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Visit the Graduate School for admission information and the online application to the PhD program. Please note that only online applications are accepted. Any difficulties or special requests for paper applications should be addressed directly to the Graduate School.
Questions of a general nature relating to the Department of Romance Studies can be directed to the Graduate Field Assistant.
OVERVIEW|
Thanks
to the Special Committee system at Cornell, the Ph.D. program in
Italian at Cornell has long been a program in Italian Studies. Graduate
students in Italian design a program of study that is comparatist
and/or interdisciplinary in approach, and are strongly encouraged
to develop a high degree of theoretical and methodological awareness.
The Italian program is particularly strong in the areas of medieval
and Renaissance Italian literature, modern and contemporary visual culture and media studies,
political theory, literary theory, and feminist thought.
Graduate students have
access to other outstanding faculty in many departments and programs
across the university, such as Architecture, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Government, History, History
of Art, Medieval Studies, Music, Romance Studies, and Visual Studies.
The opportunity to do interdisciplinary work is enhanced by the
structure of the program which requires students to complete a concentration
in a minor field. Typical
concentrations include gender studies, visual studies, comparative
literature, music, and art history.
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CORNELL AND ROMANCE STUDIES|
Cornell
is uniquely positioned for the study of Italian literature and culture.
The University Libraries house the finest Dante and Petrarch collections
outside Italy, while the university is home to Cornell Cinema, cited
as one of the best campus film exhibition programs in the country,
screening close to 400 different films/videos each year, seven nights
a week.
Founded in 1966 to support research and imaginative teaching in
the humanities, the Society for the Humanities encourages serious
and sustained discussion on topics of compelling interest to Italian
Studies.
The topic for 2011-2012 is “Sound” and for 2012-13 "Risk@Humanities."
Cornell is also home to the Institute for European Studies, whose
mission is to enhance the international dimensions of Cornell University’s
curriculum and facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching.
The Institute provides financial and logistical support for more
than 20 programs in area, thematic and development studies at Cornell.
It is especially active in offering predissertation workshops and
international research travel grants to encourage graduate student
research.
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CURRICULUM|
The
following list of recent graduate courses offers a snapshot of faculty interests and the kinds
of subjects prospective students can expect to study at Cornell:
Fascist Bodies, Fascist Films
The Modern-Post: Postmodernism in Italy
The Modern Italian Novel
Boccaccio
Dante’s Commedia
The Medieval Society of the Spectacle
Opera, History, Politics, and Gender
The Cinematic City
Tuscany as the New Jerusalem
Love and Sex in the Italian Renaissance
Patronage and the Medici
History of the Italian Language
Poetry in a Radio Age: Data Retrieval and the Italian Lyric
The Culture of the Renaissance
Renaissance Literature
The Catholic Grotesque: The Italian ‘Sacri Monti’ and
Their Post-Renaissance Legacy
Manzoni
Precariousness
The Italian Landscape: From the Dittamundo to Cyberspace
Autonomia: Art, Literature and Politics in and around Italy, 1968-1979
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FINANCIAL SUPPORT|
All
entering students receive generous fellowship support and summer funding. Currently, support is guaranteed by the graduate school for four years for students entering with an M.A. or five years for students entering with a B.A. This guarantee includes two years of fellowship and two or more years of teaching assistantships. These provide full tuition awards and, in addition, offer academic year stipends and student health insurance coverage. Students receive additional funding for the summer. Travel money and grants are also available to fund research projects and conference travel.
Prospective graduate students are encouraged to consider applying for outside fellowships. Click the following link for information about the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship
Teaching
Opportunities for Graduate Students
The experience of classroom teaching, with adequate advice, assistance,
and supervision, is an essential part of graduate education. Indeed,
documentary evidence of such experience (evaluations, letters of
recommendation) is indispensable for new Ph.D.s applying for teaching
jobs. We make every effort to have all Ph.D. candidates teach Italian
language courses for one year and Italian literature for a second.
Scholarly and Professional Training Opportunities
Advanced students can petition to join the Editorial
Board of diacritics and participate in reviewing and evaluating
submissions. Students have even been responsible for editing special
issues of the journal on topics of their choosing.
Research Abroad
Students have the opportunity to study abroad and are encouraged
to spend one of their fellowship years in Italy. The Department
of Romance Studies covers travel expenses to and from the United
States.
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PH.D. PROGRAM|
Structure
of the Ph.D. Program
The graduate program in Italian literature is structured to allow
for a broad experience in literary history and criticism. The student of recent literature
should acquire an ample and precise sense of cultural traditions;
likewise, the student of earlier periods should become acquainted
with the literary and critical trends of our own day. To this end,
courses and seminars seek to provide both broad and detailed familiarity
with major periods and authors.
