French and Italian

Tales as old as time … yet we still love them

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:36:10 +0000

Tales as old as time … yet we still love them Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/04/2025 - 09:36

Rachel Sauer

With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, ɫ��ֱ�� scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales

Once upon a time—this time, in fact, and many of the ones that came before it—there was a story that never grew dull in its telling.

It possibly leaped the porous cultural and national borders of narrative, carried by caravans or ships or ethernet cables and planted in the ready imaginations of successive generations of story lovers—those who tell them and those who hear them.

Maybe it’s the story of a young person who ventures into the unknown, where they encounter magic and beasts of all sizes and a resolution specific to the tale’s time and place. Maybe there really even are fairies involved.

Suzanne Magnanini, a ɫ��ֱ�� associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian, notes that fairy tales' malleability helps them remain fresh and relevant over centuries of retellings.

And we never seem to tire of hearing about them.

The recent theatrical release of Disney’s live-action Snow White—one of countless retellings of the tale over more than 400 years—highlights the place of honor that fairy tales occupy in cultures around the world and in the hearts of people hearing them for the first time or the thousandth.

One of the reasons they remain fresh through countless years and iterations is their malleability, says Suzanne Magnanini, a ɫ��ֱ�� associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian. “The Italian author Italo Calvino, who also edited a seminal collection of Italian folktales, writes of fairy tales as being like a stone fruit, where you have that hard core center that is always the same—you’ll usually recognize a Sleeping Beauty story, for example—but the fruit can be radically different around that.”

Stories of time and place

As a researcher, Magnanini has published broadly on fairy tales, including her 2008 book Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Fairy Tales of Straparola and Basile. She began studying fairy tales while working on her PhD, finding in them a fascinating dovetailing between her interests in monstrosity and otherness.

“As a scholar, I take what’s called a social-historical approach,” she explains. “I’m really interested in all those little details that link a tale to a very precise place in time where it was told, and I’ve written about the ways in which fairy tales are used to elaborate on and think about scientific theories of reproduction that hadn’t really been nailed down at the time—questions that were still being circulated about whether humans could interbreed with animals, for example, and would that produce a monstrous child?

“You look at a some variations of Beauty and the Beast, like Giovan Francesco Straparola’s story of a pig king, where it’s a magical version of these questions, and maybe what’s actually happening is that fairy tales are a way to think through the anxieties and interests of the time.”

Fairy Tales at ɫ��ֱ��

The ATU Index is one of the search elements that Suzanne Magnanini and her students are including as they develop the database for Fairy Tales at ɫ��ֱ��. The project aims, in part, to improve access and searchability of the more than 2,000 fairy tale collections that are part of the Rare Books Collection at Norlin Library.

The project is a partnership between undergraduates and graduate students under the direction of Magnanini and Sean Babbs, instruction coordinator for the University Libraries' Rare and Distinctive Collections, as well as Hope Saska, CU Art Museum acting director and chief curator, who has trained students in visual-thinking strategies. The project is supported by Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the ASSETT Innovation Incubator, the President’s Teaching Scholars Program and the University Libraries.

Fairy Tales at ɫ��ֱ�� will host a showcase of CU's fairy tale collection from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. April 16 in Norlin Library M350B. Learn more here.

Though fairy tales may be spun in response to what’s happening in a specific time and place, they also often address concerns that aren’t specific to one location or culture but are broadly pondered across humanity. “Andrew Teverson has written that fairy tales are literature’s migrants because they can move across borders, they can move across boundaries and then make themselves at home and assimilate to a certain extent in different cultures,” Magnanini says.

For example, the Brothers Grimm heard a tale called “Sneewittchen” (Snow White) from folklorist Marie Hassenpflug, as well as from other sources, and included it as tale No. 53 in their seminal 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales. However, says Magnanini, there was a similar tale called “The Young Slave” in Giambattista Basile’s 1634 work Pentamerone. In fact, Snow White is type 709 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), which catalogs and describes common motifs and themes in fairy tales and folklore around the world.

Not so happily ever after

The origins of many fairy tales can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, Rome and China, Magnanini says, which speaks to their ability not only to help people of particular times and places explore their anxieties and questions, but to address the feelings that have been central to the human condition almost since our species emerged from caves.

“When I think about fairy tales, I think about number of characteristics that make them really appealing across time and space,” Magnanini says. “If you think about it, the protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges. That experience can be very transformational, so in a way these stories are all about metamorphosis and change.

“A lot of times that’s when you’re living your life in Technicolor and all the emotions are new. So, even if you’re no longer in that moment of life, fairy tales tap into experiences like the first falling in love, the first adventure from home. And they often end right after the wedding, so you don’t see someone having to do their taxes or being like, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve been in this relationship for 30 years and I’m bored.’ I think part of the reason we don’t get tired of fairy tales is because they capture this fleeting time in life.”

“If you think about it, the (fairy tale) protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges," says ɫ��ֱ�� scholar Suzanne Magnanini. (Photo: Disney Studios)

While fairy tales, particularly as they’ve been interpreted and simplified by Disney, are stereotyped as having “and they lived happily ever after” endings, fairy tales pre-Disney more commonly ended with justice served, Magnanini says. For example, the version of “Snow White” in the 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales ends with the evil queen being forced to step into a pair of red-hot iron shoes and dance until she dies.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, it’s the happy ending that’s the appeal of fairy tales,’ but it’s important to remember the vast majority of fairy tales end with the deliverance of justice—something really unjust has happened, someone has been discriminated against, there’s some evil in the world, and justice is delivered,” Magnanini explains. “People who study the formal aspects of fairy tales always talk about how the ‘happy ending’ is found in justice.

“Disney Studios has a tendency to remove the ambiguity from these tales and remove most of the violence—simplifying them in a lot of ways. If you read the French version of Beauty and the Beast, Charles Perrault’s version, there were other siblings in there; there was a complex family structure with complex interactions and a lot of really heavy issues—the family must deal with economic disaster.”

In fact, the field of fairy tale scholarship addresses everything from feminist interpretations of the stories to the ways in which children use fairy tales to help navigate psychosexual rites of passage. Generations of authors have told and continue to retell these familiar stories through different lenses of gender, sexuality, geography, racial identity, economic status and many, many others.

