On this page you find a list of all the book awardees of recent years.
2024 AAIS BOOK PRIZE
Literary and Cultural Studies
Visual Studies
History, Society and Politics
First Book ex-aequo
Visual Studies
English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Literary Work
English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Scholarly Work
Literary and Cultural Studies
Stefano Serafini, Gothic Italy: Crime, Science, and Literature after Unification, 1861-1914
University of Toronto Press, 2024
Stefano Serafini’s Gothic Italy: Crime, Science, and Literature after Unification, 1861-1914 makes an especially unique contribution to current scholarly debates for the way it charts the discourses constituting the geography of the Italian Gothic and the roles they performed in the building of the modern nation of Italy. This twofold project is elaborated through close readings of works by such authors as Carolina Invernizio, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, which interrogate the complex exchanges between Gothic narratives and discursive constructions of crime in positivist anthropology, sociology, medicine, law, and politics. With admirable acumen, the analyses of these relations highlight subversive narrative strategies and a variety of issues, such as threats posed to the social hierarchy of power by disease and depravity attached to the lower classes, transgressive masculinity, vampirism, and female deviance as they relate to Gothic cities, the Gothic mind, and the Gothic body. The study culminates in provocative conclusions that enable readers to see the spectral presence of the modern Gothic in eugenics, neurocriminology, and monstrous murders today, thereby showing just how contingent upon crime the making of Italy has been.
Visual Studies
Luca Caminati, Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema
Indiana University Press, 2024
Luca Caminati’s provides a compelling and meticulously researched examination of how postwar auteurs Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni portrayed the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in their often-overlooked nonfiction and documentary films. The book’s greatest strength is its challenge to the conventional view of these directors solely as icons of national art cinema. By foregrounding travel, Caminati reframes their work within a broader transnational and geopolitical context, emphasizing their role within the context of anticolonial and Third Worldist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This shift not only highlights their roles as politically impegnati
History, Society and Politics
Samantha Kelly, Translating Faith: Ethiopian Pilgrims in Renaissance Rome
Harvard University Press, 2024
Samantha Kelly’s Translating Faith: Ethiopian Pilgrims in Renaissance Rome is the result of an extensive, meticulous research on the little-known Santo Stefano Pilgrims, an Ethiopian pilgrimage tradition that Ethiopians would undertake to worship the tombs of Peter and Paul in the city of Rome. Their church, Santo Stefano degli Abissini, survives to this day in the Vatican. Through nine chapters, and several intriguing appendix materials, Kelly analyzes the history of the pilgrimage, and the cultural and intellectual connections that the pilgrims established with other groups in the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance, from Rome, to Pisa, to Venice, and more. Drawing on a blend of classical and modern scholarship, and on a precious Gə’əzmanuscript collection, Kelly brings these pilgrims and the history of their community back to life, while also helping her readers make compelling transcultural connections with Italy’s colonial past.
First Book ex-aequo
Chiara Trebaiocchi, Reschooling Society: Pedagogia come forma di lotta nella vita e nell’opera di Franco Fortini
Pacini Editore, 2024
With Reschooling Society: Pedagogia come forma di lotta nella vita e nell’opera di Franco Fortini, Chiara Trebaiocchi offers a groundbreaking, definitive study of one of postwar Italy’s most sophisticated poets (and most influential radical intellectuals) as a teacher, a pedagogical activist, and a theorist of education. Governing a remarkable amount of archival documents and texts with apparent ease and impressive philological thoroughness, Trebaiocchi shows why Franco Fortini was a pivotal interlocutor for the students’ movement of the 1968 and 1977 generations, between classrooms and public squares, and why it is urgent to reconsider his legacy of “impegno pedagogico” along those of more studied figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Lorenzo Milani. Intersecting Fortini’s poems with his courses, his impervious theoretical writings with public-facing essay and anthologies meant for a mass audience, Trebaiocchi reconstructs his ideas on authority, dissent, inter-generational struggle, and social change, in dialogue not only with Marx and Gramsci, but also with Edward Said’s vision for the role of public intellectuals in a postmodern society. Indeed, written in terse, beautiful Italian, and supported by a monumental apparatus of rigorous notes, this book extends a call to action to today’s intellectuals, and to anyone who still believes that any future worth fighting for will be shaped by the revolutionary practice of education.
