Special thanks to Mary Ann Carolan for chairing the committee and to Sherry Roush, Mark Pietralunga, and Elsa Filosa for serving on the committee.
Award for Performance and Visual Culture (includes media, theatre, art history, film): Luca Caminati, Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema
Luca Caminati’s nuanced study focuses on the iconic Italian directors Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they document the post-war global landscape in countries and regions such as India, China, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula. The author uses theory confidently and convincingly in this sophisticated study which persuasively repositions three major Italian filmmakers, employing geography and politics, “to gauge how Italian cinema has reacted to the world outside” in the emerging postcolonial era. While looking outside Italy, Caminati engages theoretical, political, and historical analyses to articulate the challenges intellectuals faced as that country modernized in the postwar years.
Award for Literary, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies: Jo Ann Cavallo, The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947)
With this volume, Jo Ann Cavallo offers a meticulous and detailed reconstruction of the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City. The author reinforces this important study of the migration of the puppet theater from Sicily to the Americas by providing excellent translations of eight selected plays. An expert on Italian chivalric epic, Cavallo demonstrates the indebtedness of these works to the Storia dei paladini, which in turn follows the plot of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Cavallo’s smart and accessible study incorporates both the historical and cultural context of the puppet plays while tracing the diasporic journey of this art form from Europe to South and North America. This fascinating study of the little-known impresario Manteo, his family and their descendants sheds light on the creative genius and cultural importance of early twentieth century Italian immigrants.
Award for First Book: Anne C. Leone, Dante’s Blood
Leone’s investigation of blood’s “diverse implications and polysemous agency” in Dante’s works is rigorously researched and well-documented. This detailed and enlightening study represents an important contribution to future studies on the body. Leone authoritatively traces a wide range of literary, scientific, medical, political, theological and religious implications of blood employed by the sommo poeta. Each of the well-developed chapters highlights the role blood plays in Dante’s works as well as in the greater medieval context, ranging from Aristotle’s ideas about conception to its central role in artistic creation and divine inspiration. In this comprehensive book, Leone offers an engaging, multi-level reading of the question with which it opens: “[W]hy is the image of blood pouring down the Pier delle Vigne’s wooden frame the only one that comes close to dramatizing the Crucifixion in the Commedia?”
