Italian Studies Guest Speaker - Massimo Riva
When: Wednesday,
November 18, 2020
3:00 PM
-
4:00 PM
Where: > See description for location
Description: Italian Studies Guest Speaker: Massimo Riva, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies, Brown University
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Virtual (Zoom)
In 2005, the John Hay library at Brown University, home of the Anne S. K. collection of military art, made a peculiar acquisition: a moving panorama. Made in Nottingham, England, in the fall of 1860, this rare surviving specimen of a popular nineteenth-century spectacle is an impressive artifact: a paper scroll ~4.75' tall and ~260' wide, painted in tempera on both sides. It is also a narrative marvel which tells in 55 colorful tableaux the heroic deeds of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian national hero, at the peak of his popularity in the U.K. and Europe. In 2007, the artifact became the object of an ongoing experiment in teaching and research that led to the creation of a website and various installations in libraries and museums around the world. In this talk, I will sketch the story of this artifact as well as the story it told: they are both intertwined in what we may call an example of nineteenth-century "reality show - the invention of a hero" (Riall) in the media of his time.
M. Riva (Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at Brown University) has published four books on literary maladies and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and literature in the digital age. He is the editor of the Yale anthology of contemporary fiction Italian Tales, and the co-editor of the Cambridge edition of Pico della Mirandola's Oration "On Human Dignity." His pioneering work in the digital humanities has led to the creation of several projects, including the Decameron Web, recipient of two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento Archive, supported by a digital innovation fellowship and grant of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently completing a digital monograph entitled: Italian Shadows. A (Curious) History of Virtual Reality, a project of the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to be published in 2021 by Stanford University Press.
To join our mailing list and/or receive the Zoom link, please contact:
Prof. Rose Facchini - rose.facchini@umassd.edu
Prof. Matthew Sneider - msneider@umassd.edu
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Virtual (Zoom)
In 2005, the John Hay library at Brown University, home of the Anne S. K. collection of military art, made a peculiar acquisition: a moving panorama. Made in Nottingham, England, in the fall of 1860, this rare surviving specimen of a popular nineteenth-century spectacle is an impressive artifact: a paper scroll ~4.75' tall and ~260' wide, painted in tempera on both sides. It is also a narrative marvel which tells in 55 colorful tableaux the heroic deeds of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian national hero, at the peak of his popularity in the U.K. and Europe. In 2007, the artifact became the object of an ongoing experiment in teaching and research that led to the creation of a website and various installations in libraries and museums around the world. In this talk, I will sketch the story of this artifact as well as the story it told: they are both intertwined in what we may call an example of nineteenth-century "reality show - the invention of a hero" (Riall) in the media of his time.
M. Riva (Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at Brown University) has published four books on literary maladies and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and literature in the digital age. He is the editor of the Yale anthology of contemporary fiction Italian Tales, and the co-editor of the Cambridge edition of Pico della Mirandola's Oration "On Human Dignity." His pioneering work in the digital humanities has led to the creation of several projects, including the Decameron Web, recipient of two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento Archive, supported by a digital innovation fellowship and grant of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently completing a digital monograph entitled: Italian Shadows. A (Curious) History of Virtual Reality, a project of the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to be published in 2021 by Stanford University Press.
To join our mailing list and/or receive the Zoom link, please contact:
Prof. Rose Facchini - rose.facchini@umassd.edu
Prof. Matthew Sneider - msneider@umassd.edu
Contact: > See Description for contact information
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