Massimo Riva
Professor of Italian Studies:
Italian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 3984
Phone 2: +1 401 863 1561
Massimo_Riva@Brown.EDU
Prof. Riva's research focuses on the role of emerging technologies in humanities research. Among his award winning online projects: the Decameron Web, the Pico Project and the Garibaldi and the Risorgimento project, centered on the Garibaldi panorama, a unique survival of a form of public art that was prevalent throughout the nineteenth century. This project was recently featured as part of an exhibit at the British Library in London, as well as in museums and libraries in Italy.
Biography
Massimo Riva has taught at Brown University since 1990. He is Professor of Italian Studies and a member of the graduate faculty of the Modern Culture and Media Department. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Bologna and the IULM of Milan, in Italy; the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Mexico City. Among his recent publications: Pinocchio Digitale. Post-umanesimo e Iper-romanzo (Milan, 2012), and Il futuro della letteratura. L'opera letteraria nell'epoca della sua (ri)producibilità digitale (Naples, 2011). He also recently co-edited two books: Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. A New Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2012) and Renato Poggioli: An Intellectual Biography (Florence, 2012).
Interests
Some of the questions I address in my research: do digital media promote a new type of "encyclopedic" learning, based on learning communities sharing common cognitive "values"? Or do they foster, instead, new forms of fragmentary knowledge, thinking and "values"? How can electronic media enhance our historical understanding of texts, images and other cultural products belonging to a distant cultural past? More specifically: how can classic literary and philosophical works of the Italian humanist tradition, as diverse as Boccaccio's Decameron (the narrative epic of early Modern mercantile world), Pico's Oration On Human Dignity (a "manifesto" of Renaissance philosophy) or Calvino's "hypernovels" (the expression of a cybernetic society) suggest new modes of thought for 21st-century humanism? I see the main challenge of my work as translating into critical discourse the new cognitive values emerging from my experimentation with digital technology, for the benefit of scholars, teachers and students engaged in these practices, as well as all those readers interested in the future (the present) of the humanities.
Degrees
Laurea, Universita di Firenze (1981); Ph.D., Rutgers University (1986)
Awards
ACLS, Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2011-12
Fellowship, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples, Italy, 1988
Fellow, Frederick May Foundation, University of Sydney, Australia, 1985
Affiliations
(Past and present)
Advisory Board of the C.E.F.I./CNRS (Centre d'Etudes Franco-Italiennes - Université de Savoie) Institut de REcherches sur le MOderne IREMO(C.E.F.I./CNRS ) Institut de REcherches et Applications Multimediales IREAM (C.E.F.I./CNRS )
Advisory Board of Bollettino '900, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Italian Literature
Advisory Board of the Yale University Press series on Italian Literature and Thought
Member of the Board (U.S. representative), Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi Italy
Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies
Editorial Board of the Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies
Advisory Board of the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University
Inaugural Board for the Brown Humanities Research Center
Advisory Board, Reinvention Center, SUNY, Stony Brook
Advisory Board, Digital Humanities Quarterly, funded by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
Renaissance Society of America
American Association for Italian Studies
American Association of Boccaccio Studies
Teaching
The evolution of narrative forms from Boccaccio's Decameron to contemporary hypermedia; humanism and post-humanism from Pico della Mirandola to digital culture; visual culture of the Enlightenment and the Risorgimento; Italian film; theories and methods of the digital humanities.
My courses are linked to web projects to which students can actively contribute:
The Decameron Web
Funded Research
ACLS/Mellon Digital innovation research grant, 2011-12 ($25,000)
Seed grant of the Brown Vice President for Research, for a project in collaboration with Gabriel Taubin (Dept. of Engineering), Andres van Dam (Department of Computer Science), and Harriette Hemmasi (University Librarian), 2010-11 ($90,000)
Virtual Humanities Lab, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004-06 ($178,000 in outright funds)
Pico della Mirandola Project, Scholarly Technology Group, Faculty Grant, 2005-06
Frances Wayland Collegium, Faculty Seminar Grant, "Computers and the Future of the Humanities," 2003 ($10,000)
Decameron Web, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1999-2000 and 2001-02 ($360,000 in outright funds)
Curriculum Development Grant, Brown University, 2000
Wriston-Merrit Grant, Brown University, 1995