“What makes these stories different, and what I think is a big part of the appeal of fairy tales, is the magic or the marvel,” Magnanini says. “For it to be a fairy tale, scholars would say there has to be magic in there—not just the presence of magic, but magic that facilitates the happy ending by allowing the protagonist to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of what they desire, maybe the marriage, the wealth, the happy ending. There’s something so satisfying about that, because it doesn’t happen in your quotidian day-to-day life. I mean, imagine if you met a talking deer.”

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With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, ɫ��ֱ�� scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales.

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Top image: Disney Studios

As it has for centuries, Paris beguiles and beckons

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 22:12:44 +0000

As it has for centuries, Paris beguiles and beckons Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/19/2024 - 16:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

With the 2024 Olympics set to open, ɫ��ֱ�� professor Aimee Kilbane ponders Americans’ long love affair with the City of Light

Among all cities on earth, Paris must surely be counted among the most storied, the most romanticized and the most infused with literary, artistic, historical and cultural meaning.

Consider just a handful of associations with the City of Light, as the capital of love, art and the avant garde. It brought us Impressionism, the Belle Epoque and la vie de bohème, and it served as the stomping grounds for uncountable expatriates, including the “Lost Generation.”

The mystique of France’s ancient capital has long drawn tourists from around the world in search of their own unique experiences. With the opening of the XXXIII Olympiad, aka Paris 2024, on July 26, countless thousands of visitors old and new are expected to pour into the city and its environs, including many Americans, who’ve had a long fascination with the city.

Aimee Kilbane, an assistant teaching professor of French at the ɫ��ֱ��, first went to Paris as a third-year undergraduate and over the past quarter century has returned for frequent visits and residencies.

“One practical reason Americans fall in love with Paris so easily is that it’s such an accessible, walkable city. You get your bearings more quickly than in London or elsewhere in Europe,” says Aimee Kilbane, assistant teaching professor of French at the ɫ��ֱ��.

At the same time, she says, “it’s a beautiful city, with no end to its layers. A familiar refrain is that you can never fully know Paris, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.”

Romantic Paris

Kilbane first went to Paris as a third-year undergraduate and over the past quarter century has returned for frequent visits and residencies. With an academic focus on the tourists, expatriates and subcultures of Paris, she teaches a course on Modern Paris and has served as tour guide to dozens of students abroad.

The romantic Paris of the American imagination is only a recent addition to millennia of history. The city’s ancient roots fascinate many visitors from the still-wet-behind-the-ears United States. What we now know as Paris was founded by the Parisii, a Celtic tribe, on an island in the middle of the Seine River around 250 BCE.

“Walking through the city is like walking through history, no matter what you’re interested in— the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th-century. There are traces of Roman, and even pre-Roman, Paris everywhere,” Kilbane says.

Kilbane enjoys taking students to see the largely intact Arènes de Lutèce, a 1st-century Roman theater and amphitheater unearthed and excavated in the 1860s.

“Every time they build an underground parking structure, extend a metro line or widen a boulevard, they find remnants of Paris’ buried past,” she says.

Kilbane also teaches a Global Seminar on-location in Paris, to explore the city’s literal and figurative “undergrounds.” The literal includes its famous, eerie catacombs, Metro rail system, sewers and the depths of the Louvre art museum; the figurative encompasses cutting-edge art and cultural movements past and present and discarded or “buried” histories such as the stories of immigrants and their influence on the city.

Above ground, the medieval cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, built in the 12th century, looms large in the city’s history, landscape and, thanks to Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, literary heritage.

“It’s a magnificent piece of architecture, with massive Gothic towers that lend a sense of permanence as they watch over this ancient and modern city, almost as a surveyor or protector,” Kilbane says. “It’s magical and majestic, but it’s also a nearly 1,000-year-old marvel of engineering that defies gravity.”

Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, seen in October 2017. (Photo: Ali Sabbagh/Wikimedia Commons)

On the other end of the architectural spectrum is a landmark that has, over time, supplanted Notre Dame as the most visible symbol of the city: the Eiffel Tower, built as a centerpiece for the 1889 World’s Fair.

“It’s another kind of tower, not as solemn, its presence feels less eternal. I suppose some find it elegant,” Kilbane notes wryly, “but I could not give a good answer as to why or how it’s become the symbol of Paris.”

(She’s not the only one who’s been less than impressed: When asked why he so often frequented the tower, 19^th-century British author, poet and artist William Morris replied, “This is the only place in the city where I can look out and avoid seeing this hideous thing.”)

A crossroads for artists and thinkers

Medieval Paris was an influential center of theology and scholarship as far back as the 13th century, thanks to the establishment of the Sorbonne, one of Europe’s oldest universities. The 19th-century cemented Paris’ reputation as an artist’s paradise, with its influential École des Beaux-Arts. Impressionism, considered by many the zenith of 1800s European art, began as a rebellion against the rules and strictures of the day, and Paris has long been a crossroads for artists and thinkers who push boundaries.

Many Americans first encounter the city through the written word, particularly the famous Lost Generation—American writers who made pilgrimage to the city in the 1920s, including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Paris also drew Beat hero Jack Kerouac and some of the greatest African American artists, performers and writers of the 20th century, including Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker and James Baldwin.

“Paris was the place to go study to be an artist in the 1800s,” Kilbane says. “In the 20th century, it became the destination of choice for would-be writers and other exiles seeking more creative freedom than they knew at home.”

The Luxembourg Gardens and Luxembourg Palace in Paris. (Photo: Rdevany/Wikimedia Commons)

The city has deeply influenced film, as well. Paris has played a starring role in American cinema: musicals like Funny Face and An American in Paris helped renew American tourism in Paris after World War II, and more recent films like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris continue to revisit the romantic myth of the young, contemplative American writer abroad.

“Hemingway provided the blueprint for Americans with artistic ambitions in Paris,” Kilbane says. “Midnight in Paris comes directly from A Moveable Feast.”

Literary-minded visitors still visit landmarks of Hemingway’s Paris, such as the Luxembourg Gardens, the cafés he made famous and the bookstalls along the Seine. And no trip to Paris would be complete without stepping inside Shakespeare and Company. Established by American Sylvia Beach in 1922 as an English-language lending library that would be instrumental to the anglophone expatriate community and modernist literature, it published the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, sold Hemingway’s first collection of poems and is still going strong.

Contemporary Paris has a vibrant music scene, infused with world influences, and is a leader in green innovation and livable-city sensibilities, Kilbane says.

She likes to take students to Batignolles, a neighborhood less frequented by tourists that combines old and new Paris. Parc Clichy-Batignolles - Martin Luther King, completed in 2021, is a green space built between towering high rises, adjacent to a 19th-century park and village once frequented by impressionist painters.

