A photo of Robert Rushing

Robert Rushing

Professor, Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies & Graduate Studies

E-mail: robrushing@ucla.edu Office: Royce Hall 340E

Office Hours: Wednesdays 2:00 - 4:00pm

Fields of interest: 20th & 21st c. Italian Literature & Culture; Film & Television; Comparative Studies; Transnational Italian Studies

Professor Rushing teaches, researches and publishes on 20th- and 21st-century Italian literature, culture, film and music, including contemporary Italian fiction, film and television; critical and interpretive theory (especially gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and environmental humanities); popular culture, in both film and television (Mad Men and Orphan Black); comparative studies; and genre. He has published articles on topics ranging from Italo Calvino and Ovid to Mad Men and Antonioni, and he has a particular interest in popular genres, including Italian Westerns, science fiction (especially apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema), commedia all’italiana and the “peplum” or the sword-and-sandals film. His most recent book, Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen, covers a century of peplum films from Cabiria to 300, and is the winner of the 2016 AAIS (American Association for Italian Studies) Film/Media book prize. Recent articles include work on cross-dressing in Italian silent cinema, the use of sound in peplum cinema, the importance of transnational movement in European detective fiction, and the “radical idealism” of plants in the work of Luigi Serafini and Leo Lionni.

His most recent book, Transmedial Resonance: The Acoustic Afterlives of Italo Calvino (Fordham University Press, 2026), addresses the remarkable and ongoing responses to the imagination of Italo Calvino, Italy’s most important modern writer. Since his death in 1985, Calvino’s writing has served as a constant figure of inspiration for other artists. Although Calvino’s reputation as a writer is immense, his influence has in fact been vastly larger outside of literature, including in architecture, city plan­ning, community organizing, design, visual arts, video games, the performing arts, and much more. That influence is not only transmedial. It has also been “more outside than inside” across national boundaries, particularly in the English-speaking world, including Chris Cerrone’s Pulitzer-nominated “opera in headphones” based on Invisible Cities, Lisa Mezzacappa’s Cosmicomics jazz suite, and Ashwini Ramaswamy’s multimedia dance performance of Invisible Cities, which combines traditional South Indian Bharatanatyam, urban breaking, and African American modern dance. These works, Rushing shows, tell the story of a very different Calvino, one who is (in Mezzacappa’s words) “nerdy and neurotic,” playfully perverse, and profoundly political. Bringing together sound studies with literary studies and cultural reception, Transmedial Reso­nance argues for a radical re-imagination of how we think about artistic and cultural influence, calling for a completely new understanding of this major figure of modern Italian and world literature.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Italian Studies, UC Berkeley
  • B.A. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz

Featured Works

Selected Publications

Articles

  • “Calvino, Vibration and Music: How to Feel Thoughts,” in Italian Quarterlyspecial issue on “Inscribing Voice: Recording and Notation in Twentieth-Century Italy” (accepted for publication, 2027). 
  • “Radical Idealism: Serafini and Lionni’s Alternative Botanies,” in Thinking Italian Plants (Boston: Brill, in production for 2026).
  • “(Transnational) Crime in Italian Silent Cinema,” in Illegality and the Making of Italy: Crime Italian Style (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025): 259–77.
  • “A Jazz Cosmicomics: Geometry, Perversion, Resonance,” California Italian Studies1 (2023): 1–18.
  • “Contemporary Italian Detective Fiction: National, International, Transnational,” MLN1 (2023): 165–88.
  • “Eco-Horror: Human-Animal Encounters in the Italian Science Fiction Film,” in Italian Science-Fiction and the Environmental Humanities(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023): 111–26.
  • “The Noise of War: Sound, Politics and Space in the Italian Peplum,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film(Boston: Brill, 2023): 386–404.
  • “Feet of Strength: The Sword-and-Sandals Film,” in Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 136–47.
  • “‘Vestiti semimaschili’: Women Dressing as Men in Italian Silent Cinema,” gender/sexuality/italy9 (2022): 81–100.
  • “Calvino, Cerrone & the Catacoustic: an ‘Echo-logical’ Reading,” Italian Culture 2 (2021): 115–135.
  • “Toxicity: Making the Toxic Visible in Italian Cinema,” The Italianist 2, special issue on ecomedia (2020): 244–55.
  • “Italian Transnational Masculinity: Jeeg robot, Il ragazzo invisibileand Milzaman,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 1 (January 2020): 43–60.
  • “Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Bicycles, Spaceships and an Elephant: Images of Movement from Neorealism to the commedia all’italiana,” California Italian Studies 1 (2018) (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zt4d8px).
  • “Contemporary Italian Science Fiction Film: the Future of Italy,” Luci e ombre: trimestrale di informazione cinematografica e culturale 2 (2016): 32–46.
  • “Skin Flicks: Haptic Ideology in the Peplum Film,” Cinema Journal1 (2016): 88–110.

Honors and Awards

  • LAS dean’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, University of Illinois (2018)
  • Winner: best film/media book for Descended from Hercules(2016) from the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS)
  • Humanities council teaching excellence award, University of Illinois (2008)
  • Nomination: Gradiva Award: best theory book for resisting arrest (2008) from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP)