Giuseppe Albano
Giuseppe's undergraduate studies in English Literature and the excellent teaching he received inspire him to this day in his career in museums and heritage.
| Name | Giuseppe Albano |
| Degree Course | MA English Literature (First Class Honours) |
| Year of Graduation | 1998 |
Your time at the University
When the time came to choose a university to my mind there could be no place more suitable for studying English Literature than Edinburgh, given the university’s remarkable contributions to centuries of Scottish intellectual history and the city’s abundance of libraries.
My memories of the range of teaching styles and personalities I encountered there will stay with me for life, and the freedom the course gave students to pursue and develop their own interests and opinions was a major plus, but also at times an exciting challenge. Edinburgh has never been the kind of place for those who just want to learn how to give the right answers to get their degree.
Tell us about your experiences since leaving the University
Following my degree at Edinburgh I took a masters at York followed by a PhD at Cambridge. Years later I was fortunate enough to go back to Edinburgh as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, where I also taught some of the modules I had once taken myself. I was happy to see that the feisty intellectual spirit of Edinburgh still lived on, and I believe still does.
I later decided to pursue a career in museums and heritage and enrolled on a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies by distance learning with Leicester University. I worked for a number of arts and heritage organisations in the UK before moving to Italy to take up the post of Curator and Director of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, where I remained for ten and a half years before taking up my current role as Director of the Freud Museum London.
Edinburgh has never been the place to go to for those who just want to learn how to give the right answers to get their degree.
It was at Edinburgh that I first read Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id and some of his case studies in a module exploring literary modernism and the revolution that took place in writing in Europe and the USA in the first part of the twentieth century. Tutors often implored students to query and disagree with standard interpretations of the texts being studied, an experience which has shaped my thinking to this day.
Alumni wisdom
Edinburgh University inspired me to read voraciously and encouraged me to think critically. I will always consider myself lucky to have had the excellent education I had.