Calendar Event

April 17, 2012, 9:30 am to 12:00 pm

HC Faculty Fellows Symposia

Cosmopolitan Mosaics of Modern Alexandria, Egypt

STEFANO GIANNINI, 2012 HC Faculty Fellow & Assistant Professor of Italian, Syracuse University

STEFANO GIANNINI teaches Modern Italian literature. His research focuses on the historical novel, poetry, and the intersections between historical memory and philology. A graduate of the University of Genoa (Italy), he studied at the University of Oregon and completed a Ph.D. in Italian Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and at University of Calgary (Canada). At SU he is the coordinator of the Italian program. His book, “La musa sotto i portici: caffe e provincia nella narrativa di Piero Chiara e Lucio Mastronardi” (Florence: Pagliai, 2008), analyzes the role of coffeehouses in the shaping of the Italian cultural panorama. His articles have appeared in Italian and North American periodicals

Invited speakers:

Michael Ebner, Assistant Professor of History, Syracuse University
Professor Ebner was a 2001 recipient of the Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome. From 2001 to 2002, he was a Whiting Fellow at Columbia University. Ebner's research and teaching focus on the history of modern Europe, political violence and fascism. His book, “Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), is an analysis of the way in which the fascist regime used political violence and confinement to rule Italy between 1926 and 1943

Deborah Starr, Associate Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature and Film, Director of the Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University
Professor Starr received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2000. She is the author of “Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire” (Routledge, 2009). She is also the co-editor, with Sasson Somekh, of “Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff “(Stanford University Press, 2011). She is currently at work on a new book about minorities in Egyptian cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her research and teaching interests include cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, minorities of the Middle East, film, and urban studies

Beverly Allen, Professor, French, Italian & Comparative Literature, Syracuse University
Professor Allen’s work in Italian literature, film, and culture includes “Andrea Zanzotto: The Language of Beauty’s Apprentice, Pier Paolo Pasolini”: “The Poetics of Heresy” (ed.), “The Defiant Muse: Italian Feminist Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Present” (co-ed.), “Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture” (co-ed.), and numerous articles and prize-winning translations of Italian poetry.  In the 1990s, her move to investigative journalism produced “Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia”.  She served as consultant to the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for The former Yugoslavia.  More recently, she has been writing screenplays, one of which won the Prize for Best Feature-length Screenplay at the Roma Independent Film Festival in 2010. Other honors include grants and prizes from sources such as Soros Open Society, National Endowment for the Arts, Pro Suecia, Delmas Foundation for Research in Venice, and the Folger Shakespeare Institute.  She held the William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professorship in The Humanities at Syracuse University from 2005-2007.  She holds a Masters degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Timothy Campbell, Professor of Italian, Cornell University,
In addition to his translations of Roberto Esposito's “Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy” (Minnesota, 2008) and “Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community”(Stanford, 2009), Professor Campbell is the author of “Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi”(Minnesota, 2006), and winner of the Media Ecology Association's 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics. He recently completed his second book, “Tecnica e biopolitica”, which is forthcoming from Guerini. His current projects include a study of biopolitics and post-colonialism and an examination of Italian political cinema and contemporary thought. At Cornell he teaches courses on contemporary Italian philosophy, Italian cinema, and core courses in the Italian major.

Jean Jonassaint, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Syracuse University
Professor Jonassaint’s broad field of research is Francophone Studies, which cover a huge area of literary productions primarily in French, from eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas to twenty-first-century Africa or Asia. Mainly, his research is on narratives by Caribbean, Quebec and African writers or transnational writers in France and Quebec. On the other hand, he is more and more interested in a practical epistemology, which to some extent implies an ethics of criticism and theory. His growing interest in the questioning of traditional approaches to Francophone or Caribbean literatures leads him more recently to critical and genetic edition of texts, as demonstrated by his 90-page book chapter “Matériaux pour une édition critique” (2008). Currently he is working on a critical and genetic edition of “La Tragédie du Roi Christophe” by Aimé Césaire to be published in a volume coordinated by Professor A. James Arnold for the series “Planète libre” of CNRS editions (Paris).

Tolley Humanities Building, Room 304

CO-SPONSOR: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences