Massimo Lollini
Biography
Since I was a teenager, I have been attracted by literature and and philosophy when I sought meaning in my life and in my relationships with others and with the natural landscape. Starting from this original youthful impulse, I have developed my career as a teacher, researcher and writer. My youthful questions and the search for meaning in my life have never abandoned me and have constituted the deepest nourishment of my long years of teaching and research. Even today I continue on this path and I try to learn by reformulating those questions in the new context in which I live. Indeed, the emergence of a reality organized around the Internet is provoking a profound crisis of identity in which the older principles of self-orientation and communitarian identification lose their effectiveness. What concepts, what methods do we need to understand the “knowledge space” in which we live an increasing part of our life? How can we orient our individual and professional identity within it? These are some of the questions that nurture my life and I keep in mind for myself and my students.
My research addresses from different points of view the problem of Humanism in our time and reflects on the crisis of traditional notions of human subjectivity. In this perspective, in my first book, Le muse, le maschere e il sublime. G.B. Vico e la poesia nell’età della “ragione spiegata” (1994), I have studied the emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture that for Vico testifies to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss both of the constitutive referentiality of language and of its supposed “natural” origin. In my recent publications, including the essays “Vico’s More than Human Humanism” and “Vico's Wilderness and the Places of Humanity”, I developed an original ecocritical approach to culture and literature that emphasizes the relationality, processuality, and possible demise of the human subject. I further developed this approach editing two volumes on L'autobiografia nell'epoca dell'impersonale (2007) and on Humanisms, Posthumanisms and Neohumanisms (2008).
In my second authored book, Il vuoto della forma. Scrittura, testimonianza e verità (2001), I studied how writers such as Antonio Gramsci, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Paul Celan bear witness to tragic historical events such as WWI, WWII and the Holocaust. In 2006 with Norma Bouchard, I coedited, Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo.
In my research in the area of Digital Humanities, I study the reconfiguration of literary studies introduced by the use of digital technologies and the remediation of literature in social and new media. In this context, since 2003 I am the Principal Investigator of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book hypertext project, and I have led students to the creation of the first complete Twitter edition of Francesco Petrarca's Canzoniere (2014). Moreover, I explore the cognitive dimension of computer technology focusing on digital research, topic modeling, textual analysis, close and distant reading. Finally, since 2010 I am the Editor in Chief of the journal Humanist Studies & the Digital Age. In this capacity, I have co-edited seven monographic issues of this peer-reviewed e-journal including Lector in Rete: Figures of the Readers in Digital Humanities (2015) and Steps Toward the Future: More-Than-Human-Humanism in the Age of AI (2022).
Education
Laurea, 1978, University of Bologna; Ph.D., 1992, Yale University.
Publications
- "The Oregon Petrarch Open Book: Poetry, Digital Humanities, and the Landscape." Arizona State University, February 16, 2023.
- "Ricordati di vivere": La Teologia Biocentrica di Pier Cesare Bori." Vivere per sé e per gli altri. Ricordando Pier Cesare Bori. Bologna, Archiginnasio, November. 3, 2022.
- "Petrarca's Canzoniere from Early Print to the Oregon Petrarch Open Book." Université de Franche Comté à Besançon, Master Rare Book and Digital Humanities. March 15, 2022.
- “Petrarch’s Open Book from the Editio Princeps (Inc. Queriniano G V 15) to Digital Culture.” Université de Franche Comté à Besançon, Master Rare Book and Digital Humanities. March 11, 2021.
- “Re-reading Manzoni at the time of Covid-19: Contagion, Ethics, and Justice.” The Graziadio Center, California State University Long Beach, February 22, 2021.
- “Pre-human, Human, and Post-human in Giambattista Vico”. MLA Annual Meeting, Seattle, January 2020.
- “Exploring the Dolomites: A View From Above.” University of Bolzano in Bressanone, September 2019.
- “WW1 Between Sleepwalkers and Witnesses”. The Idea of Europe, University of Oregon, May 2019.
- “L’ipertesto tra rimediazione e ipermediazione.” Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem NC, March 17, 2019.
- "Hypertext and Twitterature." Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies, Istituto Sant'Anna (Sorrento), Italy, June 14-16, 2018.
- “Le Dolomiti tra Natura e Storia.” Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies, Istituto Sant’Anna (Sorrento), Italy, June 14-16, 2018.
- “Pythagoras’ Mediterranean: Travels, Migration and Philosophy”: presentation at the 2018 Spring Workshop and Conference of the Mediterranean Seminar.
- “The Candle of Light: Revisiting Cesare Beccaria’s Vision.” University of Oregon. November 2, 2017.
- "Language in Life and Work." Commencement Speech University of Oregon, Department of Romance Languages. June 20, 2017.
- "Reading, Rewriting and Encoding Petrarca's Rvf as Hypertext." Annual Conference of the MLA, Philadelphia, PA, January 5, 2017.
- "The Ancient Roots of a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism: A Pythagorean Perspective." Mellon Symposium – Environmental Posthumanities in the Anthropocene - Friday, Dec. 2nd 2016, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
- "Early Modern Ecocriticism?." Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies, Baton Rouge, LA, April 23, 2016.
- "Twiitterature and Hermeneutics of the Text." Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies, Baton Rouge, LA, April 23, 2016."The Oregon
- Petrarch Open Book: Preservation, Hypertext, and Pedagogy." University of Oregon. Digital Humanisties Working Group, November 20, 2015.
- "Roberto Saviano's Letter to My Land." Annual Conference of the PAMLA, Portland, Oregon, November 7, 2015.
- "Lector in Rete: The Oregon Petrarch Open Book as Hypertext." Annual Conference of the Sixteenth Century Society, Vancouver, October 23, 2015.
- "Suggestioni mediterranee: la Riviera Ligure da Montale a Biamonti." California State University, Long Beach. March 24, 2015.
- "Sicilian Ruins from Vittorio De Seta's Documentaries to Vincenzo Consolo's Citiscapes." Common Knowledges Symposium 2014, Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Culture, the Environment and Labor. Wednesday May 14, 2014. UC San Diego.
- "Natura parens from Bernardus Silvestris' Cosmographia to Petrarch's Canzoniere." Renaissance Society of America, New York, March 29, 2014.
- "Poetic Geography and More than Human Humanism in Sardinian Literature from Grazia Deledda to Marcello Fois." Notre Dame University, November 7, 2013.
- "Philology and Sense Making in the Oregon Petrarch Open Book." Digital French and Italian conference held at Darmouth College, October 30-31, 2013.
- “Vico’s more than Human Humanism.” AAIS Conference, Eugene, Oregon, April 11-13, 2013.
- “Encoding Text and Images in the Oregon Petrarch Open Book.” AAIS Conference, Eugene, Oregon, April 11-13, 2013.
- “Petrarch's Open Book from the Editio Princeps (Inc. Queriniano G V 15) to Digital Culture.” International Conference on Petrarch and His Legacies . University of Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin, March 4-5, 2013.
- “Oregon Petrarch Open Book Project.” Symposiumon Textualities in the Digital Age held at the University of Oregon on April 14, 2012.
- "The Daimon, the Wisdom and the Pietas: Giambasttista Vico's Paths to a More Than Human Humanism." Keynote Address Graduate Student Symposium on "Giambattista Vico: Education, Politics and Poetics." Yale University, March 2-3, 2012.