Individual and Collaborative Film Studies in Italy: Legal Constraints and the Gender Balance

In this article, we offer a handful of reflections about collaborative scholarship in Italy, referring in particular to the principal public funding scheme for research—the so-called “Progetti di rilevante interesse nazionale” (PRIN), organized and financed by the Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). We draw, moreover, on our experience working on “The International Circulation of Italian Cinema,” a project on which we both collaborated as postdoctoral researchers at different times between 2017 and 2020. Drawing from our experience and attempting to speak to some of the themes of this issue, in these reflections we address essentially two macro questions: first, the nature of individual and collaborative research in Italian film and media studies today, and how certain legal frameworks affect this balance; second, the extent to which the gender balance in public-funded projects is representative of the composition of academic positions in our field.