Each semester the Italian Academy invites prominent Columbia University professors to open one of their regularly scheduled classes to the public, bringing students and the community together in the Academy building. This spring the Academy welcomes professors from the departments of Art History, Classics, and Italian who will lecture on topics related to Italian history.
Elizabeth Leake is a visiting professor to the Italian Department at Columbia and an Associate Professor of Italian at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Twentieth Century narrative and theatre, psychoanalytic and ideological studies in Italian literature, fascist Italy, Italian cinema, and early Danish cinema. She is a recipient of the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for her book The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (2003) and The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars 2001. Her latest book, After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth Century Italy, was published in February of this year, and she is co-authoring another entitled Representing Confino. She earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998.