The graduate plan encourages students to define their field of study
flexibly and broadly, in relation to such disciplines as linguistics
and semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, visual studies, history
of art or music, medieval studies, psychology or psychoanalysis,
and the study of classical literatures or other modern national
literatures. The student’s field of study is defined by consultation
with the Special Committee.
The Special Committee and the Minor Subject
As soon as possible--but no later than the third semester of study--each doctoral student chooses a three-member
Special Committee consisting of a chair (who must be a member of the Itlaian section in the Graduate Field of Romance Studies) plus two other faculty members. The committee (in particular, the
chair) is the person directly responsible for the student’s
progress in his/her work. It is the student’s responsibility
to consult regularly with the members of his/her committee and, ideally, to
convene the entire committee once a year to discuss the general
direction of his/her studies. Students may reconstitute the committee
whenever and as often as they wish, and are encouraged to do so,
without embarrassment, as their special interests crystallize and
their contacts with faculty members increase.
At least one member of the Special Committee must represent a field
other than the student’s major field. Most students choose
only one minor subject, though Graduate School regulations allow
election of two.
Coursework and Second Foreign Language Requirement
Students entering the program without an M.A. normally take a total
of sixteen courses over a three-year period.
Every student is expected to speak and write Italian fluently and
accurately. Students choose any additional language study according
to the requirements of their areas of study and in consultation
with Special Committees.
The student must also demonstrate or acquire proficiency in a second
foreign language (one that complements the student's course
of study) prior to taking the "A" exam. Proficiency
can be demonstrated through coursework or by written examination.
"Q" Examination
The main purpose of the “Q" or "Qualifying" Exam is to evaluate the student's ability to do the kind of original research work and analysis required of a successful Ph.D. candidate; additionally, the Q exam may be used to evaluate the student's pedagogical and linguistic skills. Ideally, the Q exam will provide an opportunity for the student and the Special Committee to discuss possible directions the student's work might take in the future.
Students must take the Q exam by the end of the fourth semester. The Q exam will consist of a longer essay (possibly developed from course work) and short answer questions, followed by an oral discussion.
Because the Q exam depends on directives provided by the members of the Special Committee, the student would be well advised to constitute a three-person Committee as early as is feasible, and no later than the end of the student's third semester.
If the committe is satisfied with the quality of the student's Q exam, the student can begin preparing for the A exam. If the committee finds that the Q exam does not meet the standard for graduate work, the committee will ask the student to complete further portions of the exam or the committee will recommend a terminal M.A. degree.
“A” Examination
The Graduate School requires that students complete the “A" or "Admission
to Candidacy" Examination before registering
for the seventh semester.
The “A” exam is an oral exam that usually does not exceed
two hours. Based on an extended piece of written work presented
to the Special Committee -- usually a paper designed to serve as
the introduction or first chapter of the dissertation -- the “A”
exam tests the student’s competence in his/her area of specialization.
Students should plan to spend at least a fourth of their time over
one semester in the preparationsof this paper, consulting frequently
with their chair as they define the topic, prepare an outline and
write. The paper should not be a first draft, but a finished
piece of work, complete with summary bibliography and such scholarly
apparatus as may be appropriate (most such papers are twenty to
fifty pages long). The completed paper should be made available
to all members of the Special Committee at least one week (preferably
two) prior to the date agreed upon for the examination.
During the examination, members of the Special Committee question
the candidate on the worth and coherence of his/her topic and on
his/her understanding of the texts and problems of interpretation
that the topic raises. Students who pass the examination receive
recommendations from committee members for further work on the dissertation.
In the event of failure, the student repeats the examination on
the basis of a new or revised paper.
“B” Exam
The “B” exam is the defense of the dissertation. Each
member of the Special Committee usually presents to the candidate
a brief written judgment and critique of the dissertation and a
checklist of errors to be corrected. The major aims of the exam
are to assure the candidate that the dissertation has been carefully
read and considered and to allow the student to engage in a serious
discussion of his/her work.
