Fall 2022
Visiting Fellows
Alessandro Capone, University of Salerno
Alessandro Capone’s book project analyses the French military occupation in the Papal States from the intervention against the revolutionary Roman Republic in 1849 to the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. With the aim of restoring and protecting Papal sovereignty, the occupation resulted in a system of shared governance between the French and local authorities. The practices of the occupation adapted to the dynamics of political conflict in an era marked by the struggle between liberalism and counterrevolution, the development of new state and imperial projects, and nation-building wars which ultimately lead to the Italian unification. By focusing on the multiple relations between the French military, Papal government and local society, the book exemplifies the connected history of France and Italy in the age of Risorgimento and sheds light on the reshaping of French informal imperialism after 1848.
Greg Conti, Princeton University
Greg Conti’s research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France. During his time at Remarque, he will be working on a book on the constitutional lawyer and political philosopher Albert Venn Dicey, as well as a project on John Stuart Mill's views on representative government and parliamentary reform.
Hugo Drochon, University of Nottingham
Hugo Drochon’s book project explores the concept of centrism from the French Revolution to today. Memorably born during debates about what to do with the King, the left/right divide was not the only opposition, nor indeed the most dominant, available at the time. The Terror, for instance, opposed the Mountain to the Plane or the Marais: the Mountain was composed of radical Jacobin deputies who dominated the Committee of Public Safety – most famously Robespierre – who sat across the highest benches of the Assembly, whereas the Plane or the Marsh sat on the lower benches, closer to the tribune. What consequences for our understanding of history and contemporary politics of seeing political dynamics not through a left/right divide but a center/extremes one?
Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara
Tae-Yeoun Keum’s research concerns the symbolic dimensions of politics: to what extent can and should politics be shaped by figurative elements in our thinking—such as symbols, metaphors, and narratives—that are not immediately transparent to reason? Keum’s first book explored this question through the lens of Plato’s myths and their reception in modern political thought. Keum’s second book, provisionally titled "The Symbol and the Vortex: The Symbolic Politics of Blumenberg, Habermas, and Schmitt," reconstructs the political theory of Hans Blumenberg in dialogue with the work of his contemporaries. Going against the grain of dominant approaches in the philosophical mainstream, Blumenberg developed an account of the dynamic role that myths play in modern political life. His work, in turn, helps political theorists appreciate not only the significance of figurative and symbolic content in politics, but also our own capacity to rewrite their content.
Victoria Smolkin, Wesleyan University
Victoria Smolkin is currently working on two projects: "The Wall of Memory: Ukraine and the Impossibility of History," and "The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia." "The Wall of Memory" explores the conceptual and methodological conundrums of history through a microhistory of a cemetery in Kyiv, Ukraine, that became a contested site of politics, ideology, and memory, and which remains both symbolically saturated and ideologically fraught to this day. The themes raised by this story lie at the intersection of some of the thorniest questions of Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian history. "The Wall of Memory" is about the challenges of writing a history in and of Ukraine as Ukraine continues to elude our existing conceptual frameworks and narrative structures. "The World of Tomorrow" is a cultural history of Soviet cosmic utopianism as it intersected with the communist political project over the course of the long twentieth century. The project explores the intersection of ideas, state power, cultural production, social imaginaries, and everyday experiences, and analyzes the emergence, life, and fate of cosmic imaginaries in the place where they took their most material form: the Soviet Union. "The World of Tomorrow" is a story about the utopian world brought forth in 1917—a world that was still possible to imagine fifty years later, in 1967—and follows how it was lost over the course of the following decades, becoming a site of nostalgia and regret.
Alessandra Vigo, Padua University
Alessandro Vigo’s research aims to detect the actual experiences of African decolonization and its long-term memorial and narrative results in Republican Italy, using the repatriation of Italians from Africa as a lens. More specifically, it looks at Italians who returned from Tunisia and the former Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa and resettled in specific areas in the central-west countryside of the peninsula, from the mid-1950s up to the late 1970s. Through the use of archival and oral sources, this research intends to identify the social conflicts which emerged between natives' and repatriates’ communities. Vigo’s goal is to ascertain whether shared narratives about the Italian colonial past and African decolonization persist among those communities.
New York University Doctoral Fellows
Dustin Aaron, Institute of Fine Arts
Dustin Aaron’s dissertation seeks to understand the role of the visual in pre-modern settler colonization. Focused on the medieval German settlement of the Eastern Alpine Region, he demonstrates how images of wilderness facilitated a two-sided narrative of the German settlers’ “return” to the place of settlement and the erasure of native Slavic claims to land. These predominately structural images are unusual, and have been ignored by the field of art history for their uniqueness. By placing them at the intersection of theology and politics, they are shown to be crucial to the creation and proliferation of colonial ideology and provide valuable insight into pre-modern European notions of race and the environment.
