Executive Leadership: Book Gallery

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  Mediterranean Encounters in the City: Frameworks of Mediation Between East and West, North and South

  Michela Ardizzoni and Valerio Ferme

  This book documents and analyzes how the contemporary Mediterranean city manages and negotiates its identity as a result of recent reconfigurations in its cultural, religious, and social landscape. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have recast difference as a central trope of identification in urban borderland settings, unleashing heated debates about cultural convergences and animating anxieties about an arguable clash of civilizations in modern cities. These emerging uncertainties have also grown stronger as the homogenizing forces of globalization unsettle essential principles of the nation-state and nationhood and render fixed perceptions of distinctive and singular people and cultures more tenuous. Recent scholarship and public discourse have accordingly framed discussions of these encounters around concerns of geo-political security and international policy. Unfortunately, framed within these terms, our understanding of how various groups within the Mediterranean metropolis deal with the intensification of difference as a lived experience has remained regrettably thin. This volume transcends this limitation and explores new, interdisciplinary research paradigms that will help us gain a comprehensive perspective on how complex macro and micro tensions, contradictions and similarities are negotiated in building urban identities in the Mediterranean basin.

  The contributors to this volume explore the multi-faceted nature of Mediterranean cities and engage a critical discussion of identity production and consumption in the Mediterranean basin. By spanning two centuries and examining both the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean, the chapters in this book provide a broad and comprehensive investigation of the ways in which recent cultural productions have framed and re-imagined the Mediterranean city as a locus of departures, arrivals and contested belonging. By focusing on cinema, photography, new media, magazines, music and literature as different stages for the performative representation of Mediterraneity, the authors highlight the vibrancy of the intercultural discourses taking place along the shores of the mare nostrum and provide new perspectives from which to explore the relationship between North and South, East and West.

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  Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron

  Valerio Ferme

  Providing new ways of reading Boccaccio's masterpiece, Decameron, Ferme analyzes the dynamics between the women who rule the first half of the story. Peeling back the many narrative layers within and outside of the framework, this book unearths the complications and trickery surrounding gender and death in Boccaccio's world and culture.

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  Italy and the Mediterranean: Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era

  Valerio Ferme and Norma Bouchard

  The Mediterranean has always loomed large in the history and culture of Italy, and since the 1980s this relationship has been represented in ever more varied forms as both national and regional identities have evolved within a globalized context. This interdisciplinary volume puts Italian artists (writers, musicians, and filmmakers) and intellectuals (philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists) in conversation with each other to explore Italy's Mediterranean identity while questioning the boundaries between Self and Other, and between native and foreign bodies. By moving beyond nation-centric models of cultural and ethnic homogeneity based on myths of progress and rationality, these wide-ranging contributions fashion new ways of belonging that transcend the cultural, economic, religious, and social categories that have characterized post Cold War Italy and Europe.

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  Tradurre è Tradire : la Traduzione come Sovversione Culturale sotto il Fascismo

  Valerio Ferme

  Title in English: "To Translate is to Betray: Translation as Cultural Subversion under Italian Fascism.”

  La traduzione è un’area della letteratura che spesso non riceve l’attenzione che le è dovuta, pur essendo importante nello sviluppo e nell’evoluzione di qualsiasi polisistema linguistico e culturale. Tradurre è tradire la rivaluta, offrendole un contesto che esula da considerazioni prettamente linguistiche, e che la discute invece come agente di trasformazione culturale e ideologica. Prendendo lo spunto da nuovi approcci nel campo dei «cultural studies» anglo-americani, l’autore analizza un periodo della storia letteraria italiana (gli anni Trenta dell’Italia fascista) già famoso per le sue traduzioni come fertile campo di ricerca per nuove intuizioni pertinenti non solo alle traduzioni dei ‘grandi’ traduttori Pavese e Vittorini, ma soprattutto al milieu linguistico e culturale in cui esse si affermarono. Il testo che ne risulta offre una nuova e più approfondita prospettiva sui processi di trasformazione culturale sottintesi al tradurre, e mostra la potenzialità sovversiva che la traduzione dalla letteratura americana ebbe sull’ideologia dominante durante il Ventennio fascista.

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  Diario Italo-Americano, 1989-1996

  Valerio Ferme

  "Diario Italo-Americano, 1989-1996 – as you can see from the title – is a diary about moving between countries. It is the essence of who I am. I grew up in Italy with people who used to say, “You’re an American” because my mother was American-Italian. When I moved to the United States, I was the Italian. The poetry is mostly about geography and how that geography spurs me to think about myself and my place in the world. While it was published in Italy, there is a section containing poems written in English, which for me highlights the split nature of my identity.'

  Description from Dr. Ferme, abstracted from Five questions for Valerio Ferme.