Fellows 2003–2004

  • Università di Genova

    A Transnational History of Italian Cuisine: Icon of Diasporic Identity, Cultural Commodity in the Global Marketplace

    2003-2004: Spring

    Simone Cinotto received a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Genoa (2000). He is a member of the "Piero Bairati" Center for Euro-American Studies at the University of Turin. His research interests include immigration and ethnic history, food history, and history and film. He is the author of Una famiglia che mangia insieme: cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920-1940 [A Family That Eats Together: Food and Ethnicity in the Italian American Community of New York City, 1920-1940], Turin, 2001, and the editor of Colture e culture del riso: una prospettiva storica [Rice Cultures in Historical Perspective], Vercelli, 2002. As a fellow of the Fondazione Bellonci in Rome, he is working on Luchino Visconti's film Rocco and His Brothers and its representation of Italian internal migrations in the 1950s-1960s. He is also coordinating a local history project on emigration from a Northeastern Piedmont community in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

  • 2003-2004

    Born in Grottaglie (Taranto) in 1972, Ciraci lives and works in Milan. 

    She took part in the experience of Via Fiuggi, a program in which a group of young artists with a common background live and work together for a number of years. Many contemporary Italian artists come from Via Fiuggi. Ciraci presented her work entitled “Dimensional Jump” in April 2004 at the Italian Academy.

  • University of St. Andrew's

    Scotland; Birkbeck College

    University of London

    Magic and Metamorphosis

    2003-2004: Fall

    Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic. She has written award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales, including Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (l976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998). In l994 she gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC, on the theme of Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. In l996, she curated The Inner Eye: Art Beyond The Visible, a touring exhibition, and in 2002, the exhibition Metamorphing, for Wellcome Trust at the Science Museum, London. In the autumn of 2001, she was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where she gave the Clarendon Lectures (Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds, Oxford University Press, 2002). Her most recent novel, The Leto Bundle, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In l999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Yale on the subject of Spirit Visions, and she is developing themes raised there with her current research. She is a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and St. Andrew's University, Scotland, and was recently a Guest Professor at Paris 13. Her collected essays will be coming out in the summer of 2003, under the title Signs & Wonders.

  • Università del Piemonte Orientale

    The Cold War and the Selling of the "Atlantic community" in American Photojournalism and Magazines: the Case of Italy, 1946-1956

    2003-2004

    Marco Mariano (1968) is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Literature of the Università del Piemonte Orientale-Vercelli and a member of the "Piero Bairati" Center for American and Euro-American Studies (cisi.unito.it/bairati). He received a degree in Political Science from the University of Turin and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Genoa. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of History of Columbia University (2000). His publications on American intellectual history and historiography include: Lo storico nel suo labirinto: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tra storia, impegno civile e politica (The Historian in His Labyrinth: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., History, Public Commitment and Politics), Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999, and on Euro-American relations and American journalism: Europa e Stati Uniti secondo il New York Times: La corrispondenza estera di Anne O'Hare McCormick, 1920-1954 (Europe and the United States according to the New York Times: The Foreign Correspondence of Anne O'Hare McCormick, 1920-1954) Turin: Otto, 2001 (with F. Pinelli), as well as several essays on the relations between the United States and Italy in the postwar years. At the Italian Academy his work will explore the place of Italy in the "Atlantic community" in the context of its popularization by mainstream American magazines during the Cold War.

  • Università di Bologna

    Civic Pedagogies, Cultural Identity and the Issue of Liberal Education in Italy

    2003-2004

    Giovanni Giorgini is an Associate Professor of the History of Political Thought in the Philosophy Department of the University of Bologna. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, where he was Visiting Fellow in 1999. He received his degree in Philosophy at the University of Bologna and his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Turin. His research interests include ancient political thought (Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Sophists) and the revival of classical political thought by contemporary writers such as Stuart Hampshire, Martha Nussbaum, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He is the author of three books: La città e il tiranno (1993), an investigation of ancient Greek tyranny in the conceptual history tradition, Liberalismi eretici (1999), a critical examination of some contemporary liberal authors, and I doni di Pandora (2002), a study of ancient Greek political thought from the origins to 4th century B.C., which tries to combine the approaches of political theory, ancient history and the history of ideas.
    At the Italian Academy, Professor Giorgini will work on the reform of curricula in contemporary Italy in the face of multiculturalism, using an approach deriving from the neo-Aristotelian focus on a common human nature and the importance of liberal education.

  • Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'

    Roman Archaeological Heritage and Cultural Identity in Republican Italy 1946-1992

    2003-2004: Spring

    Gabriele Cifani, born in Rome in 1970, received a M.A. in Literature (1993), Ph.D. in Archaeology (2000) and Postgraduate Specialisation (2001) at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where he was a young research fellow from 2002-2003. From 1994 to 2003, he was recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ministero dell'Università e Ricerca, Aylwin Cotton Foundation (UK), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 1998 he was a visiting student in the Department of Archaeology of Cambridge University. Since 1996 he has been consultant in fieldwork activities for the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma. From 1997 to 2000 he also worked in Libya, as a member of the Italian Archaeological Mission of "Roma Tre" University at Leptis Magna.

    His main research interests include archaic Roman architecture, the landscape archaeology of Italy and the history of archaeology. Among his most recent publications is the article "Notes on the Rural Landscape of Central Tyrrhenian Italy in the 6th-5th c. B.C. and its Social Significance," in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, vol. 15, 2002 and the book: Storia di una frontiera. Dinamiche territoriali e gruppi etnici nella media Valle Tiberina (Roma 2003, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato). At the Italian Academy, he will analyze the role of archaeological heritage as part of cultural memory in Italy during the five decades from the end of the Second World War to 1992.

  • Università di Pisa

    Randomness and Compactness in Information

    2003-2004: Fall

    Fabrizio Luccio was born in 1938. He received the Dr.Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1962, and the Libera Docenza in electronic computers from the Italian university system in 1968. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. After an industrial experience in the research laboratories of Olivetti, he began his academic career at the Politecnico di Milano. In 1966 he moved to M.I.T. as a staff member at Project MAC, then he became a professor at the University of Southern California, and then at New York University, pursuing research in theoretical and algorithmic aspects of circuit synthesis.
    In 1971 he returned permanently to Italy, as Lecturer and later Professor of Informatics at the University of Pisa, where he also served as Department Chairman for six years, and as Coordinator of the newly established Ph.D. program in Informatics for another six years. There he also set up, and is still directing, a successful research group in algorithmica. He spent several sabbatical periods as a visiting professor at UCLA, the University of Illinois, the National University of Singapore, and Carleton University in Ottawa. He has been a visiting scientist at T.J. Watson Research Center of IBM, USA, and a distinguished foreign scholar at the NTT LSI Laboratories in Morinosato, Japan. He has also been a distinguished scientist in the city of Ottawa, sponsored by a Canadian fund to carry on cooperative research with the local universities. He has pursued intense activities with UNESCO, for the dissemination of informatics in developing countries. For these activities he received in 1998 the title of Honorary Professor from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Peru, the third oldest university on the American continent. He received a high degree of recognition for outstanding research, and was nominated a Fellow of the IEEE in 1983.
    In addition to his studies in computer science, Professor Luccio is particularly interested in the relations among different fields of science and general culture, in the search of common concepts and paradigms. He has recently published a book on algorithmic aspects arising in the most diverse fields of knowledge, and plans to further pursue these studies, with particular attention to the role of random processes.

  • Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'

    Enumerative Geometry

    2003-2004

    Spring

    Enrico Arbarello is a professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza". He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1973 and is currently specializing in geometry. Of particular interest to Dr. Arbarello are algebraic curves, their moduli and the topology of moduli spaces. In addition, he works on the geometrical aspects of the theory of non-linear differential equations of the KdV type. He has taught at a number of international universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the Institut Henri Poincarè in Paris. At the Italian Academy, his research will focus on the geometry of algebraic curves.

  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

    Touching Art: Intimacy, Embodiment, and the Somatosensory System

    2003-2004

    Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professor Esrock received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications include The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and a translation of Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James Joyce (Harvard University Press, 1989.) Drawing on contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Professor Esrock has focused her research on the role of mental images, particularly visual and somatosensory, in our experience of visual art and literature. For the 2003-4 Fellowship year at the Italian Academy she will explore a process by which viewers can use their somatosensory systems to shift their sense of bodily boundaries in order to bring themselves into more intimate relationships with art objects.

  • Princeton University

    Of Language and the Lodestone

    2003-2004

    Eileen Reeves is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her area of specialization is the early modern scientific literature of Italy, France, and England, and she is the author of . She is currently finishing Evening News: Early Modern Journalism, Optics, and Astronomy, and is beginning a new project on the cultural context of the investigation of magnetism in seventeenth-century Europe. Her particular focus will be the proposed use of the magnet in a series of unworkable communication devices.

  • Università degli Studi di Torino

    Why Are Labor Market Participation and Fertility Rates So Low in Italy?

