Jennie Hirsh

Maryland Institute College of Art

Mediterranean modernity: art and nationalism in Italy and Greece, 1918-1945

2006-2007

Jennie Hirsh received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote a dissertation on pictorial and literary self-representation in the oeuvre of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. She also holds an MA in Italian from Middlebury College (1998), an MA in Italian Renaissance Art from Bryn Mawr (1997), and a BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1993).
While at the Italian Academy, she will continue to work on her project on "Mediterranean Modernity: Art and Nationalism in Italy and Greece, 1918-1945," which compares six artists working under authoritarian regimes during and after the interwar period. In particular, this project examines how classical, Etruscan, and Byzantine strategies function with the rhetoric of pictorial modernism in these two countries. She will also be completing work on a monograph on Giorgio de Chirico, a project that grows out of her doctoral dissertation. Her research and teaching interests include the classical tradition, fascist architecture, postwar Italian cinema, visual culture and the Holocaust, relationships between word and image, and self-portraiture. Her publications include essays on Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini, Gianni Amelio, and contemporary photographer Pipo Nguyen-Duy.
Prior to arriving at the Italian Academy, she was Hannah Seeger Davis postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, where she began work on her project on "Mediterranean Modernity." From 2003 until 2005, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture at Oberlin College. Prior to that appointment, she taught courses on modern and contemporary art, the history of Western Art, Italian Renaissance art and architecture, postwar Italian cinema, and Italian language at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Moore College of Art & Design, and Temple University between 1997 and 2003. Hirsh will be joining the faculty in the Department of Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art in January 2007.