Writers and the Teaching Profession: a Digital Archive of Teachers' Voices from the History of Italian Literature

Many writers across different literary traditions have been working as teachers, and thus school has often been not only a space of canon transmission, but also a source of literary inspiration. Yet, the relationship between writers and the teaching profession has not received the critical attention it deserves.

WRICHERS aims at addressing this lacuna and developing an innovative theoretical framework to study the possible interactions between writers' and teachers careers from a literary perspective.

In order to achieve such a goal, the project wants to build a digital archive that will allow to 1) explore, categorise, analyse and critically assess the specific functions of teaching experiences in the literary careers of 20th-century Italian writers; 2) prove the literary value of a number of texts produced by writers in school contexts and often downplayed as mere bureaucratic documents; 3) examine the ways in which Italian writers dealt with their involvement in school teaching while managing their public image as writers.

WRICHERS will address a gap in the field of Italian studies, but the theoretical framework resulting from the research will be designed in a way that will make it applicable to other literary contexts.

Specifically, the project will collect a large set of relevant data and hitherto invisible archival documents (the core of the archive will consist of teachers journals penned by writers that currently risk to stay inside dusty boxes, spread in different school archives all across Italy), and will make them freely available not only to scholars from different disciplines, but also to the wider public.

Beyond academia, WRICHERS has the ambition to raise awareness of why school archives are sites of cultural heritage and how this heritage can be enhanced by local school communities.

Finally, the project may also contribute to improving the attractiveness of the teaching profession by highlighting the role of teachers as important cultural actors.