The Transnational Italian Studies Department will host a round table on December 2 to celebrate the publication of "Primo Levi: Essays in Dialogue with Nicholas Patruno," a special issue of NeMLA Italian Studies (November 2024) co-edited by Professor and Chair of Transnational Italian Studies Roberta Ricci and Chiara Benetollo, director of program development at the Petey Greene Program. Ricci also wrote the essay "Nicholas Patruno in Dialogue with Primo Levi: So that Memory Never Fades," for the issue.
This volume of essays “in dialogue” with Bryn Mawr Professor Emeritus Nicholas Patruno represents the continuation and expansion of a successful symposium held at Bryn Mawr College on April 22, 2022—a gathering of scholars, students, and alumnae who honored the legacy of Patruno (1941-2020), by continuing to investigate one of the main subjects of his research, Primo Levi. Yet, the volume does not merely represent a record of the proceedings of the essays presented in 2022, but a double blinded peer reviewed collection of essays that stands on its own, says Ricci.
“I have every expectation that they will produce a fruitful conversation that will grow in the years to come, interrogating the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship of salient and intertwined aspects of Levi’s literature,” she adds.
Because of the success of the 2022 event, Ricci and Benetollo decided to move forward with a peer reviewed monographic issue of NeMLA Italian Studies, opening it up to authors whose scholarly expertise on Primo Levi enriched the volume with a variety of thematic and historical cross-references, with the intent to offer a collection on Primo Levi that best represents, with diverse contributions, a line of continuity that leads back to the critical analysis of the twentieth century as a privileged space for the elaboration on post-World War II in Italy.
This gaze, always oriented by a literary-historical perspective of those years, guides the depth and range of the essays, shedding further light on Primo Levi's work and continuing to investigate its adaptations across media.
“It is my hope that the essays collected here will ignite reenergized scholarly conversations and will constitute a starting point for new academic work, new intellectual debates, and new classroom syllabi, not only to capture the perduring risk of fascism , antisemitism, and racism today, but also the power of Levi’s creative vein and originality,” says Ricci.
Ricci’s essay focuses on collective memory and history in twentieth-century Italian literature within the dialogue between Patruno and Primo Levi, considering also translation as a form of antifascist “public intervention” in its “dynamic relationship with the political climate of the post-war period”.
The round table will host both the co-editors and authors, including Peter Kurtz (HC '19, Comp. Lit major), who is now a Ph.D. candidate in comparative Literature at CUNY, and Luca Zipoli, Assistant Professor in the Transnational Italian Studies Department, who contributed with an essay titled "Writing After and About the Holocaust: Primo Levi and Umberto Saba," which includes the publication, edition, and translation of unpublished letters between Primo Levi and 20th century poet Umberto Saba.
The event is co-sponsored by the President’s Office, the Provost’s Office, MECANA, Praxis, Comparative Literature, the 1902 Class of 1902 Lecture Fund, and is open to the public.