The Italian Research Seminar

The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame’s Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.

The “Literary Canon” of Early Venetian Humanism (1374-1446) between the Classics and the Moderns

In the first half of the fourteenth century, the Veneto region played a pivotal role in the early developments of Italian Humanism. In this same period, cities such as Padova and Verona were experiencing a central and vital political moment. In the second half of the century, Petrarch chose to spend his last years in Padua. The city was ruled by the signori da Carrara, with whom Petrarch had a close relationship, thus confirming the important relationship between political power and humanist intellectuals in this environment. However, the fifteenth century flourishing of Humanism was mostly a Florentine and Tuscan matter, while in the Veneto the indipendent cities progressively lost both their political and cultural authority in favor of Venice, which progressively conquered them. By analyzing the Latin literary production of two Paduan Humanists of the early fifteenth-century, Sicco Polenton and Antonio Baratella, Prof. Modonutti’s lecture explores the ways in which Padua, a marginalized cultural center, was nevertheless able to make its voice heard in the main literary debates of the time, offering a peculiar perspective and a relevant contribution to crucial issues to the community of Humanists, such as the recovery of an extensive knowledge of Ancient literature, culture, and institutions, or the importance of the role of Petrarch and Dante in the new humanistic era.

Rino Modonutti is Associate Professor of Medieval Latin literature at the University of Padova, where he previously held the position of visiting professor of Medieval and Humanistic Philology. In 2010 he earned a Ph. D. in Medieval Latin Literature and Philology from S.I.S.M.E.L., and in 2014 a second one in Italian Studies from the University of Padova. His main research interests lie in Medieval historiography and encyclopedism, and in the tradition of Classical Latin Literature in the Late Middle Ages and in Italian Humanism. He published the critical editions of Albertino Mussato’s Ludovicus Bavarus (Ed. nazionale dei testi della storiografia umanistica, 2015) and De gestis Italicorum post Henricum septimum Cesarem (books 1-7) (Ed. naz. dei testi della storiografia umanistica-Rerum Italicarum scriptores, III serie, 2018), and the monograph Fra Giovanni Colonna e la storia antica. Da Adriano ai Severi (Padova, CLEUP, 2013). He coedited the volumes «Moribus antiquis sibi me fecere poetam». Albertino Mussato nel VII centenario dell’incoronazione poetica (1315-2015), eds. R. Modonutti, E. Zucchi, Firenze, S.I.S.M.E.L. Ed. del Galluzzo, 2017; L’Umanesimo di Sicco Polenton. Padova, la “Catinia”, i santi, gli antichi, eds. G. Baldissin Molli, F. Benucci, R. Modonutti, Padova, CSA, 2020; and the critical edition Sicco Polenton, Vite dei moderni. Mussato, Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, ed. trans. comm. L. Banella, R. Modonutti, Padova, CLEUP, 2020. His articles have appeared in Filologia mediolatina, Italia medioevale e umanistica, Studi sul Boccaccio, Segno e testo, Filologia e critica. Since 2013 he is member of the editorial board of BISLAM Bibliotheca scriptorum Latinorum medii recentiorisque aevi (S.I.S.M.E.L.); since 2007 he collaborates with C.A.L.M.A. Compendium auctorum latinorum medii aevi (since 2019 as lector), and with Medioevo latino. Bollettino bibliografico della cultura europea da Boezio a Erasmo (since 2020 as editor of the Paduan editorial team). He is member of the S.I.S.M.E.L. International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin Culture, of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Boccaccio Association.

Italian Research Seminar. R. Pepin. “How Contini Worked: The Critic’s ‘Scartafacci’”

One of the major literary controversies of the Italian 20th Century centered on whether the study of an author’s drafts and corrections could offer anything of value to literary criticism. The practice of studying authorial drafts, set going in the interwar but particularly in vogue in the immediate post-war, was vehemently attacked by Benedetto Croce. For Croce, the reconstruction of the creative process through an author’s ‘scartafacci’ (‘drafts’, ‘jottings’) was a doomed, spiritless endeavour. Gianfranco Contini’s role in founding the discipline of ‘authorial philology’ (the study of authorial drafts and variants) in his essays beginning from the ’40s on Ariosto, Petrarch, Proust and Leopardi, is well known, as is his later absorption of Croce’s criticism in the ’50s. Contini’s own creative process, however – which resulted in writings both consummate and demanding in their style – has rarely garnered scholars’ attention. In this talk, I propose to examine ‘come lavorava Contini’. Prof. Pepin reconstructs the surprising genesis of one of his most important pieces of criticism – an essay which Italo Calvino called ‘tutta allusiva [e] quasi intraducibile’, and which inspired Pasolini’s brief, if ill-fated, venture into dantismo in the 1960s.

Ryan Pepin studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, obtaining his PhD with a thesis on Dantean metricology in 2020. He has since held research fellowships in Austria and Italy, most recently at the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini in Florence, where he was Marco Praloran Fellow. He is working on two books: a book of translations of essays by the Italian critic and philologist Gianfranco Contini, and a book on ‘rhythmical figures’ in Dante.

Italian Research Seminar. R. Midura. “Plague, Banditry, and Heresy in Early Modern Mail”

By the mid sixteenth-century, continental Europe depended upon mail for the ordinary pulse of governance and commerce. Communications networks remained as vulnerable as the humans who carried the letters. As a contemporary proverb put it, “he who rides by post, plays with death.” Prof. Midura uses state archives from across Italy to explore how protecting postal couriers from brigandage, plague, and political or religious rebellion shaped international relations. The expansion of state-sponsored postal systems into carrying private mail relied upon surveilling and intervening into a contentious public sphere.

