Summer School 2021

Carmen Belmonte (PhD Art History, University of Udine, 2017) is a researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut. Her research focuses on the visual culture and material legacy of Italian colonialism and Fascism, as well as on cultural heritage after natural disasters. She was awarded several postdoctoral fellowships from academic and research institutions, including the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut for Art History (2017–2018), the American Academy in Rome (2018–2019), and the Italian Academy at the Columbia University, New York (2020). She has published several contributions on colonial visual and material culture in nineteenth-century Italy and is currently working on a book project centered on the role of the arts in Italian colonialism (Marsilio, Venice). After the 2019 conference 'A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments, and Works of Art in Italy' (Bibliotheca Hertziana, American Academy in Rome), she is now editing a multi-authored volume that explores the afterlife of Fascist-era heritage in contemporary Italy.

Lutz Klinkhammer, Dr. phil. habil., Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom, Via Aurelia Antica 391, I-00165 Roma. 

Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Rome and head of Contemporary History. Publications on the German occupation of Italy, on the history of Italian fascism, on the memory of World War II in Italy. He served as Consultant of the Italian Parliamentary Inquiry Commission investigating on the non-punishment of war criminals after 1945, and as a Member of the Historians’ Committee established by the Ministries for Foreign Affairs in Italy and Germany. He teaches Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz. 

Selected publications: (editor with Clemens Zimmermann) Cinema as a Political Media. Germany and Italy Compared, 1945-1950s, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing 2021 (online available); (editor with Monica Fioravanzo and Filippo Focardi), Italia e Germania dopo la caduta del Muro. Politica, cultura, economia, Roma: Viella 2019; (editor with Patrick Bernhard) L’uomo nuovo del fascismo. La costruzione di un progetto totalitario, Roma: Viella 2017.   

Elizabeth Rodini is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. An art historian, she was previously founding director of the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught courses on the history of collecting and the ethics and politics of cultural heritage practice. She has published on the musealization of fascist-era memory at the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris, and on the long trajectory of an important Italian Renaissance painting in Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image (I.B. Taurus/Bloomsbury, 2020). Her current research centers on narratives of material heritage: the objects we protect and preserve, the stories we tell about them, and the way those stories get shared.