“Les Batignolles is really a unique spot in Paris—it has a great old-Paris, sleepy village feel while being young and animated,” Kilbane says. “Meanwhile, the new park looks nothing like the rest of Paris—it combines wild vegetation and community gardens with 21st-century architecture.

“Paris has been unfavorably compared to a museum. That is to say, the past is enshrined and fetishized to the extent that the vibrancy of contemporary Paris is obscured. But it really is a living city that is able to adapt and reinvent.”

Or as Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, “There is never any ending to Paris….”

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With the 2024 Olympics set to open, ɫ��ֱ�� professor Aimee Kilbane ponders Americans’ long love affair with the City of Light.

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Pirates and zombies are not so different

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 18:53:32 +0000

Pirates and zombies are not so different Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/31/2023 - 12:53

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published article, ɫ��ֱ�� researcher Kieran Murphy traces the concurrent paths and points of intersection between pirate and zombie lore in Haiti and popular culture

High in the rugged mountains above Saint-Marc, Haiti, is a cave that even today, some don’t dare visit. It is a legendary, almost mythical place called Trou Forban (Pirate Cave).

Stories say it is an enchanted cave filled with coffee and sugar plantations worked by crews of the undead and ruled by the Man of Trou Forban. “When the master of Trou Forban walks,” author Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “the whole Earth trembles.”

Notorious 20^th-century Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier is whispered to have visited Trou Forban and participated in a black magic rite that invited evil spirits to live in his presidential palace.

Despite its spooky reputation, Trou Forban and its surroundings have for centuries been a literal and spiritual meeting place for clandestine communities like buccaneers and Africans who escaped slavery, who came to be known as “maroons.” Interactions between these clandestine communities—sometimes amicable, sometimes not—gave rise to pirate and zombie myths whose similarities and concurrent paths might surprise modern audiences.

ɫ��ֱ�� researcher Kieran Murphy explores the origins and interconnected trajectories of pirate and zombie myths in Haiti.

In a recently published paper tracing the origins and trajectories of interconnected pirate and zombie lore, Kieran Murphy, a ɫ��ֱ�� associate professor of French and Italian who teaches a class called “The Zombie and the Ghost of Slavery” (FREN 1880), highlights how ritual piracies by both Black and White clandestine people “left traces of mutual recognition, traces which shed light on lesser known influences that played a role in fomenting insurrection and anti-colonial sentiment in the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution.”

“The zombie is a Haitian invention that represents the nightmare of these formerly enslaved people, these maroons,” Murphy says. “Meaning, they fought for their freedom, but they have this vision of a monster that comes back from the dead to be a slave again on plantations.

“You can see why this horrific figure would emerge in Haiti for people who were finally free and trying to make a life outside the plantation system. This fear that, after death, they would come back and be forced to work the plantations again reflects the social death that was imposed on enslaved people, that they fought against, when, after defeating Napoleon’s army, they declared the abolition of slavery.”

Connecting pirates and zombies

Before an invitation to a conference themed “Pirates and Zombies” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Murphy viewed the two entities separately. He’d written articles and taught classes on horror films and zombies since graduate school, but it wasn’t until this conference that he thought, “Hmmm, how am I going to connect these two things?” he says.

He turned to colonial records, but it wasn’t until he came across a photograph by Phyllis Galembo that something clicked. In the photograph, a Vodou devotee is posing as Bawon Lakwa (Baron La Croix), one of a group of Vodou deities who rule over the dead and are collectively called Guédé (Vodou is an Afro-Caribbean spirituality that has little in common with the portrayal of “Voodoo” in Western media). The man is wearing a black top hat adorned with both the skull and crossbones of a Jolly Roger flag and the word “zonbi,” the Creole spelling of “zombie.”

Oungan Celestin Montilas Philippe, a priest from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, posing as Bawon Lakwa in a photograph by artist Phyllis Galembo.

“In many ways, buccaneers were themselves clandestine, unauthorized communities,” Murphy says. “Reading old colonial reports, I saw interactions between maroons and pirates, which makes sense because both communities were living on the margins of European empires in the Caribbean.

“They were sometimes trading partners, and there was sometimes violence between them, but they both originated outside the plantation system of the colonies. In many pirate communities, it didn’t matter if you were White, Black, Indigenous, they were clandestine people united outside the colonial European framework.”

Rebels and outcasts

Because of scant historical record, it’s difficult to find the precise moment when pirate and maroon communities began intersecting, Murphy says. However, once he saw the Jolly Roger and “zonbi” on the same hat, it provided a clue that cultural exchanges and appropriations had happened among these communities.

For example, pirates and Guédé deities have been known for their Dionysian attitudes and for mixing eroticism and death into their symbols (in 18^th century slang, the word “roger” meant “penis” and “to copulate.”)

Further, there are historical records of Vodou rituals that involve drinking rum laced with gunpowder, which was also a tradition among mutineers and pirates, Murphy says. Maroon and pirate communities shared a certain rebelliousness and outcast nature.

Maroons played a central role in fomenting slave revolt in the colony, including the world-changing events now known as the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). When they declared their independence, Haitians abolished slavery in their constitution long before France, England and the U.S. did. However, France agreed to recognize Haiti as an independent country only after Haitian leaders signed an indemnity agreement to repay France 150 million francs as restitution for lost property—including lost human property.

"Vol de Zombis" (1946) by Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite

As Haitians struggled under the almost unbearable weight of this financial burden and leaders made moves to reinstate a form of the plantation system, some maroons remained in hiding and the zombie as an embodiment of a nightmarish future grew stronger.

By the 20^th century, however, popular culture had absconded with the zombie, turning it into a symbol of Western anxieties, Murphy says. A similar cultural appropriation happened with pirates. Yet, the framework and archetypes—and the commonalities between them—have continued to inform their portrayals in mass media.

Murphy cites “The Walking Dead” as an example of the pirate-zombie-colonialist structure, with the protagonists sometimes claiming allegiance to imperialist groups like “The Saviors” while behaving like a clandestine pirate group and fighting flesh-eating zombies. In the TV show, zombies embody early European paranoid fantasies linking Indigenous peoples with cannibalism, Murphy says.

“Through a story involving zombie, pirate and imperialist characters, ‘The Walking Dead’ reenacts colonial history while relying on the trope of the undead to suggest that the present remains haunted by the violence and tragedies of the past,” Murphy writes. From this perspective, “The Walking Dead” is just a reinterpretation of the Haitian legend of Trou Forban.

