Eugenia Paulicelli

Research Interests

The major areas of Eugenia Paulicelli's research are the word/image relationship and the impact this interaction and new technologies have had on our perception and cognition of the world around us, the language we use and on writing and memory. Central to her research is the notion of gender and how it has transformed our knowledge of the past and our understanding of aesthetic, political, and social manifestations of reality, whether literary writing or systems of signification and communication such as fashion. In addition she is interested in exploring the intersections of literary writing and politics in crucial epochs of social and cultural transformations in Italy. These concerns have taken various forms in her scholarly publications: from the debate among the disciplines in Renaissance Italy and the study of Italian poets and writers who have shown a fascination with or inspiration from art and visual culture to the cultural politics of fascism and the use it made of fashion, style and the media as well as on studies in which she focuses on literature and the craft of writing. She has also organized an International Conference on "Italian Fashion: Identities, Transformation, Production" held at The Graduate Center on October 30-31, 2002, funded by the Italian Cultural Institute and the Italian Trade Commission.

Courses Taught

Other Voices: History and Ethics in Italian Literature;

Fashion: Gender, Power, Consumerism;

Fashion Narratives: Gender, Hegemony and Identity.

Select List of Publications (Recent and Forthcoming)

Books

Fashion under Fascism. Culture and Politics of Style, Oxford: Berg, forthcoming

Parola e immagine. Sentieri della scrittura in Leonardo, Marino, Foscolo, Calvino (Word and Image. Pathways of Writing in Leonardo, Marino, Foscolo, Calvino) (Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 1996)

Dimore (Dwellings) (Collected Poems) (Ragusa: Libro Italiano, 1996)

Articles

"Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy," in Gender and History (November 2002): 537-59, special issue on Fashion, Dress and Material Strategies, Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin eds. The same article will appear in the volume of the same title to be published by the Basil Blackwell Company, Oxford, in 2003;

"Clara Sereni" entry for Jewish Women. A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, CD-ROM, Paula E. Hyman, Dalia Ofer, Alice Shalvi eds., Jerusalem: Shalvi Publishing, forthcoming

"Le narrative della moda. Egemonia, genere, identita," in Annali d'Italianistica 16 (1998): 315-37, eds. Robert S. Dombroski and Dino Cervigni;

"Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and the Discourse on Fashion" in Annalecta Husserliana (2001): 237-248;

"Art in Modern Italy. From the Macchiaioli to the Transavanguardia," in An Introduction to Modern Italian Culture, eds. Zygmunt Baranski and Rebecca West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 243-263;

"Fashion: Narration and Nation," in An Introduction to Modern Italian Culture, eds. Zygmunt Baranski and Rebecca West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 283-291;

"Natalia Ginzburg and the Craft of Writing," in Natalia Ginzburg, A Voice of Our Century, eds. Angela Jeannet and Giuliana Katz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 153-178;

With David Ward, "Interview with Clara Sereni," in L'Anello che non tiene 9:1-2 (Spring-Fall, 1997): 73-83;

"Languages and Borders of Disciplines at a Crossroads in Leonardo Da Vinci's Paragone," in The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 1:1 (1996): 214-19;

"Dalla citta invisibile alla citta futura. Italo Calvino: storia, impegno, linguaggio," in The Italianist 16 (1996): 143-60;

"On Memory, Culture and Interdisciplinarity," in Romance Languages Annual 6 (1994): 340-44;

"Fashion as a Text: Talking about Femininity and Feminism," in Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy, ed. Giovanna Miceli Jeffries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 171-89;

"The Sign and its Alterity," in Differentia 3-4 (1989): 329-36;

"Il ritratto di Nessuno ovvero nessuno ritratto," in Carte semiotiche 3 (1987): 63-70;

Current Projects

Proceedings of the International Conference Italian Fashion: Identities, Transformation, Production (editor);

Book-length study provisionally entitled Dress, Identity and Social Performance in Sixteenth Century Italy.

"Italian Literary Writing and Politics"