Event Details
Tue, March 13, 2018
18:00 – 19:00
VILLA LA PIETRA
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese 120
50139 Firenze, Italia
ROUND TABLE
Axel Körner (University College London) in conversation with Prof. Lucy Ryall (European University Institute) and Prof. Edoardo Tortarolo (Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, “Amedeo Avogadro”).
The panelists will discuss themes related to Prof. Körner’s most recent monograph. America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home.
Featured Biographies
Axel Körner
PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Professor of Modern History at University College London and Director of the UCL Centre for Transnational History. He mostly works on nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history, with a special field of interest in opera. His main publications include Das Lied von einer anderen Welt (1997), Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (2009) and America in Italy. The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763-1865 (2017). He currently works on a transnational history of the Habsburg Empire, 1804-1918 and leads a major research project on Italian opera in the world. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, and has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), at the Remarque Centre of NYU and at the ENS Paris.
Lucy Ryall
PROFESSOR, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Professor of History of Europe in the World (19th to 20th Centuries) at the European University Institute. Among her monographs are Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale University Press, 2008); Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); and Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford University Press, 2013; Italian-language edition, Laterza, 2012).
Edoardo Tortarolo
PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DEL PIEMONTE ORIENTALE
Professor of Early Modern History at the Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro.” He is the author of La ragione interpretata: la mediazione tra Italia e Germania nell’età dell’Illuminismo (Rome: Carocci, 2003), and L’invenzione della libertà di stampa. Censura e scrittori nel Settecento (Rome: Carocci, 2011; English-language edition, Springer, 2015).