An American in Rome: Mary McCarthy (1945-1974)

SERIES: Figures of history in the Rome of the past
SPEAKER: Marina D'Amelia
DATE: Thursday, November 7, 6 p.m.
 
The revival in recent years of the Mary McCarthy author of successful novels that challenged the taboos of respectable America has left in the shadows the Mary Mc Carthy, scholar of the European literary tradition and active promoter of exchanges between American and European intellectuals in the aftermath of World War II. Since 1945, sojourns in Europe have been a fixture in the writer's biography: trips that took her from Portugal to Greece via Italy. At the center of the conference, in the context of the wanderings in Italy, the different moments of the discovery of Rome and the frequentation of certain intellectuals, the reflections to which they give rise over time by a young Mary McCarthy, at first insecure, tired of theoretical controversies and a champion of a community life that made room for emotions, overlaid, gradually, by the prickly, wry writer whose books were the focus of much controversy, increasingly engaged in the issues at the center of political debate in the 1960s and 1970s, the political commentator and whipping girl of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam; finally, the successful lecturer who challenged student protests in Genoa in 1968. 

Marina D'Amelia has taught Modern History at La Sapienza University of Rome. Over the years, she has interwoven investigations of established interest in the tradition of historical studies such as the history of corruption and justice, political languages, merchant and curial families in the ancien régime, with newer issues such as the history of the family and literacy and women's writings, the history of motherhood and the stereotype of mammonism in Italian society. She moves with some freedom from the sixteenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, straddling social history and cultural history. She was among the founders and editors in 1981 of the four-monthly “Memoria. Journal of Women's History” and also founder of the Italian Society of Historians (SIS).

Free admission while seats last.

Reservations at the link.