Massimo Lollini
Crolla Amato Prize 2019 | Literary Studies
Panel Judge
Massimo Lollini is Professor Emeritus of Italian at the University of Oregon.
Massimo’s research addresses the problem of Humanism in our time, and reflects on the crisis of traditional notions of human subjectivity.
In his first book, Le muse, le maschere e il sublime. G.B. Vico e la poesia nell’età della “ragione spiegata” (1994), he studied the emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture which for Vico testifies to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss of the constitutive referentiality of language and its supposed natural origin.
In his recent publications, including the essays Vico’s More than Human Humanism (2011) and Vico’s Wilderness and the Places of Humanity (2011), Massimo developed an original ecocritical approach that emphasises the relationality, processuality and possible demise of the human subject. In this area, he edited the volumes L’autobiografia nell'epoca dell'impersonale (2007) and Humanisms, Posthumanisms and Neohumanisms (2008).
In his book Il vuoto della forma. Scrittura, testimonianza e verità (2001), he instead studied how writers such as Gramsci, Calvino, Levi and Celan bear witness to tragic historical events such as WWI, WWII and the Holocaust. In 2006 with Norma Bouchard, he coedited Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo.
In his research in the Digital Humanities, Massimo studies the reconfiguration of literary studies through digital technologies and the remediation of literature in the new media. He has been the Principal Investigator of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book hypertext projec since 2003, leading to the creation of the first complete Twitter edition of Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere (2014). In this area, he explores the cognitive dimension of computer technology focusing on digital research, topic modeling, textual analysis, close and distant reading.
He has been the Editor in Chief of the journal Humanist Studies and the Digital Age since 2010. In this capacity, he has co-edited five monographic issues of this e-journal including Lector in Rete: Figures of the Readers in Digital Humanities (2015) and Networks and Projects: New Platforms in Digital Humanities (2017).