Amy King, The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle
Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
Amy King’s The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle unearths half a century of stratified mythologies in Italy’s far-right cultural politics, arguing that neo-fascist groups have mobilized (and manipulated) the memory of the so called “Rogo di Primavalle” (1973) in order to build a collective identity that brought their coalition from the fringes of parliament to the control of government. With uncommon thoroughness and a profound will to understand, Amy King collected an unprecedented amount of primary material on this carefully constructed self-fashioning of martyrdom, investigating the current persistence and pervasiveness of the memory of Primavalle through oral history, a scrupulous survey of the media landscape, thorough analyses of shrines and memorials, and the direct witnessing (and deconstruction) of rituals of commemoration. In doing so, she managed to offer a human history of the Italian far-right from Almirante’s Movimento Sociale Italiano to Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia and, at the same time, to transcend Italy’s exemplary case towards a broader theory of cultural memory in postwar radical conservatism. Shockingly timely, this enticing, original, and wonderfully researched book contributes to some of the most pressing debates of our time, from the recrudescence of fascism in the West to the risks of rooting political culture in a tribal, retrospective gaze.
English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Literary Work
AntoloGaia: Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir by Porpora Marcasciano
Transl. Sandra Waters and Francesco Pascuzzi
Rutgers University Press (Other Voices of Italy Series) 2024.
Accompanied by the solid introduction to the Italian edition by Laura Schettini, as well as a carefully crafted preface to the English edition by Sara Galli and Mohammad Jamali, the text is further enriched by a translation note by Sandra Waters and Francesco Pascuzzi. With precision and sensitivity, this note illustrates the complex choices involved in translating a book that is as much a fascinating and provocative linguistic journey as it is a human one. Centered on a hybrid and evolving identity whose verbalization into words is an inherent challenge, the Italian text has inspired original lexical and grammatical solutions, allowing the English translation to “accessorize” itself with parentheses and coded letters, thus questioning its own structure. Expanding in a reversal of its usual conciseness, the English language undergoes a visible transition in a book where the translator does not disappear but instead becomes part of the text. AntoloGaia was selected precisely for its inventive nature, but also for its significant documentation of a historical period that remains largely undiscussed in Italy and is certainly even less known in Anglophone countries; for its nature as a collective and social biography told through an intimate lens; and for its anti-discriminatory political charge—both at the time of the events it recounts and in today’s context.
English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Scholarly Work
The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle: The Secret of San Gennaro’s Blood by Francesco Paolo de Ceglia
Transl. Clorinda Donato, Manuel Romero, Alessandra Balzani, Jaclyn Taylor
Routledge Studies in Cultural History, 2024
For their impressive work in translating Francesco Paolo de Ceglia’s The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle: The Secret of San Gennaro’s Blood, the AAIS awards the 2024 English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Scholarly Work to the team based at the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies at California State University, Long Beach: Clorinda Donato, director, Manuel Romero, associate director, Alessandra Balzani, instructional program coordinator, and Jaclyn Taylor, lecturer in Italian. In her foreword to the translation, Donato makes the case that this story deserves to be shared with the English-speaking world. It is a story recounted in different languages and genres over its long history—Church documents in Latin, a forged saint’s life in Greek, historical reports in Italian, and, of course, prayers in Neapolitan dialect. This translation provides an invaluable resource for readers of English eager to interpret the language of San Gennaro's blood.
Europa Editions Special Recognition
A spectacular kaleidoscope of Italian authors, who form the largest part of the Europa catalog, in consistently commendable translations into English, reveals to us the stunning and sometimes harsh beauty of the changing patterns of the Italian world. The impressive Italian list wins our thanks and praise.
