Global Salon Series: “Oscar Wilde’s Italian Dream” with author Renato Miracco

Renato Miracco

AUTHOR, ART CRITIC, AND CURATOR

Renato Miracco (born 1953) is an Italian art critic and curator. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for Cultural Achievements in 2018. He served as Cultural Attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington from 2010 to 2018 and as advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy. Miracco has curated major exhibitions for Tate Modern in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London’s Estorick Collection. His passion for Wilde dates from the early 1980s when he wrote his first essay on Wilde’s time in Italy. This new book on Wilde is based on new materials that Miracco has found over the last few years.

Ulrich Baer

PROFESSOR OF GERMAN AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, NYU

Ulrich Baer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He received his BA from Harvard University and his PhD from Yale University before joining the faculty of NYU in 1995. He is a widely published author, editor, and translator, and an expert on modern poetry, contemporary photography, literary theory, and philosophy. Among his many publications are Remnants of Song: Poetry and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (2000); Spectral Evidence; The Photography of Trauma (2002); 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (2002); Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life (editor and translator; 2005), The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader (co-editor with Emily Sun and Eyal Peretz; 2007); The Rilke Alphabet (2014), and Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai(2013). Uli has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Getty Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and twice been honored by the NYU Faculty of Arts and Science Golden Dozen teaching award. He writes regularly on photography as a critic and commentator.

He teaches regularly in the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch.

Stefano Evangelista

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Stefano Evangelista is an Associate Professor of English at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He works on nineteenth-century English and comparative literature and is especially interested in Aestheticism and Decadence, the reception of the classics, and the relationship between literary and visual cultures. He is the author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009) and the editor of The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), as well as collections on A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, literature and sculpture, and Decadence and translation. For his current research on literary cosmopolitanism, he has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Association and the British Academy. His new book, Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle, is due to come out in 2021 with Oxford University Press.

Lucy Riall

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE

Lucy Riall was Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a professor in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence. Riall studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge. She was a lecturer in Modern European history at the University of Essex before moving to Birkbeck. Since 2004 she has been editor of the journal European History Quarterly.Among her many prestigious awards are a Visiting Professorship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a Senior Fellowship at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Advanced Study.One of the leading experts on modern Italy, Riall has written on nineteenth-century state-formation and nationalism in Italy and Sicily. Several of her books treat the history of the Risorgimento; Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007) examined the popular cult of Giuseppe Garibaldi as a global cultural phenomenon.Riall speaks fluent Italian and she appears frequently on Italian TV and radio (RAI) as well as on the BBC.

Perri Klass

CO-DIRECTOR, NYU FLORENCE (CO-MODERATOR)

Larry Wolff

CO-DIRECTOR, NYU FLORENCE (CO-MODERATOR)

Professor Wolff works on the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and on the history of childhood. He tends to work as an intellectual and cultural historian. He has been most interested in problems concerning East and West within Europe: whether concerning the Vatican and Poland, Venice and the Slavs, or Vienna and Galicia. In the book Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) he developed the argument that Eastern Europe was “invented” in the eighteenth century, by the philosophes and travelers of the Enlightenment, who attributed meaning to a supposed division of Europe into complementary regions, Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Professor Wolff has analyzed Western perspectives on Eastern Europe as a sort of “demi-Orientalism,” negotiating a balance between attributed difference and acknowledged resemblance. In books about Venetian perspectives on Dalmatia (Venice and the Slavs, 2001) and Habsburg perspectives on Galicia (The Idea of Galicia, 2010), he has attempted to explore the meaning of “Eastern Europe” within imperial frameworks and the ideology of empire. His research on the history of childhood has included books on child abuse in Freud’s Vienna (Postcards from the End of the World, 1988) and child abuse in Casanova’s Venice (Paolina’s Innocence, 2012). His most recent book, The Singing Turk (2016), concerns Turkish subjects on the European operatic stage during the long eighteenth century, and analyzes musical and dramatic representations in the context of European-Ottoman relations. His current research concerns Woodrow Wilson and Eastern Europe. Professor Wolff also writes music and opera criticism.