THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
After receiving his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought, Michael Subialka taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University (Turkey) and then as the Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He is now Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he focuses on the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the arts in global modernism, with particular emphasis on Italian and European contexts.
His book, Modernist Idealism: Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2021 - available open access), examines the reception and rearticulation of post-Kantian idealism in Italian culture, with particular attention to Italian figures including Luigi Pirandello, Gabrielle d'Annunzio, Futurism (especially in FT Marinetti and Bruno Corra), Grazia Deledda, Eugenio Montale, Luigi Capuana, Giovani Papini, and Sebastiano Arturo Luciani. He has particular expertise on the work of Luigi Pirandello, having co-authored Scrittura d'immagini: Pirandello e la visualità tra arte, filosofia e psicoanalisi (Rubbettino, 2021) and serving as the Co-President of the Pirandello Society of America as well as Co-Editor of PSA, the Society's scholarly journal; with his colleague Lisa Sarti he is also currently directing and editing a digital humanities project to produce the first complete translation of Pirandello's short stories, Stories for a Year. Likewise, he is a scholar of Gabriele d'Annunzio, having co-edited the book Gabriele d'Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and serving as a member of the editorial board for the journal Archivio d'Annunzio.
Michael is also currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the open access scholarly journal California Italian Studies. His current book project, Mindful Modernism, compares Gabriele d'Annunzio and TS Eliot to show how their modernist poetics draw on and reconfigure a syncretic mix of spiritual traditions rooted in meditation practices, using these to shape their engagement with presence through artistic production. He is also beginning work on two new projects: one is a collaborative undertaking to unearth the sometimes forgotten or overlooked legacies of Italian actresses who immigrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries; another is an examination of how modern fantasy literature emerges in relation to theories and practices of modernist imagination.
Prior Academic Positions: Powys Roberts Research Fellow in Modern Languages, St Hugh's College, University of Oxford; Visiting Assistant Professor, Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas, Bilkent University
Prior Education: B.A. in Philosophy and Italian, University of Notre Dame, 2006
Interests: Literature and philosophy, comparative/global modernisms, the avant-gardes (and neo-avant-garde), Italian literature and artistic culture, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, Luigi Pirandello, Futurism, Gabriele d'Annunzio, TS Eliot, continental aesthetics, European theater and early cinema, translation studies and translation practice, Platonism and Neoplatonism, Italian Renaissance thought
Dissertation title: “The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Pirandello, Schopenhauer, and the Transformation of the European Social Imaginary”
Committee: Thomas Pavel (Chair), Rebecca West (Chair), David Wellbery, Armando Maggi.
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