Francesco Erspamer

I am a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. I like very much to teach and for this reason I’ve never been able to fully enjoy my sabbatical leaves. In fact most if not all my ideas and critical insights have come to my mind while teaching or preparing a class. On the other hand, I sincerely dislike administrative bureaucracy, including meetings, committees, and reports. I think that their recent multiplication is a deliberate, consistent attempt to put education under the direct control of managers rather than teachers, with the purpose of undermining critical thinking and governing creativity. I don’t like very much conferences either, and although I praise intellectual exchange and communication, I believe that many academics produce excessive carbon footprints, like watermelons in Boston supermarkets during the winter. Both administrative “duties” and conferences are too often an excuse not to read books, which I still consider a fundamental tool not for acquiring knowledge (which can be obtained in other ways) but for resisting homogenization. I am interested in the history of ideas and in cultural change, and I have worked on the Renaissance, Italy during the 19th and 20th century, and contemporary issues. My most recent books are “La creazione del passato" (The Creation of the Past) and “Paura di cambiare" (Fear of Change). From 2007 to 2011 I wrote weekly reviews for “Italica,” the online site of Rai Internazionale. I am the editor of “Romance Sphere,” the online magazine of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. I regularly teach courses on the Renaissance, soccer (with Mariano Siskind), the concept of beauty, epics, the idea of time, and cultural agency (with Doris Sommer).I support Occupy Harvard and the Occupy movement.Specialties: History of ideas; cultural change; Italian literature; Renaissance; aesthetics; fiction; book reviews; culture of soccer; concepts of time, past, beauty; cultural agency.