DISTU brings together more than 60 tenured researchers and more than 30 young scholars involved in doctoral programs, research grants and numerous Italian and international projects.
DISTU is a scientific community that conducts its research in many fields, even far apart. Many of these researches have over time found intersecting and interdisciplinary development hubs.
Four areas of research come together in DISTU: linguistic-literary, historical-philosophical, historical-artistic and legal. The legal and art-historical research areas find development, in addition to individual or group initiatives, in the two doctoral programs of European and Global Markets Law and Historical and Cultural Heritage Sciences.
In 2017, DISTU obtained substantial funding, in the area of legal sciences, for a national excellence project on the analysis and understanding of crises in the European institutional and cultural space (economics, migration, security). The project has enhanced the interdisciplinary nature of the expertise present in DISTU leading to the establishment of three academies (ADiM, ADiL and ADA, presented in MED Migration Europe Rights) in which researchers from legal, linguistic and semiotic, cultural-historical and art-historical studies collaborate.
DISTU has three research laboratories, dedicated to translation and textual analysis and Italian as a foreign and second language, and an exhibition center for cultural initiatives aimed at students and citizens.
DISTU researchers collaborate on numerous internal University of Tuscia, national and international study initiatives, and network with European and non-European universities and research centers in the fields of linguistic, semiotic, legal, historical, archaeological and artistic studies.
DISTU supports research by funding the publications of scholars who are members of the department. The wide range of studies published in the past 10 years in prestigious national and international venues has enabled DISTU to obtain excellent ratings from the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR), particularly in the areas of legal sciences and Italianism.