“‘Gli occhi della fantasia.’ Mental Images and Poetic Imagery in Leopardi”
The Italian Research Seminar will open the 2019-2020 academic year with a lecture by Sabrina Ferri, Associate Professor of Italian at Notre Dame, on Giacomo Leopardi’s poetics and its connections with 18th- and early 19th-century theories of the imagination.
More details will be announced as the date approaches.
Sabrina Ferri is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame. Her research encompasses Italian literature, philosophy, science and visual arts of the so-called “long eighteenth century,” with a focus on the transition to modernity and Italy’s place in transnational contexts. Her work on Giacomo Casanova, Lazzaro Spallanzani, the late eighteenth-century Picturesque, Vittorio Alfieri, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book, Ruins Past: Modernity in Italy, 1744-1836, was published in the Voltaire Foundation’s series “Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.” Her current research concerns the impact of the sciences of the mind on theories of the imagination and poetics in the 18th century and the intersection of fiction, revolution, and historical thought between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame’s Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.