Luca Peretti
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.