Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of Italian Studies, Faculty of Arts & Science
Ara H. Merjian is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (Yale University Press, 2014), and teaches the Italian and French avant-gardes, the modernist legacies of Nietzschean philosophy, European film theory, and the cultural politics of fascism and anti-fascism. He is currently at work on two new manuscripts: Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Avant-garde examines Pasolini’s fraught position between Neorealism and the Neo-Avant-garde in postwar Italy.s considers the wide-ranging and often inimical echoes of de Chirico’s painting in European art and architecture in the early and mid-twentieth century. Among some of Prof. Merjian’s published essays are articles on Le Corbusier and Metaphysical painting for Grey Room; Giacomo Balla’s design practice for the Oxford Art Journal; Jean Cocteau’s belle-lettrist criticism for the Getty Research Journal; Luca Buvoli’s “post-utopian” video practice in Word & Image; and Gabriel Alomar’s fin-de-siècle poetics in Modernism/Modernity. Before joining the faculty at NYU, he taught at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and is a contributing critic to Artforum and frieze.