Anne Schult, GSAS, Department of History
Anne Schult’s dissertation retells the twentieth-century history of refugees, which typically unfolds as a tale of increasing legal protection, from the viewpoint of statistics and demography. Drawing on archives in Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, Schult argues that international law and the social sciences developed as competing attempts to identify, classify, and control refugees in Europe. Even before lawyers, demographers set out to fill the gap of knowledge surrounding refugees and used cross-national data sets to outline a comprehensive, international category. Their surveys also offered predictions of future displacement and were directly involved in refugee policy as it was enacted. While highlighting quantification as a targeted management device, Schult’s investigation of refugee statistics also reveals several surprises: the colonial fantasies involved in resettling European refugees, the allure numerical control held for jurists, and, not least, the ideas the displaced themselves brought to the practice of human accounting.
Visiting ENS Fellows
Nicolas Boiffin, École Normale Supérieure
Nicolas Boiffin’s research focuses on the aesthetics of the German romantic art-song. More precisely, his dissertation deals with the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), whose work includes songs based on Mörike’s, Eichendorff’s or Goethe’s poetry. Both through musical analysis and a study of the reception, the aim of the research is to understand how these musical settings question categories that have been associated with the German Lied since the end of the 18th century, such as “immediacy”, “intimacy” or “simplicity.”
Charlotte Guichard, École Normale Supérieure
Charlotte Guichard's research focuses on Eighteenth-century French visual cultures in a global context. During her time at the Remarque Institute, she will work on a new book project on the visual and material cultures of transnational commerce and Empire in eighteenth-century France, as well as on collecting and Empire in eighteenth-century Paris. She has published several books, including Les amateurs d'art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (2008), Graffitis. Inscrire son nom à Rome, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (2014), and La Griffe du peintre. La valeur de l'art (1730-1820) (2018).
Clémence Fort, École Normale Supérieure
Clémence Fort’s thesis studies the new visibility of North America (Canada, Louisiana) at the time of the French Empire, in the collections and in the visual and artistic culture of the 18th century. It intends to identify and examine the art artifacts and specimens from French North America which were collected in the country by colonial intermediaries, collectors and merchants before being brought back to France in the royal or private collections. It focuses on the images produced (engravings, scientific maps or drawings) relative to the French colony. These images circulated in France and offered a new perspective on the colonized territory from a scientific but also a cultural point of view. It studies how collecting Native American artifacts invite us to rethink the colonial enterprise through the art history and history of knowledge.
Morgan Labar, École Normale Supérieure
Morgan Labar's research focuses on the history of laughter and comic artistic practices, aesthetic categories, hegemonic discourses and symbolic legitimization in the late Twentieth to early Twenty-first century globalized art world(s). During his time at the Remarque Institute, he will finish his forthcoming book on stupidity as an artistic practice since the 1980s (La Gloire de la bêtise. Régression et superficialité dans les arts depuis la fin des années 1980, Dijon, les presses du réel, 2023). He will also work on his new research project on the concept of indigeneity and contemporary indigenous artistic practices examined in a global context.
STANDING FELLOW
Aristotle Tziampiris, University of Piraeus
STANDING FELLOW IN EUROPEAN AFFAIRS
Pedro Sánchez, Secretary General, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party
Spring 2023
Visiting Fellows
Enrico Acciai, Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata"
Enrico Acciai’s research's aim is to study transnational war volunteering's long-term dimension in a global scale after 1945. The core innovation of this research will be to offer a new approach to studying war volunteering during the cold war in the global South emphasizing its connections with political radicalism. For two centuries, between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the model for military mobilization, especially in Europe, was closely intertwined with the nation-state and conscription. Citizens played a key role in the defense of their state, as the nation-state was considered the primary political unit of the international system. But non-state mobilization did not disappear completely from the scene. Transnational war volunteers played an important role in most 19th and 20th century wars, this also happened during the Cold War. Moreover, the phenomenon of people choosing to leave their own country and fight in a foreign conflict is once again on the increase, as the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Syria remind us. Based on this awareness of dealing with a long-term phenomenon, this research will contribute to answering the following question: to what extent is it possible to conceptualize a global history of transnational war volunteering during the cold war?
