ISLG
2012
Stephen Gundle
After a Dictator Falls: the Shadow of Mussolini in Postwar Italy
18 June 2012
British Library
Stephen Gundle, Professor of Film & Television Studies; Director of Graduate Studies, University of Warwick. Prof. Gundle holds degrees from the University of Liverpool, the State University of New York and the University of Cambridge. He held academic positions at Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford and London before moving to Warwick in 2008. He has been visiting professor at the Université de Paris II and X and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris.
His research interests lie in the fields of film and cultural and political history with a special emphasis on Italian cinema and other media. I have written about the Italian star system and relations between the media, politics and consumption from Fascism to the present. Recently, he directed a large AHRC Research Project on the Personality Cult of Benito Mussolini. He has also written two books about the history of glamour in Europe and the United States. Among his most recent publications: Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
2014
Gaia Servadio
Luchino Visconti, Theatre and Opera: a Legacy
30 June 2014
British Library
The distinguished writer, journalist, and broadcaster Gaia Servadio is the author of a wide range of literary works. As well as works of fiction, she has published on subjects including archaeology, history, politics and social studies, literature, music and the theatre.
Her 28th book, the autobiographical Raccogliamo le vele, was published in 2014 by Feltrinelli in Milan.
Gaia Servadio’s biography of Luchino Visconti (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981) is one of her best-known works. Visconti, the famous film director, was also an innovative and, at times, controversial theatre and opera director. It is this aspect of his career that this lecture has explored.
2015
Ian Thomson
Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome
29 June 2015
British Library
On the morning of November 2, 1975, in a shanty town outside Rome, Pier Paolo Pasolini was found murdered. A verdict is still open on the case: he was 53. Pasolini’s numerous works of poetry, fiction, journalism and film championed the disinherited and damned of post-war Rome, mingling an intellectual Leftism with a sentimental Franciscan Catholicism. (Blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, rationalism and property.) In Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome, Ian Thomson explored Pasolini’s poetic transfiguration of the Italian capital, in all its terrible grandeur.
Ian Thomson, "an author of great range and sensibility" (Guardian), is an award-winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic. His book Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002), regarded as the definitive biography of the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor, won the Royal Society of Literature’s W. H. Heinemann Prize. In 2010 Thomson was awarded the Ondaatje Prize as well as the Dolman Travel Book Award for his reportage The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (London: Faber and Faber, 2009). He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia.
2016
Donal Cooper
From Deluge to the Digital: Fifty Years of Research and Conservation since the 1966 Flood
27 June 2016
British Library
On November the 4th 1966, Florence fell victim of an overwhelmingly destructive flood. Fifty years on, art historian Dr Donal Cooper, Cambridge University, reflected upon developments in research and conservation since that tragic event.
2017
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From
2017
British Library
On
2018