Details

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “My Two Italies: Personal and Cultural Reflections”
Presented by Dr. Joe Luzzi
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning author, teacher, and scholar, Professor Joseph Luzzi will discuss how his “two Italies”––the southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the northern Italian realm of his professional life, especially Florence—join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love. From the dramatic struggles of his ancestors in the impoverished Italian region of Calabria to his own adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a compelling family saga and deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clichés about Italy and Italian American that we have inherited from popular media like The Sopranos and Under the Tuscan Sun. Join him for what promises to be a lively and unique exploration of the mysteries of Italian culture and its extraordinary American afterlife.

The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation is confirmed once you have purchased your ticket. You will receive the Zoom link to join the presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDING of the webinar will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience for 7 days after the event.

Lecturer

Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Faculty Member in Italian Studies at Bard College and was recently a Wallace Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, where he was writing a cultural history of Dante’s Divine Comedy that will appear with Princeton University Press. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love(HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into Italian, German, and Korean.