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Remembering Primo Levi

David Moss • Oct 31, 2019
As part of the initiative Primo Levi: Writer, Witness, Scientist which commemorates the centenary of Levi’s birth, Paul Forgasz will give a talk on Italia Ebraica: The Jews of Italy. A historical perspective, on Tuesday 19 November 2019 , 6.30-8pm, at 199 Faraday Street, Carlton VIC 3053 (free event, RSVP essential here ). The Italian Jewish narrative does not fit neatly into the conventional divisions of the Jewish Diaspora: Mizrahi (Middle Eastern/North African), Sephardi (Spanish) and Ashkenazi (Franco-German). Indeed, there are maps of the Jewish world in which Italy is depicted as a distinctive and unusually complex sub-culture. The Jewish community in Rome is one of the oldest surviving diasporas, its antiquity reflected in a distinctive Roman liturgical rite still in use today. Italy has also been home to an Ashkenazi community since the late Middle Ages, and then, in the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, a Sephardi community. Rabbis and scholars thus lived within the boundaries of traditional Jewish communities whilst simultaneously contributing to the cultural and intellectual traditions of the wider society of which they were a part. Paul Forgasz will provide a survey of the very rich and variegated history of the Jews of Italy: from their earliest presence in Roman times, to the highs and lows of the medieval Jewish experience, through to Italian Jewry’’s encounter with modern world. Paul Forgasz’’s career has spanned both the secondary and tertiary sectors of education. For more than a decade he was the Headmaster of the secondary school campus of Mount Scopus College, a large K-12 Jewish day school in Melbourne. He was a lecturer in Jewish history and comparative religion at Monash University’’s Australian Centre for Jewish Education and taught about Jewish education, as well as school leadership, in the university’’s Faculty of Education. Paul has maintained an active involvement for many years in Jewish adult education, particularly through the Jewish Museum of Australia’s community education program. Since 2010, under the auspices of the Jewish Museum of Australia, he has also led a number of Jewish study tours to various European destinations including Spain, Italy, Germany, Vienna, Poland and Lithuania. In 2020, Paul will conduct a first-time tour of Jewish Greece.
04 Mar, 2024
Open until 14 April 2024, the exhibition Emerging From Darkness: Faith, Emotion and The Body in the Baroque is presented at Victoria's Hamilton Gallery (on the unceded lands of the Eastern Maar and Gunditjmara peoples), in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Unprecedented, and monumental in scope, Emerging From Darkness brings together an exceptional group of works from public and private collections in Australia. It was curated by Associate Professor David R. Marshall , Principal Fellow in Art History at the University of Melbourne, Dr Lisa Beaven , Adjunct Senior Research at La Trobe University, and Laurie Benson , Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV. Here two curators explain some of the project’s background and aims.
27 Oct, 2023
In Italy this year there has been no shortage of Manzoni celebrations, particularly in Milan . And in Australasia? Dr Stefano Bona , Lecturer in Italian Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, on the lands of the Kauna nation, has lately been involved in creating a ‘special miniseries’ of radio programmes about Alessandro Manzoni. Now available for listening on demand are two longform interviews with Stefano Pratola at Radio Italiana 531 AM. Here Stefano Bona shares some background to this podcast project.
14 Sep, 2023
Announcing, with great pleasure, the winners of the 2023 ACIS Publication Prize for an established scholar, and the 2023 Jo-Anne Duggan Prize. ACIS awards both prizes every two years . In this case, each winning publication addresses the theme of mobility – a fast-evolving direction in Italian Studies research – and each brings forward a topic with clear contemporary significance.
04 Sep, 2023
The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies will be held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, from Wednesday 3 July to Saturday 6 July 2024. The conference theme is ‘Italian Studies for Global Challenges: Transdisciplinary Conversations’.
24 Aug, 2023
Open to postgraduate and early career researchers, since 2018 the ACIS Save Venice Fellowship programme has been enlivening close links between Australasia and the city of Venice. Fellowship applications were suspended in 2022, for pandemic-related reasons. So it is a special pleasure to announce that Brigette De Poi has been awarded an ACIS Save Venice Fellowship for 2023. Already living in Venice to focus on her PhD project, Brigette shares some first reflections on her contact with Save Venice thus far.
08 Aug, 2023
Which memories are allowed to circulate in a particular culture – and which are relegated or silenced? What political logic is at play when a certain way of remembering is spelt out, even imposed? Matthew Topp was awarded an ACIS Postgraduate Scholarship in 2020, to source archival records for his doctoral thesis, which has the working title ‘ Ars Oblivionalis : A Study of Cultural Forgetting in Renaissance Italy’. Now returned from fieldwork, he shares a brief account of his PhD project and travels.
By Catherine Kovesi 02 Apr, 2023
Two promising early career scholars – Lauren Murphy and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe – were the recipients of ACIS Save Venice Fellowships. Delayed due to COVID travel restrictions, they were finally able to access their Fellowships in 2022. Here they both reflect on their time in Venice and the benefits of the Fellowship to their respective research projects.
By Catherine Kovesi 29 Mar, 2023
ACIS is delighted to announce that Professor Andrea Rizzi has been appointed the new Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. He leads a renewed Management Committee with several new appointees who start their terms of office this year.
By Catherine Kovesi 30 Jan, 2023
After a hiatus of three years due to travel restrictions, ACIS is delighted once again to be able to offer its Postgraduate Scholarships for Research in Italy. Two promising postgraduate students have been awarded scholarships in the current round: Brigette De Poi and Laura Di Blasi.
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