The Italian Research Seminar
David Forgacs (New York University) - "Italy Seen at Its Margins: Photography and Social Exclusion Since 1861"
Thursday, February 27, 2014 at 4:30pm in Special Collections, Hesburgh Library
This paper is related to an exhibition of photographs and films that I curated in Rome and New York in 2010-12 and to my book Italy’s margins, to be published by Cambridge University Press in spring 2014. It contends that certain photographic acts contribute to the creation or reproduction of ideas of social marginality and exclusion in united Italy. It examines this process with examples of photographs of slums, colonies, the rural south, mental hospitals and Roma encampments.
David Forgacs is Guido and Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò Professor of Contemporary Italian Studies at New York University. He taught formerly at the universities of Sussex, Cambridge, Royal Holloway London and University College London. In 2006-9 he was Research Professor in Modern Studies at the British School at Rome. His books include Italian Culture in the Industrial Era (1990), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (2nd edition, 2000), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (with Stephen Gundle, 2007). Forthcoming: Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press, March 2014) and a co-edited special issue of the journal Modern Italy on “Disability rights and wrongs in Italy” (19:1, 2014).
Sponsored by the Office of Research and Italian Studies at Notre Dame.