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PROFILES of Current Graduate Students in Italian|
Valeria Dani
[in preparation]
Antonio Di Fenza
[in preparation]
Lorenzo Fabbri
I am a third year student in the Italian section of Romance Studies working on Film Theory and Continental Philosophy. I arrived at Cornell from the University of California at Irvine, where I was teaching Italian and conducting research in the Derrida Archives. It was 2005 and I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation in Contemporary Philosophy from the University of Cassino. During my time in California, I finished my first book, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism, Deconstruction. In my book, I tried to give a detailed account of Richard Rorty’s attempt to reconcile deconstruction with the American pragmatist and liberal traditions. Rorty claims that Derrida reduced philosophy to a production of private fantasies that do not have any political or theoretical relevance. I challenged such an aberrant reappropriation by investigating the two key features of Rorty’s privatization of deconstruction: the reduction of deconstructive writing to an example of merely autobiographical literature; and the thesis that Derrida not only dismisses, but also mocks the endeavor to engage philosophy with political struggle. What I eventually question, is the legitimacy of labeling deconstruction as a postmodern withdrawal from politics and theory.
In the last chapter of the book, I focused on the opposite configurations of historicity and temporality emerging from Rorty and Derrida’s frameworks. It is from this topic – “time and history” – that I picked up at Cornell. My dissertation will in fact be an exploration of different elaborations of time and history in Contemporary Italian Film and Theory. But I am not interested in unearthing the different conceptions of time/history organizing different cultural artifacts; rather, the contrary interests me: what I would like to explore is how different narrative strategies produce opposite experiences of temporality. For example: What experience of historicity is produced by the use of wipes in Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta? Does the suspension of narrative punctuating De Sica’s Umberto D. have any broader temporal consequence? How is Agamben’s style strategic to bringing forth the messianic time he often alludes to? And can it be interpreted also as an oblique critique to the hidden thanatology of deconstructive writing? Why is Gomorrah’s mise en scène essential to Garrone’s denunciation of the erasure of futurity in contemporary Italy? These are only a few of the questions I would like my dissertation to address; and I would not been able to even think of this project apart from the seminars I took at Cornell.
Jason Frank’s seminar was an opportunity to explore, via Hannah Arendt, the relation between spaces and time; thanks to Kevin Attell’s seminar on Agamben and Derrida, I understood the reasons of Agamben’s critique of deconstruction as a deferral from politics; John Najemy’s seminar made me discover Machiavelli’s election of social conflicts (“tumulti”) as a motor of historical progress; Sabine Haenni’s seminar on European Cinema allowed me to reflect on the way Rossellini and De Sica’s opposite narrative strategies involve also opposite experience of time; Timothy Murray’s seminar has been very influential for my understanding of the way technique changes our experience of history; Timothy Campbell’s seminar on biopolitics taught me that the thrust unifying the different declinations of biopolitics (Agamben, Esposito, Negri) is a concern for the disappearance of history. Currently, a directed reading with Naoki Sakai is helping me figure out the relation between postcolonial temporality (Chakrabarty) and the conception of history developed in Foucault’s archeological works.
Elisabeth Fay
I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Italian Studies from Sarah Lawrence College in 2005. I was able to study abroad for three semesters at Sarah Lawrence, and the time I spent at the universities of Florence and Catania made me aware of the very real differences in identity and practice among regions of Italy.
I began my doctoral studies at Cornell in 2007 intending to work on the Southern question, but through the readings I encountered in my coursework and the independent work I was able to do with the faculty here, my focus shifted to questions of immigration in contemporary Italy. Ultimately, my interest in both these fields stems from the same common point: the way that Italian identities have shifted and evolved when faced with the kind of cultural friction that emerges when different populations are brought into contact through migration. With this question in mind, I am currently developing an interdisciplinary dissertation project that considers how questions of migration and identity are expressed in social space and reflected in spatial politics. We need only look to the news media’s reliance on tropes of “invasion” when reporting new migrant arrivals, or references to migrant “conquest” of neighborhoods to understand the importance of space in Italy’s new multiculturalism. The physical spaces in which people move are being transformed in new ways as new communities take root. Consequently, the meanings that arise through people’s interactions with and in a particular space—a piazza, a government building, a quarter, a family home—change irrevocably, often rendering the space and the subjects who inhabit it no longer recognizable as “Italian” in the modern sense.
I am interested in examining these sites of contamination and determining their impact: can ideas of “Italianness” (italianità) and multiculturalism coexist within a single nation, city, region, or neighborhood? What is the effect of both of these identities—Italian on the one hand, “multicultural” on the other—on Italian and migrant subjects? How do these identities manifest themselves spatially in a given community? Space is one theater in which anxieties about migration are played out, both for Italians who feel that foreign “invaders” are encroaching on their national and individual territories and for the migrant residents who attempt to create some measure of autonomous space in a culture that often regards their presence as an unwelcome intrusion. My research focuses primarily on the way that these questions are addressed the literature and cinema of migration in Italy today (Italian language works by migrant authors, and works by Italian authors who engage with migration issues) and attempts to understand the intersection of artistic and spatial production among migrant groups.
