Franco Baldasso

Assistant Professor of Italian; Director, Italian Studies; Director, Study Abroad Program in Italy

Primary Academic Program: Italian Studies

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, Literature

Biography: Franco Baldasso is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome after receiving the 2019 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies. His recent publication, Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy, published in 2022 by Fordham University Press, received the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History, awarded by the Society of Italian Historical Studies. He also published in Italian: Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Pendragon, 2007), and Curzio Malaparte, la letteratura crudele. Kaputt, La pelle e la caduta della civiltà europea (Carocci, 2019). He coauthored L’età di Whitman” e l’esilio. L’America inedita di Paolo Milano (Mimesis, 2022, with Valerio Angeletti), coedited Eredità culturale e memoria dei totalitarismi (Pearson, 2024, with Franca Sinopoli), a special issue of NeMLA-Italian Studies titled Italy in WWII and the Transition to Democracy: Memory, Fiction, Histories (2014, with Simona Wright), and a special issue of Annali d’Italianistica titled 50 Years of La Storia: Elsa Morante Beyond History (2024, with Ursula Fanning, Mara Josi, Stefania Porcelli, Katrin Wheling-Giorgi). His articles have appeared in Modern Language Notes, Romance Notes, the Italianist, Context, Annali d’Italianistica, Allegoria, Comparatismi, Poetiche, and Scritture Migranti. 

Franco is the recipient of many awards, including a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, the Remarque Institute Visiting Fellowship, the Center for Italian Modern Art Affiliated Fellowship at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the A. W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. He is on the editorial board of the journals Allegoria, Novecento Transnazionale, Status Quaestionis, and Studi (e testi) italiani. He is a member of the Society of Fellows of the AAR, of the “Collegio del Dottorato in Italianistica” at Sapienza University in Rome, and of the scientific committee of the Archivio della Memoria della Grande Guerra of the Centro Studi sulla Grande Guerra “P. Pieri” in Vittorio Veneto (TV).

His new book project, in which he discusses Italian Fascism’s difficult heritage from monumental architecture to colonialism, is titled The Ruins of Fascism: Reframing Political Nostalgia in the Global Mobility of Ideas.

Laurea in Lettere Moderne, Università degli Studi di Bologna; MA, PhD, New York University. At Bard since 2015.
Phone: 845-758-7377
Email:
Location: Seymour
Office: 206