    2003-2004: Fall

    Daniela Del Boca, Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1988, is a Professor of Economics at the University of Turin. She has been a Visiting Professor at New York University and an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. She has published several books and articles in the area of Labor Economics and the Economics of the Family. Her articles have appeared in international journals, including The American Economic Review, The Journal of Human Resources, Labour, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, The Review of Economics of the Family, and The Journal of Population Economics. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Labour and The Review of Economics of the Family. She is currently a Fellow of the Center for European Studies (CES) at NYU and of the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), and is Director of the Center for Household Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD).

  • Università di Pisa

    Lo stile come fattore di identità culturale e di memoria nell'arte e nella società contemporanea

    2003-2004

    Carla Benedetti is Professor of Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Pisa, and recurrent Visiting Professor of Italian at New York University. Her books include "La soggettivita' nel racconto. Proust e Svevo"(1984), "Una trappola di parole. Lettura del 'Pasticciaccio'" (1987) [on Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], "Modi di attribuzione. Filosofia e teoria dei sistemi," co-authored (1989), and more recently, "Pasolini contro Calvino. Per una letteratura impura" (1998), "L'ombra lunga dell'autore. Indagine su una figura cancellata" (1999, soon to be published by Cornell University Press) and "Il tradimento dei critici" (2002). Professor Benedetti has also written numerous articles and contributes regularly to the Italian edition of the "New York Review of Books" and to the culture section of the Italian magazine, "L'Espresso."

  • Università di Modena

    Self-Knowledge

    2003-2004: Spring

    Annalisa Coliva (Milan 1973), MA (Bologna), M. Litt. (St. Andrews), PhD (St. Andrews), PhD in Philosophy of language (Vercelli, Italy), Fulbright Fellow 2002-2003 (Columbia, NY), after teaching and researching at Bologna and Fribourg (CH) Universities, is now a lecturer at the University of Modena. Her main interests are in history of analytic philosophy and in philosophy of mind and epistemology. Among her publications: (with Elisabetta Sacchi) Singular Thoughts. Perceptual-Demonstrative Thoughts and I-Thoughts, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2001, Moore e Wittgenstein: scetticismo, certezza e senso commune, Padova, Il Poligrafo, 2003. She has published several papers on the topics of philosophy of perception, I-thoughts, philosophy of psychiatry, current interpretations of Moore's proof of an external world and history of analytic philosophy, appeared in journals such as The Journal of Philosophy, Dialectica, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and in collected volumes both in English and Italian.
    At the Academy she will be working on an on-going project on the topic of our knowledge of our own mental states.

  • Università degli Studi di Milano

    Mneme. Collective Memory and Imaginative World

    2003-2004

    Andrea Pinotti (Mantova, 1967) graduated summa cum laude in Philosophy at the University of Milan, with a thesis entitled: 'The 'Eternal Gothic': Wilhelm Worringer's Art Theory. With grants from the University of Milan, he then studied at the University "S. Orsola Benincasa" in Naples (1992-1993), and at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (1994-1995), investigating the German aesthetic theories based on the concept of "empathy". His findings were published in an anthology entitled Aesthetics and Empathy. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Milan. His thesis, originally entitled Style and Apriori: Art History and Transcendental Aesthetics, was published under the title The Body of Style. History of Art as History of Aesthetics: Semper, Riegl and Wölfflin. He then worked as a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan (1999-2002) on a project entitled Form, Symbol and Image: Aesthetics, Science of Expression and Philosophy of Culture in Aby Warburg's School. During this period he published two books: one devoted to the influence of Art Historians, such as Riegl and Wölfflin, on Walter Benjamin' theory of perception (Little History of Distance) and another concerning Goethe's morphological influence upon Warburg's theory of the collective memory of images in Western culture, specifically in the Italian Renaissance (Memories of the Neutra). He is presently a research fellow ("ricercatore") in Aesthetics in the same department, focusing on the physiologists (such as Ewald Hering and Richard Semon) who influenced some of the most significant theories of collective memory in 20th century (Aby Warburg, Carl G. Jung). He is also involved in the Italian Edition Project of Aby Warburg's Works (Warburg Institute-Nino Aragno Edizioni).

     

  • 2003-2004

    Film & Video

    An artist from Bologna, Tesi presented a screening of her film entitled “The Glass Movie/Film di vetro” at the Italian Academy. 

    Tesi's objective in creating “The Glass Movie” was to create a film of infinite length, adding scenes over time, a succession of paintings made of light.