Latest Past Events

Political Convicts: Transnational Actors of the Risorgimento

Presenter: Elena Bacchin (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice & Columbia University, Marie Curie Global Fellow) Discussant: Mark Mazower (Columbia University) Moderator: Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) Political Convicts: Transnational Actors of the Risorgimento During the Risorgimento, numerous Italian intellectuals, patriots, and political activists spent parts of their lives in prison and built around this experience an identity based on the concepts of sacrifice and martyrdom. Focusing on the…

Carlo Ginzburg on Machiavelli and Michelangelo

Online

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli compared the act of imposing new political orders on an uncivilized population to the carving of a statue from a piece of rough marble: an allusion, according to many scholars, to Michelangelo’s David. Did Michelangelo respond in some way to Machiavelli’s allusion? The University of Pennsylvania is the joint producer of this series—through the Italian Studies section…

Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians

Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) in conversation with Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara) on the occasion of the publication of his book: The Fishing Net and the Spider Web. Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Palgrave, 2020) The book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or ‘making of’ Italians. While previous scholarship on…