Top image: (left) "Three Zombies" (1956) by Haitian artist Wilson Bigaud; romanticized pirate image (iStock)

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In a recently published article, ɫ��ֱ�� researcher Kieran Murphy traces the concurrent paths and points of intersection between pirate and zombie lore in Haiti and popular culture.

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On lonely ɫ��ֱ�� ‘prairie,’ Mary Rippon saw glory

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 18:44:38 +0000

On lonely ɫ��ֱ�� ‘prairie,’ Mary Rippon saw glory Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/03/2022 - 11:44

Women’s history snapshot: CU’s first woman faculty member, now a university icon, hesitated to come West

Mary Rippon was a bona fide pioneer who became a University of Colorado icon, but CU almost did not become her home.

CU’s first president, Joseph A. Sewall, invited Rippon to teach at the University of Colorado, which had just opened its doors in September 1877. Rippon initially declined, noting that she’d just accepted a high school teaching job in Detroit.

Rippon—whom history books conspicuously call “Miss Rippon,” thus underscoring the fact that she was not married—had already led a vigorous academic life by the time Sewall recruited her. After graduating from high school, she studied abroad for five years, spending two years apiece in Germany and Switzerland, plus one year in France.

While in Detroit, a minister who’d just returned from ɫ��ֱ�� urged her not to go. As the clergyman told it, the university comprised nothing but a single building “way out on a prairie.” Further, he warned, that one building would soon collapse, killing all inside.

Rippon ignored this advice, accepting an appointment to join the faculty in January 1878.

At the top of the page: Completed in 1876, Old Main was the first building on ɫ��ֱ�� campus. Above: Mary Rippon was the first female professor at CU and is believed to be the first female faculty at a state university (Photo courtesy of ɫ��ֱ�� Archives).

As the story goes, three things changed her mind. One was news that Charles Buckingham, a ɫ��ֱ�� banker, had donated $2,000 to purchase books for the new CU library. Another was Helen Hunt Jackson’s inspiring writing, accompanied by watercolors paintings, of Colorado wildflowers. And the third was President Sewall, whose repeated invitations helped persuade her to come.

She took the train from Detroit to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then south to ɫ��ֱ��, where Sewall met her. As Rippon observed, “The daylight had faded, but a new moon cast enough light to show up the wonderful line of the snow-clad mountains.”

In the crisp January air, Sewall asked Rippon how things looked to her.

She recalled: “With eyes turned toward the silhouette at the west, and thoughts on the Alps, my one word was ‘glorious.’”

Sewall appeared relieved and said, “Well my spirits have risen 100%. My wife had told me that you would not stay two days in this lonely place.”

But stay she did. Her job was to teach French and German, plus to give “some instruction in the branches of math and English grammar.” On this then-remote outpost, with a handful of college students, she became the first woman to be a professor at CU and is thought to be the first female faculty member at any state university.

Nine men and one woman had entered the inaugural first-year class of students in 1878, but only six, all men, continued to graduation. For the young men, it was easy to leave school to find good-paying jobs as cowboys. It is not clear, but not hard to imagine, what prompted a woman to leave.

When Rippon joined the university, having studied abroad and lived as an independent person, she was entrusted with the education of the young, yet she did not have the freedom to vote. That right was not recognized until 1894, after a statewide referendum recognized female suffrage.

She also received unequal pay. President Sewall had an annual salary of $3,000 in 1878. The first faculty member, a man, was paid $2,000. Rippon, hired at about the same time, got $1,200 a year.

The six men who composed CU’s first graduating class in 1882 might not have thought such inequity amiss. As one of the graduates wrote, two of the six graduates “would vote for ‘women’s rights,’ meaning the suffrage, one would not, one is for woman’s rights—rights to manage the household—while two are lukewarm as to the whole question.”

Further, the graduate said, one of the six graduating seniors was opposed to “co-education,” in which women and men studied together.

These shades of information suggest the contours of life for Mary Rippon, who remained at the university until she retired in 1909. Today, the campus’ outdoor theater, home of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, bears her name. It is an homage to her pioneering spirit, which, in other ways, endures.

Sources: Glory Colorado, a History of the University of Colorado, 1858-1963; The University of Colorado, 1876-1976.

Women’s history snapshot: CU’s first woman faculty member, now a university icon, hesitated to come West.

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Turning the page with Cosetta Seno

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 16:31:45 +0000

Turning the page with Cosetta Seno Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/12/2020 - 10:31

Robin Ferruggia

Truth, metaphor and female perspective in Italian literature

People often disagree about what is true; but what is true is not always as obvious as we might expect it should be. Sometimes artists, writers, filmmakers and other creatives use imaginative ways to show people truths they might not see otherwise.

One such person was Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998)—an author from Rome raised in Naples—whose father, an impoverished government employee, had to move his family often because of his job. Thus, Ortese grew up feeling like a stranger in her own country, which led her to create a unique adaptation of the Italian neorealism style of writing with which she expressed truths that were otherwise hard to explain. She used imaginative fantasy to present reality in a powerful, gripping manner.

Italian neorealism (a literary movement that became popular in Italy after World War II) “tried to present Italy as the way it was,” said Cosetta Seno, associate professor of Italian at the ɫ��ֱ��. Mussolini’s fascist regime presented a perfected portrait of Italy, and the neorealist movement wanted to offer an authentic portrait or the country. “(They) were hoping that, by doing so, Italy would have a real chance of becoming a better country for all the Italians; a country where equality and justice could be shared by all.”

At the top of the page: Naples, Italy Above: Anna Maria Ortese

Seno—who is originally from the small coastal town of Rimini in the Emilia-Romagna region of central Italy and was raised in the Verona area west of Venice—was especially touched by the writings of Ortese while she was in graduate school. In 2013, she wrote a book about Ortese titled Anna Maria Ortese Unavventuroso realismo (Anna Maria Ortese: An Adventurous Realism) which demonstrated how Ortese used fantasy to offer a better and deeper understanding of reality, rather than escape it.

Seno initially got interested in Ortese after one of her short stories captured her heart. “Un paio di occhiali” (A Pair of Glasses), part of the collection, il mare non bagna Napoli (Neapolitan Chronicles), tells the story of a little girl in Naples who was almost completely blind.

Seno brings her Italian values of community and cooperation to her teaching."

