A group of academics from the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and Israel are founding an international postgraduate institute in Rome with the financial backing of a prominent businessman Alessandro Novelli.
Called the Rome International University, it will offer courses on Italian linguistics and culture, financial and business studies, psychoanalytic studies and a course on the history and culture of Jewish Italy. The Italian linguistics and culture summer course will be mainly at teachers.
RIU's president will be Nora Galli de' Paratesi, a linguist with a PhD from Cambridge who works on the Council of Europe's modern language project and the European Consortium for Language Attainment.
"We will be filling a gap in both Italian and international postgraduate education," she explained. "As far as we know, there is no postgraduate course on Italian linguistics and culture or on Jewish Italy anywhere in the world."
The core group of academics includes James Walston, political science, (Cambridge), Giovanni Dosi, statistics and finance, (Rome), Franco Orsucci, psychoanalytic studies, (Rome), Gregory Smith, social anthropology, (Oxford), and Ken Stow, history, (Haifa).