Calendar of Events

This talk emerges from my current book project on poetics of piety in early modern Italy, a study of the relations between spiritual life and lyric expression in the long sixteenth century that uncovers and elucidates the subtle but diffuse presence of an incarnational poetics and an interstitial conception of identity at the heart of […]

Sometime between 1905 and 1907, the artist Umberto Boccioni stepped into a photographic cabinet to sit for a “multigraph”: a fivefold (self-)portrait created with the aid of an unseen mirror.  Appealing to the general public as the twentieth century progressed, the format would also become a visual calling-card for several avant-gardists.  Yet Boccioni’s multigraph stands […]

This talk explores the origin and development of the Italian fascination with Japanese samurais in the aftermath of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War and the rise of a young, nationalistic movement in Italy. Far from representing a simple, exotic, and monolithic image, the samurai warrior inspired multiple adaptations ranging from the loyal soldier to the spiritual […]