Italian Modernities Lecture Series: "In Opposition to the Social Media: Poetry and Poetics in Italy Today"

Speaker(s): Professor Thomas Harrison (UCLA)

Thomas Harrison, Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, CUNY, is a Professor of Italian at UCLA. He specializes in modern European intellectual history, literature, the comparative arts and film. He also researches contemporary Italian critical theory, music, the modernist novel and poetics, and the avant-garde.
He has published studies of Leopardi, Claudio Magris, Carlo Michelstaeder, Gianni Vattimo, Ungaretti, Montale, and Zanzotto, Elsa Morante, Antonio Tabucchi and Gianni Celati. He is also the author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, a study of European expressionism across the arts, and Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. He has edited a collection of essays by Agamben, Nancy, Girard and others called Nietzsche in Italy and The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry. He is currently completing a book on bridges in social and literary discourse from the ancient Romans and Chinese to our time.