Events

Past Event

Paolo Valesio on “Le Futuriste”

October 20, 2009
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
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Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America will host two public lectures by prominent professors in the humanities. In recognition of the anniversaries of important moments in world history, the Academy is pleased to present a lecture on Galileo (to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his first astronomical observation through a telescope) and another on the Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti (in celebration of the centennial of the Italian Avant-Garde).

Before joining the Department of Italian at Columbia, where he became the Giuseppe Ungaretti Professor in Italian Literature in 2005, Paolo Valesio retired as an emeritus professor from Yale University, where he taught for more than a quarter century, and where for most of this period he was Chair of the Italian Department. Prior to that he taught at New York University, after having studied general linguistics and literature at Bologna University and Harvard University. He has been a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He has also been honorary president of the American Association of Italian Studies. The author of numerous critical essays and articles, Valesio has published five books of criticism, seventeen collections of poetry, two novels, one collection of short stories, a novella, and a one-act drama in verse. He founded and directed the journal Yale Italian Poetry (YIP) which is now published at Columbia (from headquarters inside the Italian Academy) with a new title, Italian Poetry Review. Valesio's areas of teaching and research include the literature of the 19th and 20th century, rhetoric in its connection with literary analysis and with spirituality, as well as comparative approaches to contemporary Italian literature, and the theory and practice of creative writing.