BU Humanists at Work: Meet Jim Carter
“I liked telling stories as a kid. I always had a video camera in my hand and was employing my sisters or cousins as actors and actresses. I wanted to continue to tell stories in a professional way,” said Dr. Jim Carter. Carter joined the BU faculty this semester as Lecturer in Italian. While Carter may have grown up with a passion for cinema, he did not grow up with Italian language or culture. In fact, it was his interest in film that ultimately led him to the field of Italian Studies.
Carter grew up in the Boston area but decided to attend Hofstra University in the suburbs of New York City to take advantage of opportunities in the film industry that proximity to NYC provided. As an undergraduate at Hofstra, he enrolled in a course about national cinemas, where each week was devoted to films from a different country. It was in that class that he first encountered Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), one of the iconic Italian films of the 20th century. “I really fell in love with that film, not only because of the love story at the surface of it, but because of the way it staged and performed a whole era of Italian history . . . and wove that together with the history of cinema,” said Carter.
Eager to learn more about Italian film and culture, Carter enrolled in a study abroad program in Florence in his junior year, where serendipity struck. A classmate who was working for an English-language newspaper in Florence helped him secure a job as the paper’s new film critic. The paper paid Carter to attend as many films as he wanted as long as he wrote a review. Carter spent his days watching Italian films and thinking and writing about them critically. “It was sitting there in the movie theatre that, almost without my knowing it, I began to absorb the Italian language,” he now realizes.
Carter added an Italian major to his existing Film Studies and Production major upon returning from his semester abroad, but it was graduate school that allowed him to study Italian film and culture in depth. As a PhD student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Carter turned his attention to Italian cinema, literature, and visual arts from the post World War II period. The critical lens through which he engaged with these varied media was provided by the Olivetti Company. Founded in 1908 by Camillo Olivetti, the company became a leading designer and manufacturer of typewriters, and later, early computers. But Camillo, and later his son, Adriano, weren’t only interested in technological innovation. “Their company was something that today we would call “interdisciplinary . . . . The Olivettis were engineers with a broad vision for the role of the humanities in contemporary culture and committed to making [technological and cultural production] speak to one another,” Carter explained. They invested heavily in the arts, hiring skilled painters, novelists, and poets to create their advertising content. They also invested in cinema, funding experimental cinema that eventually became commercials for their products.
Carter sees BU as a place that will allow his own interdisciplinary approach to scholarship to thrive. “At BU, I am most excited about working in collaboration between Romance Studies and Cinema and Media Studies—both fantastic opportunities for students here at BU and both very active in terms of courses and extracurricular events,” he said. In addition to teaching and working on his first book project, which grew out of his dissertation on the Olivetti Company, he and several other colleagues are already at work in the early stages of planning an Italian Film Festival at BU in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Carter’s interdisciplinary approach to scholarship also informs his teaching. In addition to teaching Italian language classes this semester, he is teaching “Italian Media and Popular Culture.” He describes the class as a “dive into the media sphere of contemporary Italy,” through engagement with less commonly studied forms of media, including newspapers and magazines, TV, pop music, and independent cinema. “Most of the things we watch, read, and listen to were published during the week they were assigned, which presents its own challenges from the perspective of an instructor,” explained Carter. While the descriptor “contemporary” is quite apt for this class, Carter explains that today’s Italian media sphere was born in the post World War II period; consequently, “by talking about what’s happening now, we also end up talking about the past.”
Undergraduates who, like an eighteen-year-old Carter, have no connection or exposure to Italian language or culture might not consider enrolling in an Italian film course. But Carter sees Italian cinema as a window onto complicated questions: “I find that the connection between cinema and national identity is particularly strong in the Italian context. Studying cinema in the Italian context is studying how communities are defined. . . . Who is included in and excluded from those communities? Where is the border between inclusion and exclusion and how has that changed over time? We see these issues reflected in films that attempt to redraw the boundaries of the Italian community in order to be more inclusive,” Carter explained.
In spring 2022, Carter will teach a course called “Italian Cinema: Neorealism to the Present.” Unlike his “Italian Media and Popular Culture” course, this course requires no knowledge of the Italian language. Students will watch Italian films with English subtitles and discuss and write about them in English. Carter invites all students, familiar or unfamiliar with Italian culture to come “get their feet wet.”