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?
Elisabeth Åsbrink, Author and Journalist
Elisabeth Åsbrink is a Swedish nonfiction author and journalist. In her writing she often examines the heritage and memory of the holocaust in an individual, political or collective perspective. Elisabeth Åsbrink is currently conducting research for a book concerning the 1957 Little Rock crisis and its Swedish connections, one being Gunnar Myrdal and his groundbreaking 1944 publication, An American Dilemma. Her book, Och i Wienerwald står träden kvar (And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain, 2011), won the August Prize, the Danish-Swedish Cultural Foundations annual Culture Prize (2013), and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award (2014). Åsbrink's play RÄLS (Tracks) is based on the minutes from a meeting convened by Hermann Göring in 1938 and interviews with child refugees from Nazi Germany; and her book 1947: When Now Begins deals with the development of jihadism, liberal values, feminism and memory culture after WW2.
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.
Visiting ENS Fellows
Rahul Markovits, École Normale Supérieure
Rahul Markovits will be starting work on a new research project focusing on the flow of political information between Asia and Europe during the eighteenth century. The invention of news has been mostly studied in a European or an Atlantic framework until now. Yet, from the mid seventeenth century onwards, Europeans became aware of Asian politics, as Asia was no longer seen as a continent frozen in immutable tradition. Focusing on a series of momentous events ranging from the Ming-Qing transition to the Bengal famine, the project aims at uncovering the routes and networks through which information from Asia transited and to understand how it fed into European debates.
Anne-Françoise Benhamou, École Normale Supérieure
Anne-Françoise Benhamou's work questions dramatic and scenic works, with a tendency of putting them in relation to a social, political and anthropological context. Over the last five years, she has paid particular attention to the use of the body on stage and to the representation of situations of domination. The progressive erasure of psychoanalysis from the field of dramaturgy and acting, another recurrent subject, is linked to the advent of the neo-liberal subject, implying a transformation of acting practices.
Stéphane Van Damme, École Normale Supérieure
Stéphane Van Damme’s research project focuses on the emergence between 1750 and 1850 of a natural history of New York, which was published in the 1840s in five volumes including an urban botany, an urban geology, an urban zoology and an urban paleontology. He proposes the hypothesis that the multiplication of this urban knowledge responds to the indeterminacy of the natural limits of the metropolis. As the precursors of urban ecology, this knowledge embodies a natural science of the city. This research is based mainly on the archives of the New York Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the manuscript collections of Columbia University, New York University and the Bronx Botanical Garden.
Katia Sowels, École Normale Supérieure
Katia Sowels’s research examines the situation of André Breton’s collection during his exile in New York, while he was "dépaysé" during the War and separated from his studio at 42, rue Fontaine. These works and objects, as many show traces of his American experience, raise questions of cultural transfer and conditions of creation during exile. They allow further investigations into the surrealists’ networks and exchanges between American and European artists, highlighting Breton’s less-studied new friendships (from Suzy Hare to Sonja Sekula) and extending far beyond New York, to Mexico, Chile (Mandragora group), and more. Regarding Breton’s collection, attention will be given to the history of the art market (galleries and collectors) as well as the history of surrealist exhibitions and publications during the war. This research aims to deepen one of the chapters of Katia Sowels’s PhD dissertation on surrealist objects, destined to become a chapter for an upcoming book prepared with Sean O’Hanlan (Met Museum) on Breton’s collection.
Françoise Zamour, École Normale Supérieure
Françoise Zamour’s research focuses on the evolution of melodrama in world-cinema since the eighties. Her book Le Melodrame dans le cinéma contemporain, une fabrique de peuples (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015) deals with ethical and political issues of melodrama from Hollywood classical period until now. A large part of her work concerns classical film-makers. In association with Jean-Loup Bourget, she wrote a monography about King Vidor (Editions Vrin, Paris, 2015) and directed Jouer l’Actrice (Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2017), and Histoire, légende, imaginaire : nouvelles études sur le western (Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2018). She has also written many articles about the relationship between theater and cinema from Jean Genet to Patrice Chereau.