Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, demonstrates how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.
Her current book project, Reverberation and the Anticolonial Imagination, proposes reverberation as a conceptual intervention that addresses how aesthetics—etymologically, relating to perception by the senses—holds and transmits historical violence in the present. Through close readings of selected works by Elisa Strinna, Sylvia Wynter, Giacomo Leopardi, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi, Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Dagmawi Yimer, Garrett Bradley, and Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, the book explores reverberation both as an aesthetic mode oriented toward the entangled senses of hearing, sight, and touch and to a critical cut that addresses history’s recursivity as it rumbles beneath the surface of a word, sound, or image and presents itself to sensory experience.
For a complete bibliography of publications, click here.
Welch’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Cornell University Society for the Humanities, the Cornell University Institute of European Studies, and the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, Welch held positions at Cornell University, Franklin & Marshall College, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University.
Recent courses taught include:
Entangled Pasts at the Border: Aesthetics, Race, and Migration
Italian Cinema and the Ecological Imagination
Italy and the (Broken) World
Aesthetics | Biopolitics | Crisis
Global Neorealism
Film Theory and World Cinema
(Post)colonial Italian Cinema
Landscape and Architecture in Antonioni, Rosi, and Pasolini
Race, Biopolitics, and the ‘Making’ of Italians
Working Slowly. Labor in Modern Italian Literature
Boomerang Effect. Migration in Italian Literature and Film
Visual Culture and Crisis
Poetics and Politics of Travel in Pier Paolo Pasolini
