"I promessi sposi" Then and Now

Professor Stephanie Jed and the Italian Cultural Center of San Diego present "I promessi sposi: Then and Now." Professor Stephanie Jed and the Italian Cultural Center of San Diego present "I promessi sposi: Then and Now." Join us on Saturday, November 14th at 4pm to investigate the layered meaning in Manzoni's seminal work of Italian literature. - Manzoni provides, in his representations of Spanish relations of ruling, both glimpses of an economy that has begun to link to a world capitalist system and glimpses of resistance to this globalizing model. In my talk, I investigate the continuity of this resistance from the time of the Spanish occupation (represented in the novel) to later archival texts that document Austrian efforts, in the Lombard countryside, to control the movements of malviventi and the spread of the cholera epidemic (1836). I suggest that, though Manzoni’s novel is indisputably a classic of Italian literature and European Romanticism, it can also be read productively against the grain, as a work that also represents alternatives to concepts of the nation, economy, and culture that were negotiated in Italian and Latin American projects of nationalism and independence of the nineteenth century. - Stephanie Jed was an aspiring pianist in college, but after a semester of study abroad in Rome, she decided to pursue a PhD in Italian literature. She taught for 40 years at UCSD in the Department of Literature, serving, during those years, as Director of Italian Studies, Director of Women Studies, Director of Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of Literature. Her primary passion has always been in the art of teaching/learning. She understands that, in educational settings, we are all teacher-learners who share our passions for reading, writing, language-learning, and research, in order to discover our paths of self-development and community-building. Drawing on her experiences as a Fulbright scholar in Rome (1978), Jed has often found ways to connect her passions for research and teaching to social activism. She was a co-founder (in the 1980s) of the Educators’ Committee on Central America and a columnist (in 1992) for The Lies of our Times, a journal of media criticism that critiqued (primarily) the New York Times. After retiring from UCSD (in 2021), Jed spent two years (2021-23) teaching as a volunteer at Freedom University (a program in Atlanta that prepares undocumented students – who are not allowed, by law, to attend public universities – to apply for admission and scholarships at private universities). More recently, she served as a teaching artist in the San Diego Opera’s Words and Music program, as an instructor of Italian at USD, and as a Summer instructor at the ICC.