Professor Robert S C Gordon FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2015
- Subjects
- Literature, Modern languages
Summary
Robert S C Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge since 1998 and was elected to the Serena Chair in 2012. Prior to that, he was Lecturer in Italian and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
His principal fields of research are modern Italian literature, cinema and cultural history, and Holocaust studies, with a particular interest in the cultural legacy of the Shoah. His PhD and first book were on the writer, intellectual and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), with research carried out in Cambridge, Rome and Pavia. He subsequently worked extensively on the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), authoring a book-length critical study of Levi's engagement with questions of ethics and testimony, and editing several texts by and about Levi, including his interviews and a co-authored report on medical conditions at Auschwitz. This was followed by a wide-ranging study of the complex legacy of the Holocaust in postwar Italy. He has further edited books on censorship and Holocaust visual culture. He served as Senior Editor of the journal Italian Studies (2005-2010) and is co-editor of the book series Italian Modernities (Peter Lang).
Current post
University of Cambridge Serena Professor of Italian
Publications
The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010,
Robert Gordon - Published in 2012 by Stanford University Press
Introduction to 20th-century Italian Literature: A Difficult Modernity
Robert Gordon - Published in 2005 by Duckworth
Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics
Robert Gordon - Published in 2001 by Oxford University Press
Other Fellows of the British Academy
Professor Michael Bell FBA
Literary studies from the Enlightenment to modernity; the interrelations of literature and philosophy
Professor Esther Leslie FBA
Aesthetics in combination with politics; Marxism and critical theory, especially the work of Walter Benjamin and TW Adorno; the poetics of science and technology; animation; digital culture and the sensorium
