Italian at Columbia Is Still Going Strong After 200 Years

This year marks 200 years of Italian studies at Columbia. In 1825, the Standing Committee of the Trustees of Columbia College established a Professorship of Italian Literature, and appointed Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, to that position. In 1927, construction was completed on the Casa Italiana, a seven-story, Renaissance-style palazzo at 117th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which was gifted to Columbia by donors and volunteers from the Italian-American community “for use by the University as the center and seat of its work in the field of Italian language, literature, history, and art.” The Department of Italian was housed in what is now known as the Italian Academy from 1927 until the early 1990s, when it was relocated to the fifth floor of Hamilton Hall.

Columbia News caught up with Elizabeth Leake, professor of Italian and new chair of the department, to find out what is going on with all things Italian at Columbia.

What are your plans for the Department of Italian? What sort of programming is happening this year? 

It’s thrilling to teach in the oldest Italian studies department in the country. Just think, we were teaching Italian in 1825—the year John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, and the year Antonio Salieri, the alleged rival of Mozart, died. Truly another epoch. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s opera librettist and author of late-18th century operas like The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, was our first faculty member, and Columbia was still located in lower Manhattan. The Core Curriculum (to which the Italian Department contributes significantly, both in terms of content and instructors) was founded only in 1919. So, historically, our department has always been central to Columbia’s identity.

We’re a small department, so we have strategized by developing long-term, self-sufficient programs. This year, like every year, we have a full roster of activities planned. Da Ponte Professor of Italian Teodolinda Barolini’s internationally renowned Digital Dante project celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2024, and this year, the Italian translation of the Commento Baroliniano of Inferno will go live, as will other new pages, some of which were written by former students who are now working as Italianists at other institutions. 

Also over 10 years old is our Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium, established and run by two of the most important Mediterraneanists in the field, my colleagues Associate Professor of Italian Pier Mattia Tommasino and Associate Professor of Italian Konstantina Zanou. There are two wonderful presentations scheduled this fall in the department’s Italian Medieval Seminars, going strong in its 12th year. I am the faculty co-director of our six-week Venice summer program, which has run in conjunction with the Department of Art History and Archaeology for 20 years. In short, each one of us is involved in initiatives of enduring importance. 

While chair, will you continue to teach? If so, what are you teaching this semester? And what are you working on now?

I’m just completing the cycle of courses I teach with a focus on Italian Fascism, the antifascist resistance, and the postwar period. This semester, I’m teaching Neorealist film. 

My current projects are related to these topics. They have to do with what qualified as combat in Italy under Fascism: How we define combatants, whose actions counted and whose didn’t, and how being recognized as a combatant had, and continues to have, political stakes. Now I’m investigating how popular films made during and after the Fascist era (1922-1945) and the Years of Lead (1970-1988)—a time of social and political unrest in Italy—represent women’s contributions to the war, considering what they hold in their heads as well as in their hands: strategies, secret information, and rhetorical skills, along with pistols and grenades. Side by side with more conventional female protagonists, these generally minor characters inhabit a stealth sub-narrative about gender-based oppression and resistance. What emerges from this approach is a clear sense of the many ways that Fascism, especially during the war years, did not unite the populace across gender lines to fight for or against the Fascist cause, but instigated irreconcilable hostilities between men and women.

Current scholarship in these films, which typically focused on women’s roles as helpmeets (mothers, wives, teachers, shop-girls), underscores the conciliatory nature of much Italian cinema of the era. In that reading, Fascism is what resolves domestic conflict. Challenges to the Fascist (and later, anti-Fascist) family, strongly bonded ideologically, are performed as quotidian domestic dramas. My research takes a different approach, by looking at female characters in these same popular films (including spies, soldiers, and organizers) for whom domestic conflicts, transferred to the scene of battle, can’t be smoothed over in the service of the dominant social order. Thus, alongside the protagonists’ quests for resolution exist scenarios that exceed the limits of the reconcilable. This is particularly evident when we consider the depiction of women’s experiences on the front lines of battle. These same questions reemerge in representations of both the Italian Red Brigades and the political Right in the 1970s and 1980s. Advancing scholarship about relations between ideology and aesthetics, I also hope to construct a model to explain how cultural anxieties resist absorption into official narratives. 

What was your path to a career as an educator and writer?

I only discovered relatively late in the game that I could get paid to do what I have loved to do all my life—read books and think about them. My parents are physicians, so I already had secondhand knowledge of the satisfactions of research, and grad school felt right to me. Then, once I started teaching, that love took on a different dimension. Though I have not taught language since I was a student myself, I did it for years and found it immensely satisfying.

Why is the study of languages and literature so important? 

At the risk of sounding like a self-help book, teaching students a foreign language is like handing them a skeleton key: Where before they stood behind the door of a culture, knowledge of the language opens the door to most all the things that people desire in life—making friends, finding love, experiencing beauty, discovering and nurturing interests, engaging in meaningful work. And teaching literature (or any of the arts, for that matter), whether in one’s first language or one acquired later, helps us to see and to know ourselves. It’s not my goal as a literature instructor to help students see the world in a new way; I’m more interested, rather, in helping students see the world. 

What’s special about teaching at Columbia and in New York?

My Columbia faculty colleagues and my students are phenomenal—brilliant, hardworking, and dedicated to using their expertise and energies to develop thoughtful analyses of cultures, history, and, in general, the world in which we live, both in its contemporaneity and historically. There’s a great expression in Italian: mettere le mani in pasta, which translates as “to put your hands in the dough.” It means to be fully involved in a project, which describes my colleagues and students well. Teaching and research at Columbia mean contributing to the advancement of knowledge in a thoughtful and responsible way.