Laura Wittman

Laura Wittman

Associate Professor of French and Italian
2001: Ph.D., Italian Language and Literature, Yale University
1996: M.Phil., Italian Language and Literature, Yale University
1995: M.A., Italian Language and Literature, Yale University
1991: B.A., Summa cum Laude, double major in French (with Distinction) and Italian (with Exceptional Distinction), Yale University
1986: French Baccalaureate, with honors, Lycée Français de Washington, Washington, D. C.

Laura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in how modernity articulates new relationships between religious experience, embodiment, mortality, health, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.

Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012. It explores the creation and reception of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – an Italian, French, and British invention at the end of the First World War – as an emblem for modern mourning, from a cultural, historical, and literary perspective. It draws on literary and filmic evocations of the Unknown Soldier, as well as archival materials, to show that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is not pro-war, nationalist, or even proto-Fascist. Rather, it is a monument that heals trauma in two ways: first, it refuses facile consolations, and forcefully dramatizes the fact that suffering cannot be spiritualized or justified by any ideology; second, it rejects despair by enacting, through the concreteness of a particular body, a human solidarity in suffering that commands respect. Anticipating recent analyses of PTSD, the Memorial shows that when traumatic events are relived in a ritual, embodied, empathetic setting, healing occurs not via analysis but via symbolic communication and transmission of emotion. It has recently been translated into Italian as Il Milite Ignoto: Storia e Mito (LEG, 2021).

Laura Wittman is the editor of a special issue of the Romanic Review entitled Italy and France: Imagined Geographies (2006), as well as the co-editor of an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles on d’Annunzio, Marinetti, Fogazzaro, Ungaretti, Montale, Sereni,  Merini, A.R. Ammons, as well as on decadent-era culture, Italian cinema, and Medical Humanities. With Jon Snyder and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, she co-edited a special issue of California Italian Studies on "The Sacred in Italian Culture" (2015).

She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism," an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term "mystic without God" in the works of Gabriele d'Annununzio and Paul Valéry.

In Spring 2009, and again in 2019, she was organizer of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies (CICIS) Annual Conference, held at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was also organizer of the interdisciplinary conference on Language, Literature, and Mysticism held at the Stanford Humanities Center on 15 and 16 October 2010; and co-organizer of the War and the Arts Conference held at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2018 to commemorate the end of World War One, 100 years later.

Recently, she has been co-Chair (with Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology) of the Medical Humanities Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center; and she also was organizer of the Spring 2023 Medical Humanities Conference at Stanford, "Grief, Recovery, and Social Justice in the Wake of Covid-19."

She is currently completing a book entitled Faith in the Age of Irony that explores visions of the afterlife in modern literature and culture through Lazarus stories, as a window toward our changing attitudes toward “the good death.” Far from being purely personal, or medical in a narrow sense of comfort, the book proposes that “the good death” is a collective, public, and activist responsibility. 

She has just begun a new project on “Grief and Art in the Wake of Covid-19,” from a Health Humanities perspective.

 

 

Contact

Telephone
(650) 725-5243
Office
Pigott Hall, Bldg 260, Rm 135

Office Hours

For "Why College?" Mondays, 3:45-4:45 drop in time; for "Future Text," Mondays 2-3:45 drop in time.
Otherwise, by appointment (email me; can be in person or via zoom).

Research Interests

  • Film History, Criticism & Theory

     

  • French Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

     

  • Literary and Cultural Theory

     

  • Medical Humanities

     

  • Philosophy and Literature

     

  • Poetry and Poetics

     

  • Women’s Studies