Angelo Caglioti
(Re)covering the Empire: Environmental History and the Palimpsest of Italian Colonialism

The talk will use the approach of environmental history as a method to recover the memory of Italian colonialism in Africa. By drawing on the metaphor of the “palimpsest,” it will examine Italy’s colonial past as a set of moments and narratives that have been “overwritten” by different regimes, thus covering the goals and strategies of Italian imperialism in the liberal, fascist, and republican period.

Angelo Caglioti is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and an assistant professor in the Department of History at Columbia University’s Barnard College.

Nicole Sealey
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department: Lyric Erasures

Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department: Lyric Erasure is a revisionist project in that, while the Ferguson report details a familiar history of racial biases and police brutality, the erasure reimagines and repurposes that history. This talk will focus on Nicole Sealey’s impulse to as well as the context and creative process of drafting these lyric erasures.

Sealey is the recipient of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, and a 2019–20 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

The shoptalks will be held in English.