2023 AAIS BOOK PRIZE
History, Society, and Politics
Literary and Cultural Studies
Visual, Film and Media
First Book
History, Society, and Politics
Massimo Mazzotti’s outstanding Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity advances a dynamic concept of mathematics as culture, elaborated through insightful analysis of its formative interactions with the social and political currents of life in Naples from the 1780s to the 1830s. With readings of a rich array of texts ranging from paintings and maps to political satires and textbooks, the author charts mathematics as a site of conflict between the European regime of modern concepts and practices and alternative Neapolitan ones designed for increased precision, which ultimately gives rise to an image of mathematical knowledge invested with purity and neutrality still underwriting technologies today. While mapping this genealogy, Mazzotti’s extraordinary study thus demonstrates the stakes and possibilities Italian Studies and the Humanities in general have in Science Studies.
Literary and Cultural Studies
In Ariosto in the Machine Age, Alessandro Giammei reconsiders the monumental presence of Ludovico Ariosto and Orlando Furioso in Italian culture over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The poet’s statue in Piazza Ariostea in Ferrara--inspirational for Giorgio de Chirico and many others--cast a long shadow indeed over Futurism, Bontempelli’s Magical Realism, Fascism’s various strategies of cultural propaganda, and the evolving new art form of cinema. Pivotal moments in modern Italian culture produced an unexpected collection of responses to the myth of Ariosto that reveal a deep archive of canonical and ephemeral works, including unrealized projects by Visconti and Fellini, among others. Laviciously illustrated, this innovative exploration of reception and imitation proposes an ongoing dialogue between image and text destined to energize future readings of Ariosto’s poem.
Visual, Film and Media
Diana Bullen Presciutti’s Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art draws compelling and revealing connections between Renaissance images of the miracles performed by mendicant saints and the ideological order that mediated social problems in Renaissance Italy. Shedding new light on the work of famous artists while removing from obscurity others largely forgotten, the monograph helps us to see the Renaissance world anew. The author adopts a rigorously interdisciplinary approach, embracing art history, social history, sociology, religious and gender studies to demonstrate how art functioned within shifting social and cultural systems both to buttress and to challenge the prevailing order. Careful visual analysis, supported by exacting textual interpretation, convincingly illustrates the material significance of miraculous imagery, uncovering a series of interrelations between the marvelous and the quotidian in the Renaissance context. For the breadth of its vision and the depth of its inquiry, this book merits a prize.
First Book
Cecilia Brioni’s impressive first book Fashioning Italian Youth: Young People’s Identity and Style in Italian Popular Culture, 1958-75, offers a unique and original perspective on representations of youth in Italian media between the 1950s and 1970s. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Brioni embarks on a meticulous analysis resulting from thorough research on magazines, television programming, and cinema about (and aimed at) young audiences. The author explores representations of young Italians through style (hair and clothing), music and dance trends, issues of gender and identity, and transnationalism. At the center of Brioni’s analysis is a convincing distinction between a socially constructed idea of ‘i giovani’ and actual young Italians of the time. This study is a precious resource for understanding the cultural and social dynamics that characterized Italy during a period of significant social evolution.
Previous Book Prize Winners
2022:
Literary and Cultural Studies: Francesca Vella, Networking Operatic Italy. The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Visual Studies, Film and Media: Elena Dellapiana, Il design e l’invenzione del Made in Italy. Turin: Einaudi, 2022.
History, Society, and Politics: Rocco Rubini, Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
First Book
Winner: David Escudero, Neorealist Architecture. Aesthetics of dwelling in postwar Italy. Routledge, 2023.
Honorable Mention: James K. Coleman, A Sudden Frenzy: Improvisation, Orality, and the Power in Renaissance Italy. University of Toronto Press, 2022.
