a) The Italian Studies faculty has a new member. After a nationwide search the Department has hired Dr. Claudio Fogu as Assistant Professor of Italian Studies. Born in Perugia, Claudio is a cultural historian with strong interests in film studies, literature and theory. He has published The Historic Imaginary: the politics of history in Fascist Italy (Toronto UP, 2003) and the brand-new The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, eds. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (Duke UP, 2006), along with numerous essays on the culture of Fascism, Futurism and so on. He will teach courses on modern and contemporary Italian literature, culture, history and politics for our growing program. Benvenuto!
b) Alexia Ferracuti and Chris Nixon, both of whom graduated as Italian Studies majors in 2005, have been accepted into the Yale University doctoral program in Italian with full fellowship support. Congratulazioni!
c) In September 2006 the Italian Government—through its Los Angeles consulate and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura—awarded 12,000 euros to the UCSB Italian Studies Program to fund a series of language and culture classes aimed at enriching the undergraduate curriculum. Mille grazie!
d) The Italian Cultural Heritage Foundation (ICHF) of Santa Barbara, which has long been a generous supporter of the Italian Studies Program, decided this summer to establish an annual award of $2000 to be shared among top students in the language and culture classes of the Program. The first award will be made at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year. Grazie mille!
e) Our regular visiting professor, Dr. Lucia Re (UCLA), was co-winner of the 2006 PEN USA prize for her translation and edition of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations (Green Integer, 2005). See the PEN USA website (http://penusa.org/go) for further information. Dr. Re also was co-winner of the prestigious 2006 Flaiano Prize for Italian Studies for this same publication: an international jury composed of 200 critics and scholars selected the volume for the prize, which was awarded at a nationally-televised ceremony in Italy this past July (see www.premiflaiano.it for further information and photos). In the meantime, Dr. Re co-edited a volume of essays entitled Il cibo e le donne nella cultura e nella storia (Bologna: CLUEB, 2006), which has been widely reviewed in Italy. Congratulazioni!
f) Dr. Jon R. Snyder, the Director of the Italian Studies Program, has also been active during this past year. He is a convenor of the ongoing Mediterranean Studies Research Focus Group on campus, and founded UC’s brand-new Multicampus Research Group on Italian Studies, in which Berkeley, UCLA, UCSB and UCSD will collaborate. The CICIS (California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies), which he co-founded five years ago, now has more than 300 members across the world, and held its fifth annual conference at UCLA in February 2006 with circa 100 people in attendance. In November 2005 Dr. Snyder published a new book, entitled L’estetica del Barocco, with Italy’s leading scholarly press, Il Mulino (Bologna). He was invited to speak on “the study of Italian material cultures” at the world meeting sponsored by Slow Food, Terra Madre 2006, held in Turin in October 2006 for over 5000 delegates from more than 100 countries.
g) Finally, the Italian Studies Program at UCSB continues to grow: in 2005-2006 there were 38 majors and 91 minors, and more than 110 UCSB students studied in Italy with EAP. Thanks to our devoted and talented staff of language lecturers (Angela Ellis, Luisella Bovio, Carla Borromeo, Valentina Padula, Tiziana De Simone, Camilla Fiorina, and Elisa Tragni), our language program is flourishing and courses are almost always full to capacity. Finally, our summer curriculum has proven so popular that we plan to increase course offerings in Italian literature and culture in the years to come.
