Roberto Dainotto, Chair of Romance Studies and Professor of Romance Studies, Italian Studies

Roberto Dainotto
Office Location:  205 Languages Building
Office Phone:  (919) 660-3102
Email Address: send me a message
Web Page:  http://www.duke.edu/~dainotto

Teaching (Fall 2012):

Office Hours:

Appointments through Rebecca Smith (rsm443@duke.edu)
Education:

PhDNew York University1995
MANew York University1990
Laurea, cum laudeUniversity of Catania, Italy1986
Specialties:

Italian
Modern and Contemporary
European Studies
Historicism
Poetics
Space Studies, Urban Studies
Theory of the Novel
Marxism
The Enlightenment in a Global Perspective
Research Interests:

Current projects: The Philosophy of Praxis from Labriola to Gramsci., Vincenzo Cuoco's epistolary novel "Platone in Italia*, The narrative of Luciano Bianciardi., The Italian-American represented in Italian Culture.

Modern and contemporary Italian culture. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000), Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), and the edited volume Racconti Americani del ‘900 (Einaudi, 1999). His research interests include the Italian historicist tradition (Vico, Cuoco, Manzoni, Labriola and Gramsci), the formation of national identity between regionalism (including the so-called “Southern Question” and “Jewish Question”) and European integration; Italian cinema.

Current Ph.D. Students  

Representative Publications

  1. Europe (in Theory) (2007), Duke University Press (Winner of the 2010 Laura Shannon Prize of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies..)
  2. Asimmetrie mediterranee. Etica e mare nostrum, NAE, vol. 3 (2003), pp. 3-18
  3. The Gubbio Papers: Historic Centers in the Age of the 'Economic Miracle', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 8 no. 1 (2003), pp. 67-83
  4. Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (2000), Ithaca: Cornell University Press
  5. R. Dainotto, Historical Materialism as New Humanism: Antonio Labriola’s ‘In Memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti’ (1895), Annali d'Italianistica, vol. 25 (2008), pp. 265-282
  6. The Canonization of Heinrich Heine and the Construction of Jewish-Italian Literature, in The Most Ancient of Minorities: History and Culture of the Jews of Italy, edited by Stanislao Pugliese (2002), pp. 131-138, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press
  7. R. Dainotto, Of the Arab Origin of Modern Europe: Giammaria Barbieri, Juan Andrés, and the Origin of Rhyme, Comparative Literature, vol. 58 no. 4 (Fall, 2007), pp. 271-292
  8. The Importance of Being Sicilian: Italian Cultural Studies, sicilitudine and je ne sais quoi, edited by Graziella Parati and Ben Lawton, Italian Cultural Studies (2001), pp. 201-219, Boca Raton: Bordighera Press
  9. Goethe's Backpack, SubStance, vol. 105 no. 33 (2005), pp. 6-22 [html]
  10. Tramonto and Risorgimento: Gentile's Dialectics and the Prophecy of Nation, in Making and Unmaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, edited by Alberto Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (2001), pp. 241-256, Oxford: Berg.
  11. La città e il represso. Moderno, postmoderno, e l' immaginario del(la) capitale, in Golem. Il futuro che passa, edited by Fausto Carmelo Nigrelli (2001), pp. 49-72, Roma: ManifestoLibri.
  12. Die Rhetorik des Regionalismus. Architektonischer Ort und der Geist des Gemeinplatzes, in Die Architektur, die Tradition und der Ort: Regionalismen in der europaäischen Stadt, edited by Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani (2000), pp. 15-30, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
  13. R. Dainotto, The Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory, European History Quarterly, vol. 36 no. 1 (2006), pp. 7-29
  14. The `Other' Europe of Michele Amari: Orientalism from the South, Nineteent-Century Contexts, vol. 26 no. 4 (2005), pp. 18-27
  15. Vico's Beginnings and Ends: Variations on the Theme of Origins of Language, Annali d'Italianistica, vol. 18 (2000), pp. 13-28
Conferences Organized

It is said in his legend that Professor Dainotto's PhD from New York University was in Comparative Literature, and only when he was struck by an illumination under the statue of Washington Duke, possessed by the spirit of JB our Founder, he started pronouncing burning words in Italian and was appointed Assistant Professor in that Field. The image of Garibaldi spake unto him and said: "Roberto, go and spread Italian words, that manyfold students can hear." And he went and taught, as thou can see, on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Italian literature and culture, and fascism and Reconstruction, and Mediterranean Studies and European Unions; and he wrote in European History Quarterly, SubStance, Nepantla, Critical Inquiry, Segno, NAE, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Annali d'italianistica, Italian-Americana, and in collections in Italy and abroad. On a time, he wrote about excrements, which scholars naturally abhor, but it reminded him of sublime ecstasies, and anon he wrote that for Postmodern Culture; wherefore he went to publish Il racconto americano (Einaudi Scuola) and Place in Literature (Cornell UP, 2000), to which Europe (in Theory) did follow.

Let us devoutly pray this teacher, Professor Dainotto, to be our instructor and soccur and aid us in our adversities and curricula, and help, that we may after this short life at Duke come into everlasting life in the other world called real.