“She was too poor for a pair of glasses,” she said. “Her aunt saved money to buy her glasses. When she used them for the first time, she realized that she lived on an impoverished street instead of the beautiful boulevard she had always imagined. She became painfully aware of her social condition and of the poverty of her family. She got nauseous and she had to take the glasses off. She couldn’t stand to look at the reality she lived in.

“In this story, Ortese offered a very unique interpretation of neorealism by juxtaposing reality and fantasy in a very special way; which made her an eccentric and difficult writer to classify within the Italian literary canon.”

Another profound story that drew Seno to Ortese was, The Iguana, written in 1965, in which a young rich nobleman from Milan falls in love with an iguana on a fictional island.

“After World War II, people were tuned into re-building and expanding the devastated cities,” she said. “Many parks and forests were destroyed in this process, and cities were rebuilt without taking into account any environmental issues. There was no respect for nature or animals. Ortese made people reflect on the idea that animals deserved equal care, love and respect because they were sharing the planet Earth with us and needed to be understood and respected if we wanted a chance to survive. She was one of the first to talk about these problems in Italy when nobody was discussing ecology. She was ahead of her time. About her 1965 novel, Ortese said that it was almost an autobiography—the story of a human being that was half woman and half reptile. She put herself in the skin of an animal to express how she felt different. It was a metaphor for the life of a woman.

Cosetta Seno, associate professor of Italian at the ɫ��ֱ��

“The point of view of women is difficult to explain. When a woman talks about her reality, she often takes into account the diversity of human beings and other creatures who do not belong. It is often a more inclusive perspective. Women intrinsically know what it means to be different, and therefore are more prone to be inclusive of all other different creatures.”

Women’s studies is another passion of Seno’s. She is the former elected president of the AAIS (American Association of Italian Studies) Women’s Studies Caucus and continues to work in the field of women’s studies through her research on women writers and gender theories. In spring 2019, she received the departmental teaching award. She specializes in 19th and 20th century Italian literature and culture.

Seno came to America when she was about 25 years old after having received a degree in English and Russian literature in Italy. She had been working in Russia with a non-profit American organization when American friends encouraged her to embrace an opportunity to apply to graduate school in the United States. She was accepted and completed her master’s degree in Italian studies at the University of Virginia. From there she went to University of California at Berkeley, where she received her doctorate in Italian studies.

“It’s important to maintain connections to the homeland in Italy,” she said. “I wanted to continue to understand my culture more. You re-discover it when you go abroad. I became more interested in it every day when living in the United States than when living in Italy.”

After her graduation, she taught Italian at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and at the Catholic University of America. She moved to Colorado in 2007 when she was offered a tenure track job teaching Italian literature and culture at ɫ��ֱ�� and received tenure there in 2014.

Her first book, co-authored by Professor Paolo Cherchi, l’italiano nell'America del nord (The Italians and the Italian Language in North America) was published in 2010. She is currently working on her new book length project, tentatively titled Mediterranean Spaces and Places within Narrative Reportage, in which she analyzes the evolution of the narrative genre of reportage with particular reference to the representation of the city of Naples. In 2019, she was invited to be guest-editor for a special issue of Italian literary journal Il Lettore di Provincia, devoted to the education of young women in post-unification Italy. It was published in April 2020.

Seno brings her Italian values of community and cooperation to her teaching. “Like most people, my values are mixed now,” she said. “I bring the best of both cultures to teaching. It’s important to embrace communication—direct communication. I get to know my students personally. The classes in my department are smaller, so I have the privilege of getting to know them well. ... And thanks to my American education, I learned to see teaching as a way to constantly challenge my views and opinions in order to embrace and understand my students’ perspectives,” she said. “It is a growing experience for everyone in the class.”

This article was republished with permission from Colorado's Italian community newspaper, Andiamo!

Truth, metaphor and female perspective in Italian literature

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Nation’s largest Italian Film Festival returns to ɫ��ֱ��

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Nation’s largest Italian Film Festival returns to ɫ��ֱ�� Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/03/2019 - 11:00

Cay Leytham-Powell

Italian Film Festival USA ɫ��ֱ�� to present six critically acclaimed Italian films in April

The nation’s largest Italian film festival is back at the ɫ��ֱ�� for another year of critically acclaimed Italian films—this time featuring thieves, forbidden love, Italian cuisine, pregnancy, prison and Caravaggio’s The Nativity.

The Italian Film Festival USA of ɫ��ֱ��, which runs during two weekends in April, will feature six recent films that are still largely unavailable in the United States in their native language with subtitles, as well as introductions by local experts and the film’s directors, all in an effort to expose the ɫ��ֱ�� community to the people, language and culture of Italy through cinema.

Which, says Michela Ardizzoni, an associate professor of Italian at ɫ��ֱ�� and one of the event’s co-organizers, is one of the main reasons behind the event.

“I feel that when people talk to me about Italy, they know gelato and pizza, which are great, and they do exist and they’re wonderful, but there’s more,” says Ardizzoni. “There’s more that is magnificent and there’s more that is not so good, and I think it’s important for people to know closer to the reality of what Italy is about.”

The festival began in St. Louis in 2005 with the hope that it would “provide the public the opportunity to see films that have not yet or may never be seen locally.” Since its inception, it’s grown steadily in communities across the United States, and has gotten to the point that last year more than 13,000 people attended the festival. ɫ��ֱ�� first held the festival in 2010, with the current organizers—Ardizzoni and Cosetta Seno, an associate professor of Italian—taking over in 2016.

This year, the festival has expanded and will be held in 14 different cities: Boston, ɫ��ֱ��, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Memphis, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City and St. Louis.

The festival, however, is a little different in each city, where local organizers choose what and how many films they show. This year, the ɫ��ֱ�� chapter of the festival will have six films:

**Like a Cat on a Highway (Come un Gatto in Tangenziale)**

Thursday, April 4 • 6:30 p.m. • Eaton Humanities 150

Introduction: Christopher Braider, chair of the Department of French and Italian and professor of distinction in French, ɫ��ֱ��

Synopsis: Giovanni and Monica are the most diverse people on the face of the earth. He is an intellectual, a proponent of social integration and lives in the center of Rome; she is a former supermarket cashier who deals every day with the multicultural environment of her suburban neighborhood. They would never have met if their children did not start dating. The two have a common goal: The friendship between their children, like a cat on the highway, must end!

(Director, Riccardo Milani, Comedy, 2018, 98 min.)

