reginald Pearce Vincent; Bletchley Park
  4. ^ Italian Studies presented to E. R. Vincent on his retirement from the Chair of Italian at Cambridge; edited by C. P. Brand, K. Foster, U. Limentani. Cambridge: Heffer, 1962
  5. ^ "Appointments Humanities" (PDF). gazette.web.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  • Charlton, H. B. (1951) Portrait of a University. Manchester U. P.; p. 173
  • Uberto Limentani, ‘Leone and Arthur Serena and the Cambridge Chair of Italian 1919-1934’, in Martin McLaughlin (ed.), Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism. A Festschrift for Peter Brand (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 154–77.