Mission (EN)

LILEC is a department that focuses on four main areas of scientific research and their many intersections: languages, linguistics, literatures and philologies. LILEC promotes internationality, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism and plurilingualism, and aims to produce high-quality and innovative teaching and research. The Department’s researchers cooperate with a number of international networks in the field of the humanities, and they are fully committed to facing the major social challenges of today, making LILEC a dynamic hub and a permanent laboratory rooted within the social, local, regional and national context, and consistent with the university’s ‘third mission’.

The cornerstones of the university’s mission lie in four areas: languages, linguistics, literatures and philologies.

LILEC aims to valorise the unique features deriving from the link between languages, literatures and cultures on which its identity is based, and to promote this as a strength within the university’s teaching and research network. Its general goal is to combine, in an innovative way, national and international dimensions, language mediation and cultural and literary memory, public engagement and scientific competence, providing tools for interpreting civil society, in addition to new codes of communication and social interaction. This commitment is achieved through high-quality individual research, giving rise to new projects of collaboration. In this context, alongside staff teaching commitments within the undergraduate and master’s degree courses, offered by the different schools of the university – the main Departmental reference point is the School of Languages, Literatures, Translation and Interpretation – the postgraduate degree is also strategic for the Department, in that it represents an advanced training area designed to set up new and original perspectives of research, as well as a productive dialogue between international participants.

Certain interdisciplinary fields with which the Department is connected are potential areas of growth. These include:

i) interculturalism and relationships between Europe and the outside world;

ii) narration and other forms of representation in their linguistic, literary and cultural manifestations, which can lead to innovative research projects; 

iii) new technologies and methodologies (e.g. digital humanities, e-learning) applied to linguistic and literary studies.

The Department also structures its own research activities through study centres offering their own programmes and activities, with a high level of internationality, interdisciplinarity and transculturality. The Department is strongly committed to valorising its own strengths and distinct characteristics, through more extensive projects and by working towards the construction – and communication – of a better interface between individual and group research and public and political relationships outside its perimeter.

To this end there is a need for new perspectives, not only of research and teaching, but also in order to organise and enhance the department’s project potential, which contains – in embryonic form or already developed – the themes that characterize the horizon of the future: the international dimension; dialogue between cultures and literatures, intercultural education and education towards diversity; critical innovation, new instruments, processes and methodologies; innovation in research and teaching and in the relations with other institutions and territories.