[video:https://youtu.be/PkGShSJaTo0]

**The Stolen Caravaggio (Una Storia Senza Nome)**

Friday, April 5 • 6 p.m. • Eaton Humanities 150

Introduction: Priscilla Craven, Italian teaching professor, ɫ��ֱ��

Synopsis: Valeria, the young secretary of a film producer, lives a secluded life in the same apartment building as her eccentric mother, and pens anonymous scripts for a successful screenwriter, Alessandro. One day she is approached by a mysterious man who gives her an unusual gift: the plot for her next script. But that plot turns out to be a dangerous one: the story without a name is, in fact, about the mysterious1969 theft of a famous painting by Caravaggio, The Nativity, carried out in Palermo by the Mafia.

(Director, Roberto Andò, Drama, 2018, 110 min.)

[video:https://youtu.be/KU8Q-Geubio]

**As Needed (Quanto Basta)**

Saturday, April 6 • 6 p.m. • Eaton Humanities 150

Introduction: Susanna Saurini, Italian instructor, ɫ��ֱ��

Synopsis: Arturo, a talented chef with a troubled past, is assigned to serve community time as a cooking instructor at a school for teenagers with Asperger’s syndrome. One of the students, Guido, is very talented and passionate about cooking. Will the improbable friendship between the two help Arturo change his life around?

(Director, Francesco Falaschi, Comedy, 2018, 92 min.)

Note: There will also be a corresponding exhibit (organized by Italian Senior Instructor Chiara Torriani) on Italian world-renowned chef Pellegrino Artusi, author of The Art of Eating Well, in the Eaton Humanities living area.

[video:https://youtu.be/yqEQ9ecPXq4]

Manuel

Thursday, April 18 • 6 p.m. • Visual Arts Complex Auditorium 1B20

Introduction: Suzanne Magnanini, associate professor of Italian, ɫ��ֱ��

Synopsis: Manuel, who just turned 18, leaves the education center where he was placed five years before when his mother was jailed. Happy to feel free again, he has just one objective: to help his mother get her remaining years of imprisonment commuted to house arrest. In order to receive the commuted sentence, Manuel must present himself to the authorities as a responsible adult, able to watch over his mother while he is working. It is a big responsibility for a young man.

(Director, Dario Albertini, Drama, 2017, 97 min.)

[video:https://youtu.be/EALAbFQTbTo]

Bob & Marys

Friday, April 19 • 6 p.m. • Eaton Humanities 150

Introduction: Olga Vasile, French and Italian lecturer, ɫ��ֱ��

Synopsis: Roberto and Marisa are a couple who have been married for almost 30 years, leading a tranquil and uneventful life. That is until one night a band of ruthless criminals breaks into their house and fills it up with boxes containing mysterious, but definitely illegal, contents. This practice, known as “accùppatura” requires the innocent homeowners to warehouse the illegal merchandise for the criminals. As the days pass, the couple decides to make a bold move.

(Director, Francesco Prisco, Comedy, 2018, 100 min.)

[video:https://youtu.be/V1nBoZeak_Y]

**The Vice of Hope (Il Vizio Della Speranza)**

Saturday, April 20 • Catered Reception starts at 5 p.m. • Film begins at 6 p.m. • Eaton Humanities 150

Introduction: Francesca Howell, adjunct faculty at Naropa and author of Food, Festival and Religion: Materiality and place in Italy, London and NY (2018).

Synopsis: Maria lives a hand-to-mouth existence, without dreams or desires, as she ferries pregnant women across the river like a modern-day Caronte. But hope will pay her a visit, in its most powerful form, teaching her that staying human is the greatest of all revolution.

(Director, Edoardo De Angelis, Drama, 2018, 96 min.)

[video:https://youtu.be/NA3_N1uwKAU]

This event is sponsored by the French and Italian, Media Studies, Women and Gender Studies and Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts departments and is free and open to the public.

Italian Film Festival USA ɫ��ֱ�� to present six critically acclaimed Italian films in April

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College names three new professors of distinction

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:43:21 +0000

College names three new professors of distinction Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/01/2018 - 15:43

In recognition of their exceptional service, teaching and research, three members of the ɫ��ֱ�� faculty have been named 2018 Professors of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences.

The new professors of distinction are Mitchell C. Begelman of astrophysical and planetary sciences, Christopher Braider of French and Italian and Janet Jacobs of women and gender studies.

Mitchell C. Begelman, Christopher Braider and Janet Jacobs have been named professors of distinction in the College of Arts and Sciences.

This revered title is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international acclaim whose college peers also recognize as exceptionally talented teachers and colleagues. Honorees of this award hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at ɫ��ֱ��.

The trio will be honored on Monday, Sept. 24, at 3:30 p.m., in the Old Main Chapel on campus. At the free and public event, each will give a 20-minute public presentation based on his or her research or scholarly work. A reception in the Heritage Center on the third floor of Old Main will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Begelman, who is also fellow of JILA, works on a wide range of topics in theoretical astrophysics, and is particularly interested in how black holes interact with their cosmic environments.

His talk is titled “Black Holes are Fussy Eaters.”

Christopher Braider, who chairs French and Italian and served as transitional dean of the College of Media, Communication and Information, has won five teaching honors, including CU’s Best Should Teach Gold Award in 2016. He works in the fields of early modern European literary, artistic, and intellectual culture, exploring the multi-faceted interconnections between literature, theater, visual art, natural philosophy, and political theology.

Braider’s lecture is titled “Keeping Count: Ruben’s ‘Four Philosophers,’ or the Arts and Humanities at Work.”

Jacobs, who also holds an appointment in the Department of Sociology, focuses her research on ethnic and religious violence, gender, mass trauma and collective memory. Her studies in the field cover a wide range of areas on gendered and racialized violence in the Americas and in eastern and western Europe.

Her internationally recognized work has contributed to global efforts to support women and children in the aftermath of mass trauma. She is author of five books, numerous articles, and two edited volumes.

Her lecture is titled “Sites of Terror and the Memory of Genocidal Trauma.”

For longer biographical sketches of this year’s winners and for a full listing of previously named professors of distinction, see the Professors of Distinction webpage.

In recognition of their exceptional service, teaching and research, three members of the ɫ��ֱ�� faculty have been named 2018 Professors of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Outstanding grad challenges one-dimensional images of women

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 21:54:45 +0000

Outstanding grad challenges one-dimensional images of women Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/14/2016 - 14:54

Clint Talbott

When she was a child, Maiji Castro’s father was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in Japan, Korea and Italy. There, she found fine art museums and her life’s calling.

Maiji Castro

“I knew I wanted to work in a museum,” Castro said. She is well on her way.

