Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism

29Jun6:00 pm7:30 pmItalian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism6:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

Event Details

Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism, From Florence to Jerusalem and New York

Introduction: Giorgio Van Straten (Italian Cultural Institute), Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi)

Speakers: Patrizia Guarneri (University of Florence), Judge Guido Calabresi (Yale University), Mary Gibson (John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center).

Fascism and the racial laws of 1938 dramatically changed the scientific research and the academic community. Guarnieri focuses on psychology, from its promising origins to the end of the WWII. Psychology was marginalized in Italy, with long- lasting consequences, both by fascism and the neo-idealistic reaction against science. Academics and young scholars were persecuted because they were antifascist or Jews and the story of Italian displaced scholars is still an embarrassing one. The book follows scholars who emigrated to the United States, such as psychologist Renata Calabresi, and to Palestine, such as Enzo Bonaventura. Guarnieri traces their journey and the help they received from antifascist and Zionist networks and by international organizations. Some succeeded, some did not, and very few went back.

About the speakers:

Patrizia Guarnieri is Professor of Cultural and Social History in the S.A.G.A.S. Department at the University of Florence, Italy. She has been a lecturer in Overseas Studies of Stanford University, USA and taught courses approved by the Psychology Department and the History of Science Program. She is the author of numerous publications, including A Case of Child Murder: Law and Science in Nineteenth-Century Tuscany, which has been translated into English.

Guido Calabresi is an American legal scholar and senior judge who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is a former Dean of Yale Law School, where he has been a professor since 1959. Judge Calabresi is considered, along with Ronald Coase and Richard Posner, a founder of the field of law and economics. He is the son of the late cardiologist Massimo Calabresi and European literature scholar Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi (1902–1982). Calabresi’s parents, active in the resistance against Italian fascism, eventually fled Milan for New Haven, Connecticut, immigrating to the United States in September 1939. The family became naturalized American citizens in 1948.

Mary Gibson’s research focuses on the history of crime, criminology, women, and sexuality in modern Italy. Her publications include Prostitution and the State in Italy (1986) and Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (2002). She has translated, with Nicole Hahn Rafter, the two major works of Lombroso: Criminal Man (2006) and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (2004). At John Jay College she offers courses on the history of crime and punishment in Europe, women and crime, and comparative criminology. She also teaches in the History Program and the Criminal Justice Program at the Graduate Center of CUNY.