THE REFUGEE DIPLOMAT AWARDED THE MLA SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR ITALIAN STUDIES

Contact: Paula M. Krebs 646 576-5102, awards@mla.org MLA’S SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR ITALIAN STUDIES AWARDED TO MARTINA PIPERNO FOR REBUILDING POST-REVOLUTIONARY ITALY AND TO DIEGO PIRILLO FOR THE REFUGEE-DIPLOMAT New York, NY – 4 December 2019 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its tenth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies to Martina Piperno, of KU Leuven, Belgium, for Rebuilding Post-revolutionary Italy: Leopardi and Vico’s New Science, published by the Voltaire Foundation, and to Diego Pirillo, of the University of California, Berkeley, for The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation, published by Cornell University Press. The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies is awarded biennially, and alternately with the Howard R. Marraro Prize, for an outstanding book by a member of the association in the field of Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian. From 1996 until 2000, the two prizes were awarded jointly. The prize is one of eighteen awards that will be presented on 11 January 2020, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Seattle. The members of the selection committee were Paola Bonifazio (Univ. of Texas, Austin); Sabrina Ferri (Univ. of Notre Dame); and Armando Maggi (Univ. of Chicago), chair. The selection committee’s citation for Piperno’s book reads: Martina Piperno’s extremely well-researched volume leads readers to a significantly new and exciting approach to a poorly appreciated period of Italian modern cultural history: Bourbon Restoration Italy. Piperno convincingly shows how in postrevolutionary Italy Vico’s New Science became “a powerfully diffractive object” that helped Italian intellectuals process the deeply disturbing cultural shock that had undermined their most basic ideals. Piperno brings to the fore significant points of connection between Vico’s philosophical thought and Giacomo Leopardi’s poetics and especially his immense Zibaldone. Rebuilding Post-revolutionary Italy: Leopardi and Vico’s New Science is a truly engaging and innovative work that will become an indispensable point of reference for future scholars of Italian cultural history. Martina Piperno is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in the MDRN Research Lab. She was awarded her PhD in Italian studies at Warwick University in 2016, and after that she was a visiting fellow in the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, an Alberto Institute Visiting Fellow at Seton Hall University, and a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Italian Department at University College Cork. Her research concerns the perception of time in Italian literature and theory from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The committee’s citation for Pirillo’s work reads: Diego Pirillo’s innovative volume offers a significantly new approach to early modern European studies. Through an extraordinary process of archival research, Pirillo sheds light on a poorly known facet of sixteenth-century Italian history, as well as on European history in general. Pirillo meticulously investigates the fundamental role played by Italian religious refugees in early modern diplomacy, thus questioning the traditional view of diplomatic interactions during the early modern European religious conflicts. Pirillo shows a remarkable knowledge of key aspects of Italian heretical thought and the new cultural environments in which the Italian “heretics” came to play a central, albeit almost unknown, role. The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation is a deeply engaging, often unique piece of academic writing. Diego Pirillo is associate professor of Italian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Scuola Normale Superiore. Pirillo specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, with an emphasis on Italy, England, and early America. His research interests include religious studies, the history of books and readers, the history of diplomacy and international relations, and the history of scholarship and historiography. He has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Along with several articles and book chapters, he is the author of Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissidenti religiosi italiani and coauthor of Favole, metafore, storie. Seminario su Giordano Bruno. The Modern Language Association of America and its over 25,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. The MLA sustains one of the finest publication programs in the humanities, producing a variety of publications for language and literature professionals and for the general public. The association publishes the MLA International Bibliography, the only comprehensive bibliography in language and literature, available online. The MLA Annual Convention features meetings on a wide variety of subjects; the 2020 convention in Seattle is expected to draw over 5,000 attendees. More information on MLA programs is available at www.mla.org. The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies is awarded under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards. Recent recipients include Joseph Luzzi, Michelangelo Sabatino, Alessia Ricciardi, Nick Wilding, and Serenella Iovino. Other awards sponsored by the committee are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Scholarly Edition and for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship; the Lois Roth Award; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies; the Matei Calinescu Prize; the MLA Prize for an Edited Collection; the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Comparative Literary Studies, for French and Francophone Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Endowment Fund was established and donated by Aldo Scaglione to the Modern Language Association in 1987. The fund honors the memory of Scaglione’s late wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione. A Roman Catholic, Jeanne Daman was headmistress of a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels, Belgium. When arrests and deportations of Jews began in 1942, she worked with Belgian and Jewish resistance units, helping to find hiding places for two thousand children throughout Belgium. She also helped rescue many Jewish men about to be deported as slave laborers by obtaining false papers for them. Jeanne Scaglione’s life and contributions to humanity are commemorated in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Aldo Scaglione, a member of the Modern Language Association from 1957 until his death in 2013, was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University. A native of Torino, Italy, he received a doctorate in modern letters from the University of Torino. He taught at the University of Toulouse and the University of Chicago. From 1952 to 1968 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1968 to 1987 he was W. R. Kenan Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1987 he came to New York University as professor of Italian and then chair of the Department of Italian. Scaglione was a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, held senior fellowships from the Newberry Library and the German Academic Exchange Service, and was a visiting professor at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1975 he was named Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. Scaglione was president of the American Boccaccio Association and was a member of the MLA Executive Council from 1981 to 1984. His published books include Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (1963); Ars Grammatica (1970); The Classical Theory of Composition (1972); The Theory of German Word Order (1981); The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (1986); Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (1991); and Essays on the Arts of Discourse: Linguistics, Rhetoric, Poetics (1998).