Thomas Harrison
Professor, Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies
Office Hours: Tues & Thurs 10:00-11:00 + Tues 3:45-5:00 + by appointment
Fields of interest: Italian; Modernism; Philosophy; Poetry; Music and Film StudiesThomas Harrison, Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, CUNY, has most recently authored Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account. He specializes in modern European intellectual history, literature, and the comparative arts and culture. He also researches Italian critical theory, photography, aesthetics, the modernist novel and poetics.
He is the author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, a study of European expressionism across the arts, and of Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. He has edited Nietzsche in Italy as well as The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry. With fellow professor of Italian Gian Maria Annovi (USC) he has edited the critical anthology Ends of Poetry. He has also published studies on the Watts Towers, Claudio Magris, Massimo Cacciari, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Zanzotto, Elsa Morante, Simone Weil, Gianni Vattimo, and Gianni Celati. On the side he has performed as bass player with the rock group Glass Wave
Featured Works
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- Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account
- University of Chicago Press,
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- L’arte dell’incompiuto
- Rome: Castelvecchi, 2017
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- 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance
- The Emancipation of Dissonance
- University of California Press,
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- Essayism
- Conrad, Musil and Pirandello
- The Johns Hopkins University Press,
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- Nietzsche in Italy
- Anma Libri,
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- The Favorite Malice
- Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry
- Out of London Press,
Courses commonly taught
- Italian Cinema and Culture (Italian 46, a General Education course)
- Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature in Translation (Italian 150)
- Graduate Courses in Italian Film (Antonioni, Commedia all’italiana, Neorealism)
- The Border Culture of Trieste
- Svevo, Pirandello, Calvino
- Rock Music (freshman seminars, on lyrics, progressive rock, Pink Floyd, Italian progressive rock, Zappa)
SELECTED ARTICLES
- “Simmel’s Rome: An Essay on Understanding and Self-Transcendence,” Theory, Culture & Society (2023).
- “L’outsider art di Alessandro Dal Lago,” introduction to A cosa servono le scienze sociali. Conversazione con Alessandro Dal Lago, ed. Marco Traversari (Dueville VI: Ronzani Editore, 2023).
- “The Two-Text Phenomenon: Thoughts on Adaptation and Transmediality with a Discussion of the Blues of Roberto Ciotti, a Film on Carlo Michelstaedter, and Other Case Studies,” Adaptation as a Transmedial Process: Theories and Practices, ed. Mimmo Cangiano and Filippo Luca Sambugaro (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2023).
- “Pirandello and Suicide,” in Pirandello in Context, ed. Patricia Gaborik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
- “Towards a New Ecological Imagination: Post-Anthropocentric Leopardi,” Costellazioni4: 10 (October, 2019): 125-38.
- “A Tale of Two Giannis: Nihilism, Appearances, and Writing as Rememoration,” in Gianni Celati, Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce): A Critical Edition, Patrick Barron (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019). Pp. 165-186.
- “Poetry, Between Alpha and Omega,” California Italian Studies 8: 1 (2018): 1-7.
- “Offscreen Space: From Cinema and Sculpture to Photography, Poetry and Narrative,” Moving Images, ed. Marguerite Waller and Aine O’Healy, California Italian Studies7: 1 (2017): 1-20.
- “L’emancipazione della dissonanza,” Le parole e le cose, 24 September, 2017.
- “Michelstaedter and Existentialist Authenticity Avant La Lettre: From Heidegger and Sartre to Simone Weil,” in Storia e storiografia di Carlo Michelstaedter, ed. Valerio Cappozzo (Oxford, MI: University of Mississippi, 2016). Pp. 25-46.
- “In the Wake of Conrad and Musil: The Story of History in Claudio Magris’ Alla cieca,” Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature1-2, Narrative and Reflection, ed. Stefano Ercolino and Christy Wampole (2010 [2015]): 171-185.
- “The Architectural Word,” in Inquieto pensare. Scritti in onore di Massimo Cacciari, ed. Emanuele Severino and Vincenzo Vitiello (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2015). Pp. 271-282.
- “No Novel is an Island: Damiano Damiani’s L’isola di Arturo,” in Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing, ed. Stefania Lucamante (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015). Pp. 161-172.
- “The Essayistic Novel and Mode of Life: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts1 (2014): 1-14.
- “Without Precedent: The Watts Towers,” in Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. Luisa Del Giudice (NY: Fordham University Press, 2014). Pp. 91-101 and 432-435.
- Academia Profile