Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an innovative and wide-ranging thinker, whose theorisation of the role of the intellectual have added a new dimension to the cultural and political understanding of current society.
For 50 years, Gramsci remained an Italian concern, until the English translation of Selections from the Prison Notebooks catapulted the Italian thinker onto the world stage, giving to Marxism what is probably its most influential post-war intellectual.
Roberto Dainotto (Duke University) and Peter D. Thomas (Brunel University London) will reflect on the global use (and abuse), receptions and misinterpretations of Gramsci’s thinking in different contexts and through different times.
Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Literature at Duke University. He has been visiting professor at the Université Paris Ouest and the Università di Bologna, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. His main research and teaching interests hinge on the concepts of place and space as narrative, rhetorical, and geopolitical organizational categories. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (2000); Europe (in Theory) (2007), winner of the 2010 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; and Mafia: A Cultural History (2015). He has edited Racconti Americani del ‘900 (1999), and co-edited with Fredric Jameson Gramsci in the World (Duke UP, 2020).
Peter D. Thomas teaches the history of political thought at Brunel University London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (2009) and Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation (2023). He is a member of the Coordinating Committee of the International Gramsci Society and the Editorial Board of the International Gramsci Journal.
A series of events curated by Marzia Maccaferri, with the collaboration of Geoff Andrews, Alessandro Carlucci, Peter D. Thomas and supported by ICI London and ASMI – Association for the Study of Modern Italy.