The unique structure of the Italian Ph.D. at Cornell has allowed me to adopt an interdisciplinary approach that considers a number of different perspectives and disciplines, and my committee has been invaluable in helping me weave these together in a comprehensive and meaningful way.
Diana Garvin
Second year PhD candidate in Italian Literature at Cornell University. GPSA representative for Romance Studies. B.A. cum laude, Harvard University, in Romance Studies: Italian, French, and Spanish. Additional coursework in German and Brazilian Portuguese. Senior Thesis: “The Treatises of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Pellegrino Artusi: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Two Gastronomic Paths to National Identity.”
My current project, supervised by Professor Timothy Campbell, is entitled “From "From Fascist Ideals to Consumer Appeals: Negotiating the Significance of Popular Food Stuffs in Media in Post-Fascist Italy." This project examines the textual and visual legacy of Fascism in Economic Boom period advertising. Additionally, I research the role of women, motherhood, and evocations of gender roles in Modern propagandistic film with the aid of Professor Medina Lasansky. Other academic interests include Futurism, 20th and 21st century Italian material and pop culture, and film studies. I have previously taught at Université François Rabelais in Tours, France and at Johns Hopkins SAIS with the Associazione Italo-americana in Bologna, Italy.
Recent Grants:
Cornell Institute for European Studies Michele Sicca Pre-Dissertation Grant for studies in Emilia Romagna, Italy in 2010.
Cornell Graduate School Research Travel Grant for studies at Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, Florida in 2009.
Recent and Upcoming Publications:
Academic Press:
Translation of Antonio Negri’s Alle origini del biopolitico. Un seminario, to be published in 2012.
Book Review of Cecilia Novero’s Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, to be published in Annali d’italianistica in 2011.
Co-Translation of Roberto Esposito’s Persona e vita umana, in Theory after “Theory,” published by Routledge Press in 2010.
Popular Press:
Editor of Let’s Go: Spain and Portugal 2006 published by St. Martins Press in 2005. Work also appears in Let’s Go: Europe 2006 and Let’s Go: Western Europe 2006.
Sylvia Hakopian
I am a 2nd year graduate student in Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. I received my B.A. in English from UCLA in 2005 with a concentration in British Literature. In 2009, I received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics from UCLA, with an emphasis in Latin.
My current coursework at Cornell includes: Modern Roman Novel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, War and Modernity, Urban Consumerism under Fascism, Heidegger's Literature, History of Romance Linguistics, and Italian Dialectology.
Languages studied: Armenian (native), English (native), Italian (near native fluency), French (conversational), Latin (advanced), and Piedmontese (basic).
Publications / Conferences include:
1) From 2008-2009, I conducted archival research and translating work on the 1915 Armenian Genocide with Los Angeles Times Journalist, Dawn MacKeen, who's upcoming book on her grandfather's memoirs will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2010.
2) I have also worked with Dr. Richard G. Hovanissian in the Department of History and Near Eastern Studies from 2006-2009 and translated into English interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors.
3) April 2010, I participated in the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) and delivered a paper, titled "A Revolutionary Language: Pasolini, Romanesco, and the Fluidity of Space."
4) October 2010, I conducted a talk, titled, "Armenians in Italy: Bridging the Gap Between the East and West,” as part of the Cornell Institute for European Studies Mediterranean Studies Lunchtime Talks Series.
5) Current Project includes a paper on the Linguistic development of Medieval Piedmontese from its Latin roots.
My general interests include the philosophy of language, theory of the novel, the questione della lingua and the development of Italian national identity within the 20th century, specifically under Fascism. I am interested in the ways in which language and dialect within Modern Italian literature present and discuss conflicting views on the nature of Italian national identity. Related to this is the idea of spaces within literature: What kind of spaces might linguistic variety create within a work, and what do these spaces mean for the Italian individual? What might these linguistic spaces also say about the form of or process of writing literature? How does one define a national or regional body of literature?
Joel Pastor
At Cornell since the Fall of 2008, my primary interest is the Trecento, and particularly Dante Alighieri. Dante's ideological commitments in the area of political and poetic theory, especially as developed by Petrarca, forms the basis of my prospective thesis. The two men were famous both as poets and as exiles; and each, I hope to show, attempted to confront a similar problematic in his own literary production.
My other interests include (in no particular order) Medieval philosophy and theology, Humanism, the cavalleresque epics of the Cinquecento, Augustine, Machiavelli, and the tradition of Italian Opera, particularly the work of Verdi and the veristi.
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