The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor John Welle (Notre Dame). “L’unica poetessa che abbia oggi l’Italia,” Gabriele D’Annunzio declared of Amalia Guglielminetti, who began her literary career at the age of eighteen in 1901 with the ode “Al giglio sabuado” celebrating the birth of Princess Jolanda of Savoy. In the following decade, emerging onto the rich cultural scene of her native Turin, the Italian center of both the worker’s movement and the drive for female emancipation, she would bring forth three of the most important books of poetry of the new century: Le vergini folli (1907), Le seduzioni (1909), and L’insonne (1913). Adopting classical forms such as the songbook, the sonnet, and the tercet, her modernizing self-fashioning showcases various masks of the modern “donna nuova,” from the femme fatale to the emancipated woman. While linked to such traditional figures as Gaspara Stampa and other female poets of the Renaissance, she was also praised for her “stupefacente originalità.” Moreover, her early career, in its rapid rise to literary success, parallels that of her intimate friend, confidant and fellow Turin poet, Guido Gozzano. Their epistolary exchanges, numbering some 126 letters, dated between 1906 and 1912, shed light on their mutual admiration, tense romantic engagement — more literary than amorous — and common “will to fame.” Within the context of women writers of the early 20th century, as well as within that of the modern Italian poetic canon, this research seminar proposes revisiting Amalia Guglielminetti’s literary accomplishments for serious critical reconsideration. While focusing on the dialogue in letters and in verse between these two poets from Turin during the high point of their literary celebrity, I will also trace the factors that have marginalized the female writer in relation to her male counterpart(s), denying her the fame that she so richly deserves. John P. Welle is professor of Italian and concurrent professor of film, television and theatre, emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Acclaimed pianist Renana Gutman presents a program of Jewish composers who perished during the Holocaust, alongside works by their contemporaries — Berg, Ravel, and Debussy. This is event is free and not ticketed.  Originally published at music.nd.edu.

Whistleblowers have a prominent place in Hollywood films, and a growing subgenre within focuses on government employees who release classified information. This biopic follows Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney), a former Air Force intelligence specialist, who leaked a private report demonstrating that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States presidential elections. In 2017, the FBI visited Reality's home in Georgia and questioned her about her involvement with the leaks. Her unauthorized release of information landed her a prison sentence of five years, which she wrapped up serving in 2021 with an early release. GET TICKETS!  

Comprised of five short parts (or a prelude and four parts) filmed in sections over a three-year period, Dog Star Man follows a woodsman (Stan Brakhage), his axe, and his dog as they climb a snowy mountain in order to chop down a tree. That odyssey serves as Brakhage's bracketing for the larger story, which includes various visions and abstractions encountered by the woodsman along the way. GET TICKETS  

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Professor Martyn Powell will deliver the lecture, "Wolfe Tone and the Hibernian Catch Club: Sociability in Revolutionary Ireland." Lecture Abstract Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish political radical, best-known of the leaders of the United Irish rebellion of 1798, was a cultural polymath. As Martyn Powell will explain, this is perhaps something that, amidst the memorialising and commemorating that goes on in Irish republicanism, could be a little better understood. Theobald Wolfe Tone was an aspiring novelist; exceptionally accomplished in the genre of diarist and master of the epistolary craft; and even had an early dalliance with amateur theatricals. Less well-known, however, was that he was an accomplished singer, and in 1790 he joined the Dublin musical society, the Hibernian Catch Club. His diary shows that, after a financial windfall, he paid for his membership to the club, but beyond this we are very much in the dark. This lecture will explore his arrival in the club, his network of friends and acquaintances who nominated and supported him, and the tensions that operated in this particular brand of club-life in 1790s Dublin. Political divisions were to be expected, but tense stand-offs also occurred between those who valued a commitment to music-making over sociability. Powell asserts that much more can be said about Tone’s cultural and artistic impulses through a study of Dublin club-life in one of the most fractured periods of Ireland's history. Speaker Biography Martyn J. Powell is professor of history and dean of the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in Irish political, cultural and social history, and his publications include Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (2003), The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2005), Piss-Pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (2009), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2010) (edited with James Kelly), and many articles and essays. He is currently working on a study of violence in Irish society, ‘Houghers and Chalkers: The Knife in Revolutionary Ireland, 1760-1815’, a book on the early club-life of Wolfe Tone, and an edition of the political works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, part of a Leverhulme-funded research project, for Oxford University Press. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Unpacking the Election: Where Do We Go From Here?  is presented by Gerry Baker, editor-at-large of The Wall Street Journal, as part of the Thomas H. Quinn Lecture Series. Widely recognized for his sharp political commentary, Baker writes and speaks on U.S. and global politics, economics and business trends. His weekly column for the WSJ editorial page, “Free Expression,” features some of the world's leading writers, influencers and thinkers about various subjects.Matthew E.K. Hall, the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies and director of the Notre Dame Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, will serve as moderator. Hall specializes in interdisciplinary research that spans the fields of American politics, law and society, and organizational behavior. His current research examines popular support for democratic norms in the United States, political psychology and the role of politics in the workplace. The talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required. The Quinn Lecture is sponsored by Notre Dame alumnus and trustee John W. “Jay” Jordan II (BBA ’69) in memory of Quinn (ND ’69), who was Jordan’s college roommate, longtime friend and business partner.