Professor Giorgio Bertellini is one of five LSA faculty members to be named a Guggenheim Fellow. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced 180 winners of the prestigious fellowship, awarded annually for distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The fellowship allows recipients to pursue a project for six to 12 months, without conditions, in natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts.
Bertellini will study the ways Italian neorealist filmmakers creatively reworked the social imagery of Depression-era American photography and photojournalism in the postwar era. In Italy and elsewhere, the appreciation of neorealism obscured the memory of its foreign sources of inspiration. Misrecognition begets misrecognition, he wrote. Cold War-era American film critics failed to acknowledge that the photographic offspring of Roosevelt-era progressivism had profoundly informed Italy’s most heralded, and unmistakably leftist, cinema. To Bertellini, this notable case of cross-cultural and cross-media spreading of images of poverty constitutes an example of a twice-disowned translation.
Text extracted from Jared Wadley's U Record article "Five U-M faculty members named Guggenheim Fellows," April 11, 2022
photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala
