Rhiannon Noel Welch

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, Aesthetic Reverberations and the Anticolonial Imagination (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press), asks how colonial histories and their racializing assemblages persist in reconfigured forms, shaping conditions of life today. Focusing on how aesthetics—etymologically, perception by the senses—hold, transmit, and resist their myriad forms of historical violence in the present, the book proposes thinking about these and related questions through the phenomenon of reverberation. 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 theorizes reverberation as a material metaphor for how aesthetic works—as worldly, sensory phenomena, rather than as discrete objects subject to judgment by a detached observer—hit us, as sentient participants in social worlds that are at once asymmetrical and inextricably linked.    

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

Select Publications

SPECIAL ISSUES 

Deceleration. Special issue, Diacritics. 53:1, 2025 (co-editor with Patty Keller, Cornell University).

Italy and the Epistemes of Contagion. Touch, Contact, Distance. Special Issue, California Italian Studies, Volume 11, No. 1. June 2022 (Co-editor with Cristiana Giordano, UC Davis).

ARTICLES

“Fare razza: Empire and Race Making in D’Annunzio” Gabriele D’Annunzio in Context (Guylian Nemegeer and Luca Somigli, eds.) Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming 2026).

“Thick Time and Carceral Relationality. Garrett Bradley’s Time (2020) and the Music of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.” "Deceleration." Special issue, Diacritics 53:1, 2025.

“Crisis, Deceleration, and the Visual Poetics of Refusal. Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio’s Sudeuropa (2005-7).” Special Issue of Palinsesti, Contemporary Italian Art Journal,““Italianicity is not Italy”: Questioning Contemporary Italian Art History" (August 2025).

“‘Living, Breathing Reconfigurings of the World,’ or Thinking in the Time of COVID,” Introduction to Italy and the Epistemes of Contagion. Special Issue, California Italian Studies, Volume 11, No. 1. June 2022. (Co-author with Cristiana Giordano).

“It’s a Neorealist World,” Art in America. Sept/Oct 2020, 46-53 (co-author, with Ara Merjian, NYU).

“Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Counter Archive of Migration.” End of Dreams. Copenhagen: Fotografisk Center, 2019: 82-97.

“Anachronism, Displacement, Trace: ‘Scarred Images’ and the Postcolonial Time Lag.” California Italian Studies. Volume 7: Moving Images: Cinema, Pre-cinema, Around Cinema, New Media (2017).

“Time Out of Joint: Larsen’s End of Dreams and Italy’s ‘Colonial Unconscious.’” Refugees and the Crisis of Europe. Special issue of Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots. Mayanthi Fernando, Cristiana Giordano, eds. (2016). 

“Here and Then, There and Now: Nation Time and Colonial Space in Pasolini, Oriani, and Marinetti.” Italica (2015) 625-653.

“Race and Colonial (Re)productivity.” Annali d’italianistica 32 (2014). From Otium & Occupatio to Work & Labor in Italian Culture. Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme, eds.197-213.

“Contact, Contagion, Immunization. Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994).” Italian Mobilities. Ruth Ben Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom, eds. Oxford; New York: Routledge Press, 2015: 68-87.

“Pour une lecture biopolitique de la notion de ‘race’ en Italie.” Silvia Contarini and Davide Luglio, eds. Italian Theory: existe-t-elle? Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2015 (79-92).

“Razza e (ri)produttività. Per una lettura biopolitica della razza nell’Italia postunitaria e contemporanea.” Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds. L’Italia postcoloniale. Florence, Le Monnier Mondadori, 2014: 77-90.

“Intimate Truth and (Post)colonial Knowledge in Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994).” Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, eds. National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures. Italian Modernities, Vol 7. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010: 215-233.

TRANSLATIONS

Book. Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Review. Antonio Negri, “Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Critical Economy 150 Years Later, edited by Marcello Musto.” Rethinking Marxism 26:03 (2014) 427-433.

Annotated essay. Gabriele D’Annunzio, “On the Cinematograph As an Instrument of Liberation and an Art of Transfiguration (1914).” Early Cinema. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Volume IV. Richard Abel, ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2014; 262-267.

Article. Silvio Alovisio, "Introduction: Voices of Silence. The Scenario in Silent Italian Film." Early Cinema. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Volume II. Industry Developments. Richard Abel, ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2014: 454-465.