2021:
Literary Studies: Alessia Ricciardi. Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature. (Columbia University Press)
Visual Studies, Film and Media: Laura Watts. Italian Painting in the Age of the Unification. (Routledge)
History, Society, and Politics: Brian Brege. Tuscany in the Age of Empire. (Harvard University Press)
First Book: Erica Moretti. The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education and Children's Rights. (University of Wisconsin Press)
2020:
Literary Studies: Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski, Kafka's Italian Progeny (University of Toronto Press).
Visual Studies, Film and Media: Charles Leavitt, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press).
History, Society, and Politics: Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization of Postwar Italy (Cornell University Press).
First Book: Ramsey McGlazer, Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (University of California Press).
2019:
Medieval: G. Geltner, Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press).
Renaissance, 18th, and 19th Centuries: Paola Cori, Forms of Thinking in Leopardi’s Zibaldone: Religion, Science and Everyday Life in an Age of Disenchantment (Legenda).
20th and 21st Centuries: Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press).
*Honorable Mention: Marisa Escolar, Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy (Fordham University Press).
Film and other Media Studies: Giorgio Bertellini, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press).
2018:
Medieval: William Caferro, Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge University Press).
Renaissance, 18th, and 19th Centuries: Cristina Mazzoni, Golden Fruit: A Cultural History of Oranges in Italy (University of Toronto Press).
20th and 21st Centuries: Luca Cottini, The Art of Objects: The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture, 1878-1928 (University of Toronto Press).
2017:
Renaissance, 18th, and 19th Centuries: Barbara Spackman, Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands (Liverpool University Press).
20th and 21st Centuries: Teresa Fiore, Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham University Press).
Film and other Media Studies: Timothy C. Campbell, The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (Fordham University Press).
2016:
Medieval: Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Reading as the Angels Read: Speculation and Politics in Dante’s Banquet (University of Toronto Press).
Renaissance, 18th, and 19th Centuries: Giancara Periti, In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents (Yale University Press).
20th and 21st Centuries: Serenella Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (Bloomsbury).
Film and other Media Studies: Robert Rushing, Descended From Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body On Screen (Indiana University Press).
2015:
Medieval: Dennis Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy (Yale University Press).
Renaissance, 18th, and 19th Centuries: Adrian Randolph, Touching Objects. Intimate Experiences (Yale University Press).
20th and 21st Centuries: Giacomo Parinello, Fault Lines (Berghahn).
Film and other Media Studies: Jacqueline Reich, The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Indiana University Press).
2014:
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy (Cambridge University Press).
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: John Bessler, The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (Carolina Academic Press).
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century: David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press).
General: Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (The University of Chicago Press).
2013:
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: Paolo Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts, Economy and Culture (Cambridge University Press).
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: Steven Soper, Building a Civil Society (University of Toronto Press).
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century: Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Bianco e nero; Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (Le Monnier).
2012:
Pierpaolo Antonello, Contro il materialismo. Le “due culture” in Italia; bilancio di un secolo (Aragno).
Eleonora Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando furioso (Fordham University Press).
2011:
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (Yale University Press).
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: Paola Gambarota, Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity (University of Toronto Press).
Twentieth Century: Philip Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (Palgrave).
General: Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (Notre Dame University Press).
2010:
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (Yale University Press).
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: Francesca Savoia, Fra letterati e galantuomini (Società Editrice Fiorentina).
Twentieth Century: Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (University of Toronto Press).
2009:
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: Meredith Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (University of Toronto Press).
Twentieth Century: Lina Insana, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (University of Toronto Press).
Film: Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Indiana University Press).
General: Andrea Mirabile, Scrivere la pittura: La ‘funzione Longhi’ nella letteratura italiana (Longo).
2008:
Cinzia Blum, Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress (University of Toronto Press).
2007:
Guido Bonsaver, Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press).
2006:
Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal (University of Toronto Press).
2005:
Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford University Press).
2004:
John Picchione, The New Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetic Practices (University of Toronto Press).
2003:
Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885-1915 (University of Toronto Press).
2002:
Nicoletta Pireddu, Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle (Edizioni Fiorini).
2001:
Massimo Lollini, Il vuoto della forma. Scrittura, testimonianza e verità (Marietti).
2000:
Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (University of Minnesota Press).