Draft:Massimo Riva

Early life

Massimo Riva was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1952. His family relocated to Sicily when he was six years old. He grew up in Syracuse.

Education

Massimo graduated from the University of Florence with a degree in Philosophy in 1979. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Rutgers University in 1986. His dissertation, which he later published as a manuscript, was on Melancholy in neoclassical Italian literature.

Academic career

In his early career, Massimo served as lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1983-85) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1987-89). In 1990, he started as an associate professor of Italian Studies at Brown University, where he was awarded tenure in 1993. In 2015 he was named the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence.  

In the United States, Massimo Riva has held visiting positions at the University of Connecticut; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of California, Los Angeles; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Northwestern University; and Rutgers University.

Abroad, he has held positions at the University of Bologna, University of Dijon, University of London, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, University of Modena, École des Haute Études (Paris), and University of Sydney, Australia.

Personal life

Massimo Riva divides his time between Providence, Rhode Island; Prince Edward Island, Canada; and Italy. He is married with two daughters.

Research

Massimo's research in his own words: "For many years, I have seen as the main challenge of my work translating into critical discourse the new cognitive values emerging from my experimentation with digital technology, for the benefit of scholars, teachers and students engaged in these practices, as well as all those readers interested in the future (the present) of the humanities. Some of the questions I have addressed in my research: do digital media promote a new type of "encyclopedic" learning, based on learning communities sharing common cognitive "values"? Or do they foster, instead, fragmentary knowledge, unthetered thinking and deliberate misinformation? How can digital media enhance our historical understanding and "rediscovery" of documents (texts, images and other cultural artifacts) belonging to a distant cultural past? How can classic literary and philosophical works of the Italian humanist tradition, from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (a narrative encyclopedia of the late Middle Ages) and G. Pico della Mirandola's Oration On Human Dignity (a "manifesto" of Renaissance humanism) to Italo Calvino's combinatorial "hypernovels" (the imaginative expression of our contemporary cybernetic society) inspire new modes of thought for 21st-century (post)humanism? In recent years, these questions have expanded to include a genealogy of Virtual Reality and a look at how famous or unknown Italian artists have contributed to it. The guiding framework of my current research is the meaning of "simulation" as both an evolutionary trait of the human species and a techno-cultural paradigm of a digital humanism, with a particular focus on current theoretical and applicative development.”

Prof. Riva has been involved in many award-winning online and digital humanities projects.

Awards

He was awarded the Presidential Faculty Award by Brown’s President Christina Paxton for his work as a digital humanist over the three and a half decades he has spent teaching at Brown.

Selected bibliography

Shadow Plays. Virtual Realities in an Analogue World, (Stanford University Press, 2022).

"Boccaccio, Beyond the Text." The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, G. Armstrong, R. Daniels and S. Milner eds., Cambridge: Cambridge Un. Press, 2015, 219-234 The Roman Revolution and the Garibaldi Panorama,” in: David I. Kertzer (Ed.),  Nicholas Brown and the Roman Republic (a project of the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, 2023)

“Simulating Reality: An Experiment at Brown University,” co-authored with Fulvio Domini, Special Issue: The Italianist, Volume 42, 2022, issue 3, Italian Studies and Digital Interdisciplinarity DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2022.2223855.

“Il Decameron Web vent'anni dopo: bilanci e prospettive,” Griseldaonline. Rivista di Letteratura, 2022, with Michael Papio. [https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1721-4777/12210]

Co-editor (with Alberto Zotti Minici and Massimiliano Pinucci) Time Machine. Virtual Photographic Trips Around the World 100 Years Ago, Florence: MBVision, December 2018. Catalog of the exhibition held in the Sale della Fotografia, Palazzo Angeli, Padua, co-sponsored by the Virtual Humanities Lab, December 2018-March 2019.

“Mini-Grand Tour, in 3D,” introduction to: Time Machine, 12-19.

“Il Panorama Garibaldi. Publishing and Dissemination.” Preface, Catalog of the exhibit: Icone Politiche. Celebrità e Nuovi Media al Tempo del Risorgimento co-sponsored by the Virtual Humanities Lab, Mantua, February-March, 2018, 7.

“The Past at our Fingertips: Some Remarks on Virtual Realism and the Historical Heritage,” in: Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 17 Number 3 (2018), 279-285.

“Transmedia Storytelling and other Challenges and Opportunities for the Digital Humanities,” co-authored with Alessandro Carpin, in Transmedia e co-creazione, ed. by Domenico Morreale,  Rome: Aracne, 2018, 39-52 (article also published online in DigitCult. Scientific Journal of Digital Cultures, and selected for this print publication).

“The Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento Archive at Brown University,” co-authored with Valeria Federici, NeMLA Italian Studies, Special Issue: “The Italian Digital Classroom,” eds. T. Convertini and S. Wright, Volume xxxix, 2017, 84-99.

“Pico e il Post-Umanesimo: Attualità e Inattualità di un Pensiero Vivente,” in: Pico tra Cultura e Letteratura dell’Umanesimo, ed. Giacomo Ventura, Bologna: Alma Mater Studiorum, 2018, 65-70. "An Emerging Scholarly Form: the Digital Monograph." DigitCult. Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures. Vol. 2 No. 3 (2017) www.digitcult.it/index.php/dc/article/view/53

"Change of Paradigm: From Individual to Community-Based Scholarship," in Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, vol. 4, n. 1 (2015), special issue: "Lector in Rete: Figures of the Reader in Digital Humanities" (video essay and 1307 words: abstract)

"Giacomo Casanova." The Literary Encyclopedia, ed. Jo Ann Cavallo, (3514 words entry)

"Spettacolo, Informazione, Propaganda nel Panorama Garibaldi della Brown University," in Il lungo Ottocento e le sue Immagini. Politica, media, spettacolo, eds. Vinzia Fiorino, Gian Luca, Fruci and Alessio Petrizzo, Pisa: ETS, 2013, 53-66.

