The Italian Cultural Institute, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Society, present Friendship, Language, and the City: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University), in conversation with Anna Lawton (New Academia Publishing), lead a discussion on Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy about two friends growing together and drifting apart during sixty years of Italian history.
MORE INFO: HERE
LOCATION
Wisconsin Place Community Recreation Center
5311 Friendship Boulevard
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
FREE, REGISTRATION REQUIRED
RSVP AT RSVP@italianculturalsociety.org
About the speakers:
Laura Benedetti is the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture at Georgetown University.
Her publications include the volumes La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la “Gerusalemme liberata”, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy, the edition and English translation of Lucrezia Marinella’s Esortazioni alle donne e agli altri and, most recently, the novel Un paese di carta.
She was Guest of Honor at the annual meeting of the American Association of Italian Studies (2016), as well as the recipient of the Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies, the “Wise Woman” award from the National Organization of Italian American Women, and the Gold Medal from the Federazione Associazioni Abruzzesi/U.S.A. She has published extensively on Elena Ferrante’s work and was a guest on an episode of The Diane Rehm Show devoted to the author.
Anna Lawton has earned her PhD in Russian Literature at UCLA. She worked both in academia and in government. As a professor, she taught courses in literature, cinema and visual culture at Purdue University and Georgetown University. She also worked for USIA at the American Embassy in Moscow as the Deputy Director of Public Information and Media Outreach and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Connections, and at the World Bank in Washington, DC, as the managing editor of the magazine Development Outreach.
She has served on the Advisory Film Committee of the National Gallery of Art, and directed conferences, seminars, film festivals, round tables, and editorial projects for the Kennan Institute, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Italian Embassy in Washington DC, among others.
She published three scholarly books— Vadim Shershenevic: From Futurism to Imaginism; Before the Fall: Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years; and Imaging Russia 2000: Film and Facts—numerous scholarly essays and book chapters, as well as two novels—Album di famiglia and Amy’s Story. She has received several awards, including the CHOICE Award as Outstanding Academic Title 2005 for Imaging Russia 2000. In 2003, she founded the publishing house New Academia Publishing, which is today a successful enterprise.