Laura Wittman
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 embodiment, mortality, health, spiritual experience, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.
Recently, she has been working in Health Humanities and has given papers on our changing imagination of death, dying, and the afterlife in the modern West. This is the subject of her current book project, 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 is co-Chair with Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, 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 has just begun a new project on “Grief and Art in the Wake of Covid-19,” from a Health Humanities perspective.
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).
Among her other publications, Laura Wittman co-edited with Jon Snyder and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi a special issue of California Italian Studies on "The Sacred in Italian Culture" (2015), and also co-edited with Lawrence Rainey an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles and book chapters on many figures from modern Italian and French studies, most recently on Pirandello, Svevo, and Gadda.
