New RLL Prof To Promote Study of Modern Italy

The newest professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures plans to have students thinking twice about Italian studies as a discipline devoted solely to the ancient classics.

Francesco Erspamer—currently an Associate Professor of Italian studies at New York University (NYU)—specializes in contemporary Italy and the Renaissance and will join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on July 1.

“The Renaissance is pretty obvious as a field in which Italians were pretty important, and if you’re in Italian Studies, you would study the Renaissance,” Erspamer said. “But contemporary Italy, which is also pervasive in style and fashion, is much less analyzed in Italian departments, and in the context of Italian culture is also interesting.”

Italian-born Erspamer lived in Italy until he moved to the U.S. ten years ago, and is slated to fill the opening that will be created by Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Franco Fido’s retirement in January 2006.

“His combination of Renaissance and 20th century makes him very broad and very exciting as a scholar and teacher,” said Department Chair and Smith Professor of French Language and Literature Christie McDonald. “We look forward to seeing the expansion of Italian studies with his arrival.”

Erspamer’s innovative work on modern Italy should help to update the department, according to Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Lino Pertile, who chaired the department’s search committee.

“He will bring a great deal of expertise in Italian Renaissance studies in general, but also a very fresh and strong interest in the field of contemporary studies, that is cultural studies, gender studies, theory of literature,” said Pertile, who is also the Master of Eliot House. “He will be a forceful reel for the department.”

Erspamer, who was a visiting professor this past fall, said he sees Harvard as the perfect place for his two-ended approach to Italian studies.

He will be teaching an undergraduate Renaissance course that he will develop into a Core course, something Erspamer said has not be done in a long time. He will also be teaching a graduate course on contemporary Italian fiction called “Up to Speed,” of which he is particularly proud.

“It’s a way of having graduate students…be trained not only in classics but also in writers of today, people of their own age,” Erspamer said. “There is not a lot of criticism on these writers, so students will have to figure out a way of analyzing them without relying on surveys and criticism.”

Erspamer also hopes that by working at Harvard he will help to revamp and renew interest in the field of Italian studies throughout the U.S.

“Harvard is a model,” he said. “It has to be on the cutting edge and serve to other universities as a place where you do new things for the first time, and if they are successful, they will be imitated.”

To promote Italian studies, Erspamer said new courses with new approaches are needed.

“Italian departments in general in the past have too much, in my view, limited themselves to the teaching of language and Italian literature,” he said. “But Italy has more to give, and is known more for other areas rarely connected with Italian departments.”

Erspamer said he would like to incorporate into his teaching areas such as the history of art, the development of science, and contemporary politics, which are normally studied as their own fields. “This is my goal, and at Harvard it would be more amplified than in other places,” he said.

In Cambridge, Erspamer is also looking forward to a different working environment. He said his experience at NYU was “dispersive” because the building that housed the university’s large Italian studies department was located far from the rest of campus. But while Espamer was a visiting professor at Harvard, he said he frequently met colleagues not just within his field, but also from other departments.

“It is useful in developing your intellectual curiosity beyond the limits of your own specific field,” he said.

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.