Rachel Midura is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European and Digital History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She is at work on her first book, Princes of the Post: Power, Publicity, and Europe’s Communications Revolution (1500-1700) on the origins of Europe’s postal systems. Her recent article, “Itinerating Europe,” appeared in the Journal of Social History in summer 2021, in which she uses social network analysis to compare conceptions of space in postal itineraries published from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. She finished her PhD in early modern European history in 2020 at Stanford University, where she was also a senior graduate research fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.


“‘Permettereste a vostro figlio di sposare Lola?’: Latent Fascism, American Culture, and Blackness in Postwar Italy”

The end of the Second World War marked a new beginning for Italy as the country sought to transition from Fascism to a modern, industrialized Republic, distancing itself from the racialized and xenophobic discourses of its totalitarian past. An important aspect of this desired transformation was the notion of race, particularly how Italians understood Blackness in their country and its relation to Italian national identity. Contributing to Italians’ understanding was the notable presence of African American men and women in Italian cultural productions—film, television, and fashion—in the decades following the war. Prof. Harris’s lecture examines the Italian film and television career of African American singer, dancer, and actress Lola Falana, analyzing the intersection of race, gender, and American cultural capital in a country noted for its “colonial unconscious.” This mental state allowed for the racist discourse and discriminatory practices from the Fascist era to persist in the new Republic. However, the ongoing Cold War and strong attraction of American popular culture in Italy granted Falana a certain cultural capital, allowing her to be depicted in a rather progressive way in comparison to her female African counterparts. But, she still did not escape the denigrating racialized stereotypes and rhetoric of Italian colonialism. Drawing on Italian visual media and African American and Italian print archival material, the lecture illustrates how Falana represents American cultural imperialism yet latent Fascist colonial racist rhetoric.

Jessica L. Harris is a scholar of African-American History, 20th century U.S. and the World, Black Europe, Women’s History, and Modern Italy, with a particular interest in gender and race, their intersection with material culture, and the subsequent effect on group identities. Her current book project is a transnational cultural history on race and gender relations in Italy and the United States. Placing women at the center of analysis, the book employs the methodological approaches of critical race studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and post-colonial studies to examine the presence of African American women in 20th century Italian television, film, music, and fashion.

Italian Research Seminar. M. Riva. “A Real Phantasmagoria: The Great Belzoni Show”

Prof. Riva’s lecture presents one of the six case studies that are the subject of his digital monograph, Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analogue World, an archeological exploration of virtual reality revolving around optical-enhancing devices and spectacles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (forthcoming with Stanford University Press). The case study presented here is that of Giambattista Belzoni, aka the Great Belzoni. Born in Padua in 1778, Belzoni migrated to England in search of fortune in 1802. The “Hercules in tinsel” (as Dickens called him), also nicknamed the Patagonian Samson for his gigantic physical proportions, achieved early notoriety by exhibiting himself in some of the most bizarre shows of London. His exhibitions also included “an entirely new experiment in Optics called Somatascopia,” a kind of illusionistic spectacle he described as “a Real Phantasmagoria.” A few years later, Belzoni went on to a new career as a pioneering archeologist. The focus of Prof. Riva’s presentation is the most spectacular among Belzoni’s Herculean fatigues as an archeologist and a showman which opened at Egyptian Hall, in London, in 1821: “The Tomb,” as the exhibit was called, consisted in a facsimile of the burial of Pharaoh Seti I, based on Belzoni’s own drawings, watercolors and wax impressions he had taken on-site, in the Valley of the Kings. A 3D model and simulation of The Tomb is included in the presentation.

Massimo Riva ​was educated in Italy (Laurea in Filosofia, University of Florence, 1979) and the United States (Ph.D. in Italian literature, Rutgers University, 1986). He joined the Brown faculty in 1990. His teaching ranges from Boccaccio’s Decameron to modern and contemporary literature, film, media and the digital humanities. He has held visiting positions at the University of Bologna, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the University of London, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and the University of Sydney, Australia. In recognition of his research-based teaching, he was nominated Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. His awards and honors also include the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (with the rank of Ufficiale) for his contribution to the dissemination of Italian culture in North America. Among his publications, four books on literary maladies in the eighteenth century, national identity in the nineteenth century, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and literature in the digital age. He is the editor of the Yale anthology Italian Tales and the co-editor of the Cambridge edition of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration On Human Dignity. He was the recipient of three major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Society, in support of various digital projects, now part of the Virtual Humanities Lab. Among his recent collaborative initiatives, a series of interactive installations of the Garibaldi moving panorama were featured in library and museums in Brazil, Italy and the U.K. He is currently at work on a digital monograph entitled: Italian Shadows. A (Curious) History of Virtual Reality, a pilot project of the Brown Digital Publications Initiative funded by a grant of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Italian Research Seminar. R. Dainotto. “Strategies of Representation in the Italian Novel”

Taking the cue from an essay he wrote recently on Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on the narrative point of view, Prof. Dainotto devotes this talk for the Italian Research Seminar Series to the analysis of the point of view in some canonical 19th- and 20th century Italian novels. One main objective of the talk is to rethink the relation between formal and sociological criticism in literary studies — or, put differently, a relation between aesthetics and culture.

Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Literature, Italian and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He has been Professeur invitè at the Université Paris Ouest, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. His main research and teaching interests hinge on the concepts of place and space as narrative, rhetorical, and geopolitical organizational categories. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000); Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), winner of the 2010 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; and Mafia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015). He has also edited Racconti Americani del ‘900 (Einaudi scuola, 1999), a monographic issue of Italian Culture on Giambattista Vico (2017), and co-edited with Fredric Jameson Gramsci in the World (Duke UP, 2020).

March 16, 2023

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