Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi (PhD, Yale) is Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Italian Studies at Bard. He is currently writing a book on Italy and Italian culture, from Roman times to the turbulence of life under Silvio Berlusconi, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. An active literary and film critic, his most recent reviews have appeared in the American Scholar, Bookforum, Cineaste, and TLS.

Luzzi’s first book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale Univ. Press, 2008) received the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association of America and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. He has published articles in numerous academic journals, including Comparative Literature, Dante Studies, Italica, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, and PMLA. He has also recorded three audio courses for the Modern Scholar series of Recorded Books: In Michelangelo’s Shadow: The Mystery of Modern Italy, The Blessed Lens: A History of Italian Cinema, and most recently The Art of Reading.

Luzzi’s honors include fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, an essay prize from the Dante Society of America, a Yale College Teaching Prize, and a grant from the Keats-Shelley Association. His lectures in 2012 will include appearances at Cambridge University and the Penn Center for Italian Studies, and he was chosen to give the annual Mini-Seminar in Italian literature at Yale in 2010. He is currently Co-Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at Bard, a yearlong course dedicated to the study of major texts and intellectual traditions from antiquity to the present, with a focus on such authors as Plato, Virgil, Dante, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Woolf.

Luzzi is the first American-born child in his native Italian family, which immigrated to the U.S. from Calabria in the 1950s.