Castro, who graduates summa cum laude with a degree in art history and a minor in Italian, has been named the fall 2016 outstanding graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at the ɫ��ֱ��. Hers is one of 1,574 degrees that ɫ��ֱ�� will be awarding during at the midpoint of the academic year.

In her honors thesis, Castro examined the 19^th century paintings of bathers by Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt. Castro contends that Degas and Cassatt were among the first artists who challenged the eroticism of the nude by “examining modern connections between class, privacy and cleanliness.”

Both Degas and Cassatt were hampered in their efforts to do this, he by his gender and she by her position as an upper-middle-class woman, Castro argues. Further, she notes that the effort to break free from traditional eroticized nudes is continuing today:

“It is a continuing debate as to whether artists, society and the contemporary female nude will ever be free of the desire and eroticism established by the classical idealized form,” Castro writes.

Women should no longer be viewed as erotic objects solely for the male gaze but as whole complete people who have professions, and families and possess the power to choose.”

In remarks prepared for a gathering of graduating honors students, Castro notes that artists have long depicted women primarily as beautiful, perfect objects to be desired: “Women were reduced to the nude Venus emerging from the frothy sea by Botticelli, to the provocative odalisque lounging on silk sheets by Ingres, to goddesses facing the judgment of Paris, and to Susanna being blamed for the uncontrolled lechery of the Elders.”

These are stereotypes that all people, “men and women alike, should be campaigning to free ourselves from,” Castro states, adding that women’s access to social media today helps women control the narrative told about their own lives.

In her honors thesis, Castro examined the 19th century paintings of bathers by Mary Cassatt.

She concludes, “Women should no longer be viewed as erotic objects solely for the male gaze but as whole complete people who have professions, and families and possess the power to choose.”

Castro cited two of her favorite contemporary female artists who are working toward this end: Tomoko Sawada and Amanda Charchian.

Sawada, a Japanese photographer and performance artist, photographs herself to comment on women’s self-identity and how women are judged on their appearances. Charchian, a Los Angeles-based photographer and mixed-media artist, is known for taking pictures of nude women artists in mystical landscapes to empower the female nude.

While a ɫ��ֱ�� student, Castro completed a study-abroad program at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy, and she earned her certificate in applied business from the CU Leeds School of Business.

After graduation, Castro will be finishing the application process for graduate school. She is applying to Georgetown University, New York University, the City College of New York, and the University of Denver. Meantime, she will also continue working at the ɫ��ֱ�� Museum of Contemporary Art.

If she could choose her career, she’d direct the New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If I’m going to have a dream job, I want it to be grandiose,” she said.

Maiji Castro, who graduates summa cum laude with a degree in art history and a minor in Italian, has been named the fall 2016 outstanding graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at the ɫ��ֱ��.

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Italian alumna, lifelong learner experiences la dolce vita

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:50:07 +0000

Italian alumna, lifelong learner experiences la dolce vita Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/05/2016 - 10:50

Clint Talbott

Simple twists of fate propelled Joyce Earickson toward the study of Italian, then English, divinity and psychology. She has taught Italian, French, English, and world religions; comforted families of those who were critically injured and gravely ill; and worked with autistic and disabled children.

Joyce Earickson

While her career’s focus has varied, her goals have remained constant: teaching, helping others and leading a meaningful life.

“I’ve done so many things that frightened me to my core, but I’ve done them anyway,” Earickson said, noting that her career path required several student loans and did not yield high-paying work.

“Part of me is very drawn to the life of luxury, but another part of me is repelled by it. I need to be making a contribution to the world at some level.”

By several measures, that mission has been accomplished.

Earickson earned her bachelor’s and master’s in Italian language and literature in 1969 and 1971, respectively, from the ɫ��ֱ��. She became intrigued by Italian in 1965, while her family was living in Australia. Her father, a Navy man, worked with immigrants, many of them Italian

Earickson had graduated from high school in Lakeside, Calif., before the family moved to Perth, Australia. There, she completed a fifth year of high school, because she was too young to attend the University of Western Australia.

After a year in Perth, she and her family returned to the United States via the SS Marconi, an Italian ship that sailed from Australia to Italy. Earickson recalls having nothing to do on the ship except play ping-pong or take lessons in Italian that were offered onboard.

“I got off in Naples as a young woman, and I could speak Italian, Earickson recalled. This was exhilarating. Later, she found herself at the ɫ��ֱ��, where she majored in Italian. She spent her final year of study at the University of Bologna, where her immersion in Italian language and culture deepened.

In Italy, she dated a young man who spoke no English, and her roommates confided their life troubles to her, in Italian. “It was so strange to have the grammar book come alive. … having real people speak to me.”

After she earned her master’s in Italian literature at ɫ��ֱ��, a professor asked her what she planned to do with her career. She wasn’t entirely sure.

“It was the ‘60s,” she said, adding that many college students were not materialistic.

I think I’ve had to come to terms with wondering if everybody might have a wandering life like I’ve had … where they start out in something and then it morphs into something else and leads here and there.”

Earickson’s father, still toiling in Australia, also asked her what she was going to do with the degree. She replied, “Dad, it doesn’t matter. I love this subject.”

After teaching French (her minor at ɫ��ֱ��) at a private high school and working odd jobs, Earickson returned to study at San Diego State University to get a bachelor’s degree in English. She taught English in a San Diego County public high school for about seven years before asking the principal if she could start a program in Italian.

She taught ninth and tenth graders, who “tend to be a little more discipline-challenged,” she said. “But really for me the fun came in (teaching) Italian.”

As she approached the age of 40, she was feeling “restless and a little burned out” on high-school teaching and felt that she “needed something more meaningful.”

While on a three-year leave from the school, she earned an advanced degree in theology and started working as a chaplain in a hospital. That work was both meaningful and challenging. She found herself attending to families whose loved ones were in trauma-care units—patients critically injured in motorcycle accidents and children who were dying.

“It was too intense for me, and I came home just drained.”

The chaplains who were most effective were able to be very empathetic and also maintain enough professional composure to make phone calls and the like for families. “That I could do and did do but I also found myself so grief-stricken that it was hard to maintain a professional stance,” Earickson said.

Pastoral counseling seemed a better fit, but that required a doctorate. Working at night for 10 years, she earned a doctorate in psychology. She landed a job at the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, which sought instructors to teach world religions.

