We are delighted to announce the keynote opening lecture of the 2026 Summer Program.
A City of Bridges, Lives in Between
by Konstantina Zanou
Konstantina Zanou experienced a panic attack while crossing a bridge some years ago. Since then, she has been reflecting on what it means to live and think in between languages, homelands, cultures, and disciplines. In this talk, she will offer both an autobiographical narrative of living her life in the in-between, and an account of how she narrated the lives of people who lived as in-betweeners in the past in her book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Date: Monday, June 8th
Time: 5 - 7pm
Location: Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, San Marco 2893, 30124, Venezia
Konstantina Zanou is Associate Professor of Italian at Columbia University, specializing in Mediterranean Studies. She is a historian of the long nineteenth century in the Mediterranean and her research focuses on issues of intellectual and literary history, history of archaeology, nationalism, and biography, with a special emphasis on Italy and Greece. She is also a student of modern diasporas and of the trajectories and ideas of people on the move. Her book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press 2018) won the 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies, the 2019 Marraro Prize in Italian History, and the 2020 Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize, and was translated into Italian and Greek. She has also co-edited the volume Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2016). Her current book project, Sea of Antiquities: The Cesnola Brothers, the Global Mediterranean, and the Making of the Modern Museum, is forthcoming by Oxford University Press in 2027.
Attendance at this event is restricted to invited guests
