Course teached as: B021520 - STORIA CULTURALE DELL'ETA' CONTEMPORANEA Second Cycle Degree in HISTORY
Teaching Language
Italian with some English essays and with a possible contribution by EUI scholars in English. Erasmus students have mainly texts in English.
Course Content
Intellectual migration for political and racial reasons fron fascist Italy. Italy is usually considered a s a land of poor and uneducated emigrants. However the recent brain drain had its significant past during the Mussolini age: displaced scholars and students, mainly Jews, left Italy looking for a qualified job and freedom abroad. It is a still neglected phenomenum which provokes relevant methodological questions to historians
General readings:
P. Burke, Strenghts and Weakness of Cultural History, Cultural History, 1, 1, 2012, pp. 1-13.
G. Levi, chp. V, in P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991 .
Marc Bloch, Riflessioni di uno storico sulle false notizie della guerra [1921], in Id.,La guerra e le false notizie, Roma: Fazi ed. 2014, pp. 101-136.
Primo Levi, La zona grigia in Id, I sommersi e i salvati, Torino: Einaudi, 1986, pp. 24-52.
Barbara Armani, Emmanuel Betta e Cristiana Fiamingo ( cura di), Negazionismi, legislazioni, Dossier SISSCo [2016], http://www.sissco.it/articoli/negazionismi-legislazioni-1151/ (on line)
c) Persecuzione e emigrazione degli intellettuali :
Gabriele Turi, L’Università di Firenze e la persecuzione razziale. “Italia contemporanea”, 219, 2000, pp.227-247 (on line con SBART)
Patrizia Guarnieri , Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista. Migranti, esuli e rifugiati per motivi politici e razziali, Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2019 http://intellettualinfuga.fupress.com/ see Eng. transl. (not the “Lived on move”)
Patrizia Guarnieri , Quando il «cervello in fuga» è una donna. Renata Calabresi, displaced psychologist a New York dopo le leggi anti-ebraiche, “Contemporanea”, 21, 2018, pp. 501-532,
Oppure Patrizia Guarnieri, The Zionist Network and Enzo Bonaventura: from Florence to Jerusalem, in Ead, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism. From Florence to Jerusalem and New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016, pp. 113-153 e note (open access via SBART)
Francesca Pelini e Ilaria Pavan, Il primato della continuità, in La doppia epurazione, Bologna: il Mulino 2009, pp. 119-131.
Learning Objectives
Knowledge and understanding: on cultural history and the specific subjet matters of this course, with special attention on methodology.
Ability: developing an autonomy of judgment and awareness. Skills: collecting and analyzing primary and secondary sources, writing a biographical paper The one who is not able to complete the paper, should studied two more texts: Annette Wieviorka, L’era del testimone, Milano: R. Cortina, 1999 (Engl ed.) , and Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm”, in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press,1989, p. 96-125 (or. ed., Einaudi 1979).
Prerequisites
A good enough knowledge of modern history; partecipation to the seminar; the Erasmus students must have a good enough knowledge of Italian language.
Teaching Methods
Seminar with presentations and discussions that involve the active participation of students. Visit and activities with the prof. in an historical archive.
Further information
Any changes will be communicated during the course. Students who have difficulties in attending the class, should contact the prof.
For questions beyond class time, please contact the prof. by e-mail
Type of Assessment
final oral examination, presentations and discussions during the course, in order to develop and verify the above aims. A biographical paper based on research in archive inder the prof. supervision is required
Course program
This course focus on intellectual emigration from Italy. Who were the displaced scholars and students persecuted bt the racial laws who lost their jobs and projects? They decided to leave looking for qualified jobs and for freedom abroad. What did they do? And how did both the Italian and the foreigner institutions behave with those intellectuals? Their names, their stories were cancelled, 'removed' or told with many fake news. If they are correctly reconstucted, those stories reveal severe loses at the expense of Italian science and culture, but also great talents and determination. This kind of research offers the opportunity to face methodological problems on history and memoires, on testimonies and the desire of forgetting, on oral, institutional and private sources.