Elena Bacchin, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Elena Bacchin’s research examines the emergence and the international role of political prisoners during the 19th century through the case of the Italian peninsula. Who is a political prisoner? Which penalties could be applied to political crimes? When is it legitimate to contest and challenge a government and to intervene on behalf of foreign convicts? Bacchin addresses these questions and aims to rescue the convicts’ experiences from their subsidiary status, analyzing the intellectual and juridical redefinition of the figure of political detainees taking place during the Restoration and highlighting the international dimension of political crime in the 19th century.
Jacob Collins, CUNY College of Staten Island
Jacob Collins researches twentieth-century intellectual history, and has focused on the relationship between the social sciences and political discourse in contemporary Europe. His first book, The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines how leading thinkers in France borrowed concepts from anthropology to construct new theories of politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Collins’s current project, "Writing the Self: The Politics of Autobiography" (under contract with Verso Books), traces the history of autobiography as a philosophical mode of writing, and looks at how the task of “writing the self” has posed new questions and experiences of selfhood in modernity.
Giuliano Garavini, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Giuliano Garavini’s new project delves into the framing of privatizations (or de-nationalizations) in western Europe during the 1980s and 1990s as marking the passage from an "entrepreneurial State" to a "regulatory State.” By examining the process that led to the floating of the Italian state-owned energy company ENI in 1995, he will analyze the privatization process and its enduring consequences on Italian society, its industrial and energy policy, and the environment.
Christoph Neidhart, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Christoph Neidhart is currently working on a project of comparative cartography. Focusing on Japan’s first surveyor to employ triangulation and astronomy and on some of his contemporaries in Europe, he discusses their very different backgrounds, motivations, methods and goals, as well as the values and hierarchies their maps conveyed. Since the early nineteenth century, geographical maps have been seen as scientific representations of reality, or “mirrors of nature.” It was believed that any increase of accuracy would make a map more truthful, more objective. From its very beginning, this “project of modernity” was doomed to fail, as Neidhart attempts to show. There can be no perfect map, not even a standard map, as the smartphone in everybody’s pocket proves.
Natasha Wheatley, Princeton University
Natasha Wheatley’s project, “Laws of Water, Air, Earth, and Fire: Sovereignty Among the Elements,” explores the confrontation between theories of sovereignty and the mutability of the natural world across the “trans-war” decades 1900-1950. Land, sea, air: each emerged as the locus of new juridical uncertainty and controversy under the pressure of two world wars and rapid technological change. From aerial and submarine warfare to the question of “territorial waters” and radio signals that traversed jurisdictions unseen, international jurists wrestled with the physicality and dimensionality of that notoriously abstract “property,” state sovereignty. "Laws of Water, Air, Earth and Fire" examines their thought and praxis in the halls of government, in the various codification projects orbiting the League of Nations, and in scholarly publications. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a tense encounter between modern theories of sovereignty and the natural world – an encounter whose political and moral urgency has only increased ever since.
New York University Doctoral Fellows
Christina Chalmers, GSAS, Comparative Literature
Christina Chalmers’ dissertation builds a feminist theory of inheritance through a case study of Italian feminist thought in the 1970s, considering critiques of “inheritance”, the family, and its modes of mediating economic, cultural and political transmission. The thinkers she considers critically combine or confront feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, constructing a multi-faceted consideration of transmission and reproduction. While “inheritance” is taken to structure historical thinking and social relations through the diachronic interconnections between the generations within the family, she also re-evaluates collective feminist practices of autonomy and the revalorization of women’s reproductive practices—both in terms of biological and social reproduction—against the perpetuation of sexual domination. The dissertation considers how Italian feminists intervene into debates on the relationship between reproduction and rupture, family and state, the individual and the community, and how they analyse and imagine a break from patriarchal filiation, within as well as beyond the dynamics of “inheritance”. In doing so, they propose a far-reaching critique of the structural embeddedness of “family values” in social and political life.
Alfonso Gonzalez Aguado, GSAS, Department of Italian Studies
Alfo G. Aguado's dissertation studies the circulation of Italian neorealist cinema in Spain and Latin America during the 1950s. In his project, Alfo considers Italian neorealism not in terms of film style, but as a broader cultural movement that contributed to the reshaping of national identities in Spain, Argentina, and Mexico His main argument is that neorealism became a transnational phenomenon paradoxically because of its unique concern with national identity. In Italy, filmmakers used the aesthetic of cinematic realism to respond to the pressing political questions that followed World War II. Alfo's research will show how filmmakers in Spain, Argentina, and Mexico interpreted Italian neorealism not so much as a style to imitate, but as a model of cultural and political intervention in their respective national contexts.