Beats and Hippies Italian Style: Fashioning Youth in Italian Pop Culture (1958-1974)

Firstly, the seminar will place this monograph within the broader context of the historical discourse surrounding 1960s Italian youth cultures. It will emphasise the value of utilising popular media sources as a means to challenge the prevailing '68-centric' narrative that has dominated discussions about the emergence of young people as a social group in Italy during the 1960s. Second, by looking at discourses around transnational trends like urlatori, beats, and hippies and representations of young celebrities in Italian popular culture, I will discuss what media representations of young people’s style and bodily practices can tell us about the social construction of young people’s commercial, political, transnational and gender identity in the period commonly seen as marking the birth of a distinctly Italian youth culture.

Cecilia Brioni is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen. Her research explores the history of representations of Italian youth in the 20th and 21st centuries in a variety of popular media, including film, television, print media and social media. Her current research focuses on self-representations of youth, ethnicity, gender and sexuality on the video sharing platform YouTube Italia. Her most recent publications include the monograph Fashioning Italian youth: young people's style and identity in Italian popular media, 1958-75 (Manchester University Press, 2023).

For any information or questions please email Lorenzo Dell’Oso at lorenzo.dell’oso@durham.ac.uk