February 22-26, 2012
at the University of Oklahoma

This class is full

This course explores the relationship of Italian history and Italian film from Unification to the present day. What are the possibilities and limitations of feature films as a medium for the representation of history? How has cinema functioned with respect to canonical national narratives and dominant systems of power in Italy? Put simply, what happens when history becomes cinema and when the cinema takes on history?
Each session will consist of a lecture and an in-class screening, with discussions and student presentations scheduled throughout the day. Please note that seeing the films together is an integral part of the course and not occasions to text, tweet, FB, or sleep. No knowledge of Italian is required for this course; all readings and lectures will be in English, and all films shown in class will have English sub-titles. Click here for syllabus

Reading Packet suppplied by OSLEP

Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, teaches, and lectures on the cultures and histories of modern Italy. Her areas of specialization include Italian film and visual culture, 20th century Italian history, Fascism and World War Two, and Italian colonialism and its postcolonial legacies. Throughout her career she has been dedicated to interdisciplinary inquiry, and the agenda of bringing the questions, methods,and sources of several fields together to shape the emergent field of Italian Studies has motivated her activities as a scholar and cultural organizer.

Along with her numerous book chapters and articles, she is the author or editor of four books: Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-45; Gli imperi: dall’antichità all’età contemporanea; Italian Colonialism (edited with Mia Fuller); and Fascism’s Empire Cinema: Histories and Journeys of Italian Conquest and Defeat. Her current book project is Italian Prisoners of War and the Transition from Dictatorship. The recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH, Mellon, and other fellowships, she is Chair of the Department of Italian Studies and Professor of Italian Studies and History at New York University.

Raised in Pacific Palisades, California, a town that had been home to many intellectual émigrés from Hitler’s Germany, Ruth Ben-Ghiat took an interest early on in the relationship of politics and culture and the costs of dictatorial regimes on intellectual life. At the University of California Los Angeles she did her senior thesis with Robert Wohl on the conductor Otto Klemperer and the role of German émigrés in bringing modernist music to Los Angeles. Out of this experience came her love for archival research: she used the collections of the Hollywood Bowl and obtained then-unpublished letters between Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg.

At Brandeis University, working with Alice Kelikian, she became curious about the lesser-known Italian case: what were the effects of two decades of Fascism on Italian cultural life? A Fulbright fellowship that placed her in Rome at the time of the formation of a center-right government in Italy under Berlusconi gave her first-hand exposure to the national debates about Fascism and its memory. Living in an apartment on the Via Rasella, itself a lieu de mémoire, she witnessed a palpable shift in Italian public discourse about the dictatorship. This experience sparked her interest in exploring the Italian reluctance to account for the violence and crimes of that dictatorship at home, against other Italians, and in the Balkan and African occupied territories.

Cinema has been among her interests since the start of her career, and her books and articles have explored Italian film's operation within a broader intermedial and political context and the roles film has played at critical junctures of Italian history. An article for the French journal cAnnalesconsidered issues of language and testimony within Neorealist film and how the cinema of the immediate postwar era reflects on models of spectacle and spectatorship
connected with the Fascist regime.