Working for the military struck her as “strange,” given that Earickson was “desperately, desperately against the war in Vietnam.” For seven years at Pendleton, Earickson taught 12 different world religions to Marines, many of whom bore terrible wounds.

During this time, she also worked with autistic and disabled children.

Earickson has spent time in Guatemala, vacationed in Italy and traveled when she could. As a young woman, she ascended Ayers Rock, also known as Uluru, a sacred formation to aboriginal Australians. Later, she climbed Longs Peak and Mount Sneffels in Colorado.

Having experienced these places and visited sites such as Jerusalem in Israel, Assisi in Italy, and Iona of Scotland, she became enamored of pilgrimages.

“I want to go to physically as well as spiritually beautiful places around the Earth if I can stay in good health and be financially able to do this.”

Had she augmented her degree in Italian with a more marketable degree in the ‘60s, she could have been more financially stable, she acknowledged.

“But I didn’t, and I followed my heart,” she said, adding that she doesn’t have regrets.

At the same time, “I think I’ve had to come to terms with wondering if everybody might have a wandering life like I’ve had … where they start out in something and then it morphs into something else and leads here and there.”

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Advocating for the humanities, Italian-style

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 22:22:14 +0000

Advocating for the humanities, Italian-style Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 09/11/2016 - 16:22

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Valerio Ferme elected president of largest U.S. Italian studies association

For much of the 21^stcentury, study of the humanities has been derided by high-profile pundits for allegedly failing to prepare students to compete for employment in a technology-driven world, resulting in declining enrollment and public support.

Valerio Ferme

Scholar Henri A. Giroux puts it this way: “Welcome to the dystopian world of corporate education, in which learning how to think, appropriate public values, and become an engaged critical citizen is viewed as a failure rather than a success.”

But Valerio Ferme, professor of Italian and associate dean for the arts and humanities at the ɫ��ֱ��, believes that a liberal arts education not only prepares students to adapt to a constantly shifting economic landscape, but also enriches their human experience.

“People now change jobs often, requiring completely different skills in 10 years. (Humanities) students have the skills that allow them to move between jobs and not become obsolete,” says Ferme.

“The added benefit of the humanities is that they also allow us to be lifelong thinkers, and dreamers think and dream of the possible and impossible.”

But he also believes that some blame for the oft-cited crisis in the humanities rests with academics and “what we have done in our fields. At times, we have become involuted, drawn inward toward subfields and particular, narrow questions. These are valid and spur our research, but they don’t always interest our students as much. We need to get back to the big questions, which are the hook that draws students’ interest and engagement.”

Ferme’s vision of broader relevance and outreach is one reason his colleagues recently elected him to a three-year term as president of the American Association for Italian Studies, which focuses primarily on literary pursuits. He stepped into the job in June with the goal of advancing an expansive, ambitious agenda.

One thing that’s starting to creep up in publications like Forbes (magazine) and The Wall Street Journal is that many businesses are looking for arts-and-humanities majors who are trained in the soft skills of critical thinking, oral and writing abilities, empathy and cultural knowledge.”

Among his immediate goals: collaborating with other culture, arts and academic programs, both Italian and non-Italian, whether local, national or international; meeting with officials at the Italian embassy in Washington, DC, to foster relationships with other cultural institutions and organizations around the nation; and working more closely with the American Association of Teachers of Italian, which places a greater emphasis on pedagogy, about ways in which to promote “everything Italian in this country.”

“Advocating for Italian studies is at the top of my agenda, but I also believe collaborations are important, to show strength. (The AAIS) has been run well, and from a financial standpoint, we are healthy,” he says. “But I want to look for ways to be more visible and more vocal, to create a bigger buzz for what we do.”

Ferme brings that same sensibility to his teaching at ɫ��ֱ��, designing courses that appeal to a broad cross-section of students. Take “La Dolce Vita: Why Humanities Matter, Italian Style.”

“With Italy, we are talking about the birth of humanism,” he says. “Students don’t even realize how much they do and think is related to that culture and history, going back hundreds of years.”

Ferme also teaches a course on the Italian-American experience and would like to delve deeper into the history of the Italian presence in Colorado.

“A lot of people don’t realize there was a very strong Italian-American community in the mining industry at the turn of the century, and that high schools in Pueblo still today teach Italian among their foreign languages” he says.

Ferme’s early academic career was focused in part on the provocative subject of Italian fascism. His first monograph explored the role that translators played in subverting the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini during the mid-20^th century.

“Everybody thinks of Italian fascism as sort of sweet little sister or brother to Nazism,” he says. “But Italy had concentration camps, and many people died. It wasn’t as brutal (as Nazism), but it was real.”

With his current work translating an Italian scholar’s book about Mussolini’s concentration camps, Ferme finds himself re-immersed in a controversial subject at a time when some critics have tossed around the “f-word” (fascism) in describing presidential nominee Donald Trump.

To Ferme, that’s an overstatement. But there are, he says, similarities between Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, the brash business tycoon who served as prime minister of Italy for nine years, to whom Trump is often compared.

“I do think Trump might have styled himself somewhat after Berlusconi. Today, people like someone who comes across as non-prepped and non–polished by political machinery, but also connects with certain values that are at the core of a national history. … An outspoken leader has long held an appeal in Italian politics. One need only think of the millenary history of outspoken Roman emperors, Renaissance princes and, closer to us, Benito Mussolini.”

“Berlusconi provided that link with the past for a while in Italy,” he says, “even if his brand ran out. It is possible, without making value judgments, that Trump feeds into similar sentiments and national representations.”

In the end, Berlusconi was ousted not so much because people were less fascinated by him, but because his fiscal policies were not sound and his personal foibles caught up with him.

“But, as is the case for Trump,” Ferme says, “personality is a great part of Berlusconi’s appeal. It behooves us to appreciate his role in the public arena, and understand the nature of his appeal.”

That might be fodder for a future course, Ferme says. But for now, he’s firmly focused on promoting Italian studies and working to undermine criticism of the humanities. He’s even writing a document for parents of prospective students, explaining why the arts and humanities matter.

“One thing that’s starting to creep up in publications like Forbes (magazine) and The Wall Street Journal is that many businesses are looking for arts-and-humanities majors who are trained in the soft skills of critical thinking, oral and writing abilities, empathy and cultural knowledge,” he says.

“The humanities are important, both practically and idealistically.”

Valerio Ferme, professor of Italian and associate dean for the arts and humanities at ɫ��ֱ��, believes that a liberal arts education not only prepares students to adapt to a constantly shifting economic landscape, but also enriches their human experience.

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