Notes on Contributors
Mark Antliff
is Anne Murnick Cogan Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is author of numerous works focusing on twentieth-century art and ideology, including Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909−1939 (Duke University Press, 2007). In 2010 he co-curated The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918, which opened at the Nasher Museum of Art and then traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and to Tate Britain in 2011. His new book project, Sculpture against the State: Anarchism and the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (London-Milan-Paris), examines three major innovators in the history of modern sculpture, Umberto Boccioni, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and addresses such complex issues as homosexuality, prison reform, aestheticized violence, anti-colonialism, and pacifism.
Constance Bantman
is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Surrey. She studied Modern Languages and History at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris 3 and Paris XIII Universities in France, and the University of Oxford. Her fields of expertise are French and British political and social history between 1880 and 1914. In her research she focuses on the history of French political exiles in Britain and anarchist transnationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her recent publications include The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool University Press, 2013), and (with Bert Altena) Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies (Routledge, 2015). She is currently working on a biography of the French anarchist writer and newspaper editor Jean Grave, to be published by Palgrave in 2020.
Federico Ferretti
is a Lecturer in Human Geography at University College Dublin. After completing his studies in Italy, he obtained a doctorate in 2011 from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Élisée Reclus’s New Universal Geography supervised by Marie-Claire Robic and Franco Farinelli. He took up his current position after three years of postdoctoral research in Switzerland on the exile networks of Reclus and the anarchist geographers in the Age of Empire, and having gained teaching experience in Verona, in Geneva, and in Brazil at the International University of Latin-American Integration, Foz do Iguaçu. His current research interests focus on early anarchist, critical and anti-colonialist geographies, the international and transnational circulation of geographical knowledge, and non-institutional scientific networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also interested in the broader field of contemporary anarchist and radical geographies and geopolitics, with a special focus on Latin America. Among his publications are Élisée Reclus, pour une géographie nouvelle (Édition du CTHS, 2014), and Anarchy and Geography. Élisée Reclus and Pyotr Kropotkin in the UK (Routledge, 2018).
Gabriele Guerra
is Assistant Professor at the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome. His research, conducted, amongst others, at the Free University of Berlin, the ZfL Berlin, and University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, is centered on German-Jewish literature, Ernst Jünger’s conservative revolution, and the aesthetical, political and religious dimensions of the avant-garde. He is co-editor of Links. Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca. Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft. His numerous publications comprise Das Judentum zwischen Anarchie und Theokratie. Eine religionspolitische Diskussion am Beispiel der Begegnung zwischen Walter Benjamin und Gershom Scholem (Aisthesis, 2007), and Spirito e storia. Saggi sull’ebraismo tedesco 1918−1933 (Aracne, 2012).
Carolin Kosuch
graduated from Leipzig University with an M.A. degree in history and religious studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2014 at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. In 2014 she joined the German Historical Institute in Rome as Research Associate. Her research areas include the history, philosophy and phenomenology of classical anarchism; European cultural history with an emphasis on the life reform movement and religious nonconformist groups; Jewish history and culture, and nineteenth/twentieth century German and Italian history. Among her publications are Missratene Söhne. Anarchismus und Sprachkritik im Fin de Siècle (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), and (ed.) Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. Schriften aus dem Großen Krieg (Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 13, [2014]).
Piotr Laskowski
(Ph.D. University of Warsaw) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. He cofounded the multicultural humanist lyceum in Warsaw where he worked as director (2006–2010) and still teaches general history. As a committed historian, philosopher and political scientist Laskowski deals with the history of political thought and social and political philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Besides, he co-edited two volumes of the Warsaw Ghetto underground press and collaborates with a research group editing the Ringelblum Archive. He has published widely on both education and anarchism, as in his book Szkice z dziejów anarchizmu (Wydawnictwo MUZASA, 2006), and Maszyny wojenne: Georges Sorel i strategie radykalnej filozofii politycznej (Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca, 2011).
Patricia Leighten
is Professor Emeritus of Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Her field of research is late nineteenth/early twentieth-century art and politics in France, and the history of photography. She has won numerous awards and fellowships and published extensively on visual culture and anarchism in Paris. The first art historian to publish a study of the importance of the anarchist movement for the development of twentieth-century modernism, in Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897−1914 (Princeton University Press, 1989), she extensively expanded on this subject in The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago University Press, 2013). She is also co-author, with Mark Antliff, of A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago University Press, 2008), and Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 2001) (Cubisme et culture, 2002). She is currently working on a study of anarchism and the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Daniela Padularosa
Cultural and literary scientist Daniela Padularosa is a Research Associate at the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at La Sapienza University Rome. After studies in Brussels, Rome, Vienna and Freiburg she received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Universities of Bonn, IV Sorbonne Paris, and Florence in 2013. Padularosa is interested in literary criticism, German literature, and literary theory. Her book Denken im Gegensatz: Hugo Ball Ikonen-Lehre und Psychoanalyse in der Literatur der Moderne was published in 2016 (Peter Lang). In 2018, her second book, Il principe delle nubi. Hugo Ball e le forme dell’avanguardia, (Mimesis) was released. Her current project entitled ‘Common and/or alien: toward a literary revision of cultural paradigms’ deals with a semantic re-definition of a series of notions and categories – i.e. multiculturalism and hybridization, hegemony and subordination, community and difference.
Richard Shryock
is an Associate Professor of French at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He is the author of a series of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. As well, he wrote a book on embedded narrative (Tales of Storytelling: Embedded Narrative in Modern French Fiction, Lang, 1993) and a collection of correspondence received by the writer and art critic Gustave Kahn (Lettres à Gustave et Rachel Kahn, Nizet, 1996). In 2005–2006 he co-curated with Françoise Lucbert an exhibition on Gustave Kahn at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Gustave Kahn was also the topic of a collection of articles he co-edited with Lucbert (Gustave Kahn: Un Écrivain engagé, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013). A book manuscript on the politics of the French Symbolist movement is nearing completion.
David Weir
is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He is the author of nine books, including two on the topic of anarchism – Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997) and Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye (On Our Own Authority, 2014) – as well as three on decadence: Decadence and the Making of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), Decadent Culture in the United States (State University Press of New York, 2009), and Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018).