Luca Peretti

Luca Peretti's picture
82-90 Wall Street, 4th Floor

Education History

BA, University of Rome, La Sapienza (2008) in Modern History (cum laude)
MA, University College of London (2009) in Film Studies

Dissertation

“Moving images in a country in motion. ENI’s cinema at the crossroads of modernity and tradition”

Research Interests

Italian cinema; Sponsored, non-theatrical and ephemeral cinema; Italian intellectual history; Cultural Studies; Jewish culture in Italy; Italian-American culture; Cinema and violence; World Cinema; Cinema and history; Early Cinema; Unmade and unfinished films; Marxist theory and history in Italy; History and culture of post-unification Rome. 

Publications

Immagini di piombo. Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa [“Images of lead”. Cinema, history, and terrorisms in Europe], Milan, Postmediabooks, 2014 (edited with Vanessa Roghi). Book.

Translation in Italian of David Joselit, Feedback. Televisione contro la democrazia, Milan, Postmedia Books, forthcoming in 2015.

“Compromessi e difficoltà. Note a proposito di alcuni film non fatti sugli anni di piombo” [Notes on some unmade films on Italian terrorism] in Luca Peretti e Vanessa Roghi (a cura di), Immagini di piombo. Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa, Milan, Postmediabooks, 2014, pp. 75-84. Book chapter.

“Caratteri dell’antigiudaismo a Roma nei primi dell’Ottocento in due film italiani” [Aspects of Anti-Judaism in Rome at the beginning of the Nineteen Century in two films]. In Giuseppe Capriotti (ed.), Antisemitismo, Antigiudiasmo e memoria. Un approccio pluridisciplinare [Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism and memory. A multidisciplinary approach]. Macerata, University of Macerata Press, 2009. pp. 93-126.

“Occasioni mancate, il cinema italiano e gli anni di piombo” [Missed opportunities, Italian cinema and the Italian years of lead” in Jean Gili (ed.), Storie del Bel Paese. L’Italia attraverso il cinema dal Risorgimento ad oggi (1861-2011), “Quaderni del CSCI» 2011/7, Barcelona, 2011. Short Article, peer reviewed.

“Paolo Benvenuti e Segreti di stato: un incontro tra cinema e storia”  [Paolo Benvenuti and Secret File: history and cinema], in Storiografia, rivista annuale di storiografia, Fabrizio Serra Editore, 13, 2010. Article.

Biography

My dissertation focuses on Italian industrial cinema, with particular attention to the Italian state-owned oil company ENI, a company that had a unique media strategy and a key role in the so-called “economic miracle” in Italy. I also work on Italian intellectual history, on Jewish Italian culture, and on the relationship between cinema and history. Before coming to Yale I lived in Rome where I worked as journalist and held a position as video-archivist and researcher for the forthcoming Italian Museum of the Shoah, and organized several film festivals across Italy. I still occasionally collaborate with newspapers, magazines, and websites, covering a variety of topics. In Rome I also worked as research assistant for a project on cinepanettoni (Italian holiday films) led by Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds). I spent an academic year in Birmingham (UK) as part of the Erasmus exchange program.

At Yale I was involved in the creation of two working groups, one on Antonio Gramsci and one on Jewish Italian studies; I co-organized two film series, one on European directors in the USA circa 1969 and one on Pier Paolo Pasolini; and I helped developed other film series and events. In the spring of 2015, together with Karen Raizen, I organized a semester-long series of events (lectures, seminars, and screenings) on Pasolini that led to a two-day conference. I was also part of the first cohort of the Mellon Graduate Concentration (2013-2014), and in the fall of 2015 I am co-teaching a class on Gramsci with professor Michael Denning. I wrote short pieces and reviews for, among others, The Italianist: Film Issue, Cinema e storia, and The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and I am editing a special issue of Sense of Cinema.