Overview

The city is a locus of production and consumption of shared and, more frequently, contested memories, from Benjamin’s flâneries (1927-40) through to Halbawchs’ ‘social frameworks of collective memory’ (1950), Nora’s ‘realms of memory’ (1981) and Huyssen’s ‘urban palimpsests’ (2003). My lecture elucidates and explores divisive urban memories with reference to the case study of Trieste, a port city at the north-eastern borders of Italy situated between Mitteleuropa and the Mediterranean.

Created ex-novo in the eighteenth century, Trieste is renowned for its coarse-grained, unreconciled and violent history. Radiating out to a region at the confluence of the Roman, Slav and Germanic civilizations, the city is frequently posited as a paradigm of modernity. Its fragmented culture mirrors the collision of plural and inhomogeneous ethnicities, languages and nationalities.

Open lecture to students of CES doctoral programmes «Discursos: Cultura, História e Sociedade» and "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies", CES researchers & FLUC (post)graduate students in humanities programmes.

Nota biográfica

Katia Pizzi - BA (Bologna); MA (Kent); PhD (Cantab). Since 2008, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (formerly Germanic & Romance Studies), School of Advanced Study, University of London. Lectured in Italian at the University of Kent, 1994-2004. Since 2009, Director of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Published 5 books and 64 articles and chapters in the UK and overseas on modern Italian literature and culture, including culture and literature at the north-eastern borders of Italy (especially Trieste), Italian Futurism, popular culture, children’s literature and illustration. Most recently: Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2012), winner of the Children’s Literature Association prize in 2012, and Cold War Cities: History, Culture and Memory, co-ed. M. Hietala (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016)
Her monograph Italian Futurism and the Machine is in the press (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming June 2019)