Franco Baldasso

Franco Baldasso is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Italian Studies. He graduated in modern Italian literature at the Università degli Studi of Bologna, where he worked as a journalist and editor. His mainstays of research are 20th century literature and intellectual history, the negotiations between fiction and historical discourse as well as the legacy of the Holocaust and World War II in Italy, with a main focus on the work of Primo Levi. After some publications on Levi and the representation of the Holocaust for the journal Poetiche, he published his first book, Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna, 2007). He also edited a series of photographical books about the city of Florence from the Risorgimento to the economic boom of the 1960s for the newspaper La Nazione. His articles appeared in Nemla-Italian Studies and Scritture Migranti. After receiving an MA at NYU with a thesis on the representation of the Balkans in Italian culture, he is now engaged in a project about intellectuals reworking national history in Italy in the transition from Fascism to Democracy.

Franco is the recipient of the 2012-13 Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities and the Remarque Institute Doctoral Fellowship.