The Eastern Adriatic in the degree theses and research doctorates presented at universities in Italy and abroad

Author: Daria Garbin

Presentation “Young people lack interest”. “Young people do not know Julian-Dalmatian history”. “Young people are not very present in our initiatives”. “We need to involve young people more in our activities”. “Bringing young people closer”. These are statements that are often heard in Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian environments. And they are not entirely true. Young people are poorly represented in the initiatives of the exiles, but not because they are disinterested in historical topics and current events related to the Eastern Adriatic. On the contrary, this space does not cease to provide research ideas to students and PhD students in Italy and abroad. As the analysis we propose will demonstrate, the interest in history, culture, civilization, linguistic issues, anthropology, the various aspects of politics and economics inherent to the Eastern Adriatic shores by young researchers is notable. The reason why such interest is not perceived is linked to the minimal and in many cases non-existent diffusion of their contributions which only in a few cases leave the university environment. The initial objective of this analysis was to open a window onto this substantial scientific production and to identify the topics of greatest interest and appeal for young scholars, the faculties with the greatest number of research projects, the areas with the greatest youth scientific production and the speakers most involved in following such research. We have therefore tried to draw up a "sectoral" map, convinced that it could be useful first of all to those interested in cultural and scientific promotion activities by holding conferences, organizing book presentations, and other things with the aim of interesting a young audience and involving them in future initiatives. The research also contains the basic elements of many interesting works that could be made available to a wider audience, also indicating their authors. We did not want to leave out even the now "historical" theses, that is, those dated before the 80s, as they attest to the evolution and the continuous presence of Julian-Dalmatian arguments in the student environment. The analysis was carried out on the basis of resources accessible on the Internet, for a total of 94 consulted addresses, belonging to 84 Italian universities, 2 Croatian ones (the unified database of the National University Library of Zagreb and that of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of Zagreb), the virtual libraries of the Republic of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia, the University Library of Yale University and that of Harvard, the database of the Unified Library System (OPAC SBN), that of the National Library of Florence and the website www.tesionline.it. To perform the analysis we used 200 keywords that provided us with data regarding 1120 theses, of which 489 were undergraduate and 631 were PhD theses. It should be noted that 406 of these theses (391 undergraduate and 15 PhD) were discussed in national universities, while the rest of the research refers to Croatia (525), Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo (36), Slovenia (146) and other European countries (7). The Italian city with the highest frequency of searches on the reference topics is Trieste (109), followed by Milan (94) and Venice (70). This is clearly an area that has a greater presence of Julian-Dalmatian groups and is the area of ​​greatest activity and visibility of their associations. The theses carried out in Trieste regarding the topics of history, historical politics and current affairs come from the Faculty of Political Sciences. The largest number of theses, overall, was written by students of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of different universities. The theses presented in Venice were mostly obtained at the University Institute of Architecture and concern aspects of modern urban planning in Dalmatia. PhD theses are prepared at the universities of Zagreb (382), Zadar (41), Rijeka (41) and Ljubljana (41) and cover a wide range of topics (medicine, genetics, psychiatry, anthropology, oceanography, archaeology, agronomy, history, literature, linguistics), followed by Split (30), Belgrade (31) Dubrovnik (21), etc. As regards theses presented at other foreign universities, the classification of research was done based on the topic because the online cataloguing did not offer indications on the individual faculties. It is clear that Slovenian researchers are particularly interested in issues related to the Second World War, minority issues (minorities in general, the Italian and Croatian minorities in Slovenia, the Slovenian minority in Italy) and historical and current issues concerning Venezia Giulia. In Slovenia (including the Slovenian Institute in Trieste because it groups researchers of Slovenian nationality) 6 theses were presented in Italian and one bilingual, in Zagreb 3 in Italian and two bilingual. As regards the dissemination of research, the largest number of published theses is in Slovenia (15 out of 146), followed by theses in other European countries and America (4 publications out of 7, while in Croatia, where the largest number of PhDs was highlighted, almost all authors continued their scientific activity in the field of PhD. In Italy, however, out of 406 studies, only 3 have been published, all after 2005, the year in which the Day of Remembrance was established. It is a significant fact that among the numerous researches carried out in the universities of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, therefore in the states of the former Yugoslavia, only a modest number assume a polemical attitude towards the historical and current issues of the Eastern Adriatic. This indicates that the “new, young intelligentsia” of Slovenian, Croatian or Serbian mother tongue hardly follows conflictual lines regarding Italian-Slovenian and Italian-Croatian relations which therefore only appear in the historiographical dimension, often distorted in the media of the countries themselves. We also note a continuous growth of interest in the Eastern Adriatic with a peak in the years 2004-2005, while in the following years there was a slight decrease. The research work is divided into three parts: the statistical analysis of the data is presented in the first chapter, in the second and third all the bibliographic references are reported. The second chapter is dedicated to the research carried out in Italy, the third presents the theses discussed abroad in alphabetical order of the countries. In the following pages, the data collected will be processed according to: Years City Faculty / disciplinary sectors Supervisors and co-supervisors of the theses Nature of research All data are published in full on the website www.arcipelagoadriatico.it, in the Bibliography section and can be easily found in the subsection of the "Categories" under the headings "Degree Theses", "PhD" and "Thesis in Croatian language". Of course, the list is not to be considered definitive, indeed, it is a first contribution, as it was possible to operate only with data available from electronic sources. However, the much larger section remains available locally, in the paper catalogues of the various university libraries.01 - TEMPORAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION - ITALY 02 - DISTRIBUTION BY CITY AND FACULTY - ITALY 03 - ITALIAN SPEAKERS 04 - TEMPORAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION - CROATIA 05 - DISCIPLINARY SECTORS CROATIA 06 - SPEAKERS CROATIA 07 - TEMPORAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION - SERBIA, BOSNIA, KOSOVO 08 - DISCIPLINARY SECTORS SERBIA 09 - SPEAKERS SERBIA 10 - TEMPORAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION SLOVENIA 11 - SLOVENIA DISCIPLINARY SECTORS 12 - SPEAKERS SLOVENIA 13 - TIME AND PLACE DISTRIBUTION OTHERS 14 - FOREIGN DISCIPLINARY SECTORS 15 - SUMMARY Keywords and site indexes