"Liquid/Cloudy/Foggy: For a Critique of Fluid Textuality,"Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, Vol. 2, n. 1, 2012, http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/article/view/3016

Pinocchio Digitale: Postumanesimo e Iper-romanzo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012, 170 p.

Ed. Renato Poggioli: an intellectual biography, Florence: Olschki, 2012, 277 p. (co-edited with Roberto Ludovico and Lino Pertile)

Ed. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. A New Translation and Commentary , Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 308 p. (co-edited with Francesco Borghesi and Michael Papio)

"Beyond the Mechanical Body: Digital Pinocchio," chapter 10 of Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity: The Mechanical Body, edited by Katia Pizzi, London: Blackwell, 2011, pp. 201-214

Il futuro della letteratura. L'opera d'arte letteraria nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale, Naples: ScriptaWeb, 2011. E-book and print, 304 p.

"La storia a colpo d'occhio: Panorami di guerra nell'epoca risorgimentale," in: Teatri di guerra: rappresentazioni e discorsi tra età moderna ed età contemporanea , ed. by Angela De Benedictis, Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press, 2010, 295-316

"Crisis and Clouds. New Frontiers for the Creative Industries," in: REM. Research on Education and Media , Vol. 2, n. 2, December 2010

"Toward Experimental Scholarly Modes in the Humanities," in: Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage , National Endowment for the Humanities/ Italian National Council for Research, 2009, 117-128.

"The Decameron Web: Ten Years Later," in: Teaching Foreign Languages and Literatures Online , The Modern Language Association, New York: 2009, 343-357

"Dignità ed enigmi del postumano," Annali di Italianistica , volume 26, 2008, Humanisms, Posthumanisms & Neohumanisms, 333-352.

"Garbuglio," in: Pocket Gadda Encyclopedia , 2008, http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/walks/pge/garbuglioriva.php

"Dal racconto al gioco (e viceversa): modelli per una letteratura digitale tra Collodi e Calvino," in: Italo Calvino y la Cultura de Italia , Proceedings of the Jornadas Internacionales de Estudios Italianos 19-23 septiembre, 2005, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Mexico, in Mexico City, 2007, 145-155

"Nuova prosa e nuove tecnologie, ovvero: Cronaca di un lungo decennio (1993-2006)." In: Nuova Prosa. Quadrimestrale di Narrativa , 44, 2006, 81-110.

"Digital Pinocchio: the Literary Text as Artificial Life Form," in: New Approaches to Teaching Pinocchio and Its Adaptations , Michael Sherberg (ed.), New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2006, 144-152

"Per una comunità della formazione letteraria: il WWW e la nuova italianistica," in: Letterature, Biblioteche, Ipertesti , ed. by F. Pellizzi, Roma: Carocci, 2005, 41-64

Ed. Italian Tales. An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction . New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2004, 260 p. [Selected reviews: Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Sun, Books on Fire, Il riformista, Il Messaggero, La Gazzetta del Sud, ANSA New York , Radio Città del Capo (interviews), Annali d'Italianistica.]

"The Arrows of the Mind: Calvino, Arakawa and the hyper-novel," in: E-Literature in E-Publishing , ed. P. Carbone, Milan: Mimesis, 2004 99-122.

"Christmas Carol," a short story, in: Il fior fiore di Zibaldoni e altre meraviglie , Galatina: Santoro, 2004, 129-148

"Vico e il mostro civile," in: Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani , anno XXX, 2003, 119-132

"Therapy in the Garden: G. Boccaccio's Purgatorial Eden," in: R. Psaki, ed., The Earthly Paradise. The Garden of Eden from Antiquity to Modernity , International Studies in Formative Christianity and Judaism, Global Publications, Binghamton University, 2002, 115-148

"Le frecce della mente: Italo Calvino e l'iper-romanzo," in: Italo Calvino e la reinvenzione della letteratura , ed. Anna Botta and Domenico Scarpa, Rome: Avagliano, 2002, 117-145

Malinconie del Moderno. Disagio della nazionalità e critica dell'incivilimento nella letteratura italiana del XIX secolo , Ravenna: Longo, 2001, 178 p.

"Per Speculum Melancholiae: the Awakening of Reason Engenders Monsters," in: Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination , ed. Keala Jewell, Wayne State University Press, 2001, 279-296

"Boccaccio Online: Teaching the Decameron as Hypertext at Brown University," in: New Approaches to G. Boccaccio's Decameron , ed. J. Mc Gregor, Modern Language Association series on New Approaches to Classical Texts, 2000, 172-182

"Beginning/Ending/Openness/Consistency. Models for the Hyper-Novel," in Annali di Italianistica , 18, 2000, 109-132

"Heros/Heleos: l'ambivalente terapia del mal d'amore nel libro chiamato Decameron, cognominato prencipe Galeotto," in: Italian Quarterly , XXXVI, 2000, 69-106