NYU Visual Culture in Italy and Germany conference

Visual Culture in Italy and Germany
after Dictatorship and War

April 8-9, 2010

New York University

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
Department of Italian Studies and Deutsches Haus

Conference Themes

This symposium examines visual culture in Italy and Germany in the years of transition from dictatorship and World War Two. This period, roughly 1945 to 1955, has often been treated through the lens of forward-looking Cold War historiographies that reflect an investment in 1945 as a “year zero.” The sympo­sium will reflect the newest research in this direction, but will consider how visual culture also expressed experiences of loss, disorientation, and victimization brought on by war and the end of dictatorship in Germany and Italy. Visual culture in particular can be a privileged source for the exploration of the dramatic contrasts between idealism and despair that marked this com­plex period in both Italian and German history. The tensions be­tween processes of unmaking and remaking a national past, set within a broader context of the negotiation of American and other foreign influences, figure heavily in Italian and German visual culture of the period.

FEATURING: Angela Dalle Vacche, Noa Steimatsky, Erica Carter, Massimo Perinelli, Ara H. Merjian, Lara Pucci, Sa­bine Eckmann, Emily Braun, Ulrich Baer, Antonella Peliz­zari, Andrés Mario Zervigón, Andreas Huyssen

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION http://italian.as.nyu.edu/page/newsevents