Teaching: selecting new authors & reading for the Fall iteration of the course (Aristophanes, Tacitus, More, Montaigne); creation of extra-credit option (AI-powered illustration project); study of the monumental complex of Santa Maria Novella for class site visit; analysis of Casa Buonarroti for class site visit (relation with Spini’s Michelangelo politico); exploration of texts for next semester (Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des Dames); ideas for future assessment: scaffolding written assignments, presentations as ongoing debates between two sides with scorekeeping and competition.

Research:

• History of political thought: overall project: “Escaping the embrace of institutional politics in the long 19th century” (working title); anarchism; draft article on Piedmontese poet and playwright Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803): libertine, libertarian, liberal; autobiography and literary sources; his political thought, esp. in the treatises and the comedies; servitude & freedom; classical republicanism; psychological dimension; freedom of the Moderns; rel’n w/ Machiavelli; neoclassicism; his contemporaries and posthumous fame; Pietro Verri (the Diario militare: classism, antimilitarism, proto-national consciousness); Parini (Dialogo sopra la nobiltà); Dialogues des morts as an 18th-century literary model; Alfieri’s strange afterlife as a Risorgimento icon (Foscolo’s role); Idéologues; Buonarroti (Franco Della Peruta’s intro to the Scritti Politici), Babeuvism & secret societies (anti-industrialism; importance of virtú; theory of revolutionary dictatorship; his communism accused of being ‘monkish’ by early Risorgimento patriots; Mazzini claimed he was gretto per quanto coerente; Blanqui was a disciple); Melchiorre Gioia (Pietro Themelly’s intro to the Riflessioni sulla Rivoluzione): compromising with the strong man (Napoleon) to save the social progress of the revolution in Italy; Guglielmo Pepe and his key book on insurrectionalism, L’Italia militare e la guerra di sollevazione (1836).

• Tech and politics: main project: chapter on “Trust and Institutions” for a Handbook of Disinformation; importance of social trust; social cooperation and the existence of the public sphere; evidence: reputation budgets; low trust & suboptimal outcomes; psychological micro-foundations and aggregate levels of analysis: group beliefs and trustworthiness of corporate bodies; authoritativeness in the information ecosystem; methodological problems for trust as a concept in social theory; measurement; change in trust easier to define than trust itself (dynamics of loss of trust/trust-building); historical shift in prevalent justifications for trust (deference -> solidarity -> strategic interaction); institutions and interpersonal trust; link with liberalism of fear.

Interesting books:

• Anderson, Perry. The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony. London New York, NY: Verso, 2017.
• Aretino, Pietro. Operette politiche e satiriche. 2 vols. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino, VI. Roma: Salerno, 2012.
• Bessis, David. Mathematica: une aventure au cœur de nous-mêmes. Paris: Points, 2023.
• Brunello, Piero. Storie di anarchici e di spie: polizia e politica Nell’Italia liberale. Roma: Donzelli, 2009.
• Chabod, Federico. Storia della politica estera italiana: dal 1870 al 1896. Biblioteca universale Laterza 317. Roma Bari: Ed. Laterza, 1990.
• Cheung, Caroline. Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
• Chittka, Lars. The Mind of a Bee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
• Del Boca, Angelo. Gli italiani in Africa Orientale – 1. Dall’Unità alla marcia su Roma. Milano: Mondadori, 2014.
• Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa. Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition. Black Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
• Federman, Rachel, and Etel Adnan. Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum : DelMonico Books·D.A.P, 2022.
• Finley, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
• Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et moeurs d’Épicure. Translated by Sylvie Taussig. Collection Textes philosophiques. Paris: Éd. Alive, 2001.
• Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
• Grotius, Hugo. The Free Sea. Edited by David Armitage. Translated by Richard Hakluyt. Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
• Guicciardini, Francesco. Antimachiavelli. Edited by Gian Franco Berardi. Universale idee 118. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984.
• Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks-and What It Can Teach Us. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
• John of Salisbury. Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers. Translated by Cary J. Nederman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Laursen, Eric. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Chico: AK Press, 2021.
• Mackintosh, James. Vindiciae Gallicae and Other Writings. Edited by Donald Winch. Indianapolis: Liberty fund, 2006.
• Malm, Andreas. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London ; New York: Verso, 2021.
• Olschki, Daniele. Gioverà Ricordare | Meminisse Iuvabit. Particelle Elementari. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2024.
• Saitō, Kōhei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2022.
• Valori, Niccolò. Vita di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Edited by Angela Dillon Bussi. L’Italia 12. Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.
• Videen, Hana. The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary. London: Profile Books, 2023.
• Vivanti, Corrado. Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento. Reprints Einaudi 17. Torino: Einaudi, 1974.
• Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Hogarth Press, 1992.
• Zakaras, Alex. The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Interesting events/visits: Steinbeck’s family home in Salinas, CA (June); gave a presentation on AI and higher ed at NYU Florence’s Community of Practice faculty meeting (September); Marvin Trachtenberg’s lecture in The Pazzi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence (October); the Musei Capitolini in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Rome) & Ian Bostridge performing Schubert in the Aula del Rettorato at the University of Rome La Sapienza, in front of a Fascist-era fresco by Sironi (November); Geremek room-naming event at EUI (December).

Rabbit holes: Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean; Alciato; Leopardi’s Zibaldone; Von Aubel’s Theorem; Renaissance representations of St. Matthew in Rome; Justus Lipsius and neo-stoicism (ure, seca!); Thomas Hodgskin as a Biedermeier era thinker; satire as literary genre; Kropotkin’s (1899) distinction of three strands of non-Marxian socialism in the 19th century: Saint Simonism (-> statist emphasis, social democracy), Fourierism (-> anarchism), Owenism (-> trade unionism, cooperation, municipal socialism); historical development of tragedy vs. comedy as literary genres in modern society; good editions of Petrarch and Poliziano; Donato Giannotti, Coluccio Salutati (humanist politics); contemporaneity in comparative literature (Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bruno…); Gabriel Naudé (not just a Reason of State theorist!); French utopianism (Sévarambes); clerics: Charron to Raynal (where are the modern editions?!); Bayle; Gassendi & the rehabilitation of Epicureanism; Fénelon; La Bruyère & Fontenelle; portaits of Pico della Mirandola (the Cosimo Rosselli frescos in S. Ambrogio in Florence: Pico with Marsilio Ficino & Agnolo Poliziano); Menabrea: general, politician, diplomat— CS pioneer; Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius; clay ‘Yixing’ teapots.

Sundry: new laptop (August); new glasses (December); overhaul of the website (December).