Get to know our fellows

Curating America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq: Whose War is on View?

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a PhD candidate in Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, and a dissertation fellow at UCHI. I received my MA in Italian from UConn and my BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures, with a major in American Studies and a minor in German, from the University of Florence, Italy.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am currently writing my PhD dissertation entitled The Sale of Parga in 19^th Century Italian Imagery:1815-1856. In my dissertation, I examine the impact of an episode of the Greek War of Independence – the sale of the Greek city of Parga to the Ottoman Turks by the English government in 1819 – on the cultural work of Romantic Italian intellectuals and artists. I place the sale of Parga at the intersection of cultural, political, and historical discourses, and argue that this minor historical event is a prism to chart the major leading forces, tensions, and ideas that coalesced in the formation of Italian cultural nationalism. With this research project, I intend to extend the boundaries of the Italian national movement – also known as Risorgimento – to another national cause (the Greek one) and, by implication, to the larger European geo-political and geo-cultural space, thus shedding light on the transnational aspects of 19^th century Italian nationalist culture.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

The idea of this project is a shared effort between my advisor, Professor Norma Bouchard, and myself. We were discussing possible topics for my dissertation and I expressed my desire to work on 19^th century Italian literature. She suggested that I start by studying what has been defined as “the new historiography of the Risorgimento,” which has re-conceptualized the Italian national movement in transnational terms. The concept of transnationalism fascinated me, and I found particularly stimulating the idea of applying a new theoretical perspective to a topic that, at least in Italy, has been canonized as a foundational moment in the formation of the Italian nation and national identity. We identified in the cession of Parga a case study to analyze Risorgimento literature from this new perspective, thus contributing to the on-going research in this field.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

My hopes for this research are to reach scholars of the Risorgimento both in Europe and the US, who are engaged in questions of nations and national identity, Mediterranean studies, transnationalism, and their intersection with personal and collective emotional concerns. The Italian Risorgimento will continue to stimulate a remarkable critical dialogue among scholars, for its peculiar intersection of a number of fields of research relevant to the humanities, such as history, politics, literature, visual arts, social sciences, ethics, and religion. This research project, in particular, due to its interdisciplinary nature that calls forth the core of the humanities and discusses some universal principles, such as nationality, freedom, and political hospitality, could represent a case study to further investigate the development of a Mediterranean identity in the modern era. This issue is particularly relevant to contemporary Italy – and Europe – due to the massive waves of migrants reaching the shores of Italy every day. As a consequence of this phenomenon, contemporary Italy is struggling to redefine and rethink that concept of Italianness created by the intellectuals who promoted the national movement at the beginning of the 19th century.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Connecticut and a dissertation fellow at UCHI. I received my masters in English from UConn and my bachelor’s degree in English at Southern Connecticut State University.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am writing a dissertation titled “The Return of Dagon: Failed Iconoclasm in Early Modern English Literature.” The dissertation explores the intersection between English Renaissance literature and the iconoclastic movements of the post-Reformation period. It argues that early modern writers were often interested in the ways in which idolatrous artifacts might survive, resist, or even undermine the actions and intentions of their assailants. I maintain that this archive of failed iconoclasm calls into question theories of disenchantment applied to the Reformation. Iconoclasm, I show, ironically provoked a broad cultural interest in the agency of material artifacts.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

During my reading of English literature and polemical pamphlets, I became increasingly interested in the deep-seated fear among radical Protestants about the dangers of idolatry. Why were these radicals so fearful of idolatry, if, as they claimed, idolatrous objects and images were merely “dumb,” lifeless, or inert?

My interest is probably also driven by my Roman Catholic upbringing. Having once been an altar boy, I had close proximity to the kinds of ritual artifacts—incense, candles, bells, liturgical vestments, crucifixes, stained glass windows—that radical Puritans of the early modern period would find abominable.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Public discourse surrounding iconoclasm typically presents it as absolute loss: We deplore iconoclasm because it violently erases our access to the past. My dissertation shows that early modern people often thought about iconoclastic incidents much differently. They did not automatically equate iconoclasm with erasure. Rather, they were often attentive to how certain artifacts might survive or resist the process, thus calling the efficacy of iconoclasm into question. Iconoclasm, in other words, elevated early modern interest in the capacity of material artifacts to transform human actions and intentions. In the twenty-first century, our closest analogue to this might be our increasing recognition of how digital technologies transform our consciousness and behaviors in ways we cannot fully control for.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I’m Leo Garofalo and I am associate professor of history at Connecticut College, and I teach Latin American history. My research is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for not only colonial Latin America, in particular the Andes, but also the African Diaspora, particularly how it touches Europe and how it connects Europe to Africa and the Americas.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

At the Humanities Institute, I have the great privilege of working on a book project that I’ve been doing research for for a couple of years now, and it’s on Afro-Iberian, that is Black no comma European slaves, sailors, soldiers, freed people, travelers who traveled back and forth between Europe and the Americas, particularly Portugal and Spain which had a large African-descent population. They had, by the begining of the sixteenth century, achieved the status of sailors, soldiers, slaves, artisans, domestics, and traders, and had a big presence in terms of participation in the colonization of the Americas carried out by the Portuguese and the Spanish. In fact, up until 1700, more people from Africa and of African descent arrived in the Americas than they did from Portugal and Spain. So, Black Europeans are a small group within that larger African diaspora–it’s a chapter that’s not as well know. So my book is trying to elucidate the importance of the position of these Black Europeans within the colonial and colonizing enterprise.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

This project began in many ways as a question that emerged when I was working in the archives in Peru, looking at how different groups of Europeans, different indigenous groups of many ethnicities, and West and Central Africans came together in large cities such as Lima, cities that were markets, that were colonial creations that had never existed in this format before with large resident populations with fish markets and taverns and breweries and so forth. My goal was to set out to understand who did this kind of work and how were they able to negotiate it when you had different groups coming together. Among the people who appear as very dynamic cultural mediators and people skilled at crossing different cultural zones and bringing together different practices were people of African descent who originated in Portugal and Spain. And so I was wondering, who are these Black Europeans, these people of African descent who appear to be playing such an important roll in daily life within the Americas in this formative colonial period? And so, once I finished that project, my goal was to try to trace these people back to Europe, to try to understand who they were, where they came from, what neighborhoods they lived in, how they made it to the Americas, and did they retain those connections once they got there?

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Once of the things we’re learning when we look more closely at African diaspora is not only the tremendous impact of people coming directly from Africa, but also the impact of people who are traveling through Europe and acquiring a knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish ways whether that’s language or Christianity, ways to carry out different artisan practices. They are becoming then, in a sense, settlers and colonists, whether they are enslaved or free, whether they are forced migrants or people who are volunteers, like soldiers, sailors, and traders on these ships. They are coming to the Americas in this very formative time, and they are coming over at a time that is much earlier than when we usually think of as being the important period for Africans in reshaping the Caribbean and Brazil. We usually think that happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the emergence of the sugar complex. At that period of time, we’re well aware that Africans are playing a very important role. What we’re finding with this kind of research is that they also play a very important role in shaping and cementing Spanish colonialism in the Americas, where they are fully half of the migrant communities in these urban areas. And this happens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Wednesday October 5, 2016. Location UCHI; time 4pm, Austin Building.

Jeffrey Egan (History) Watershed Decisions: Urban Planning, Rural Protest, and the Legislative Debate Over Boston’s Quabbin Reservoir, 1919-1927.