Magazzino Italian Art announces that the 2023-2024 Scholar-In-Residence position has been awarded to Dr. Margaret Scarborough. Launched in 2018, the Scholar-in-Residence program is an annual fellowship that invites an emerging academic to pursue or continue an independent project that contributes new research on postwar and contemporary Italian art. In this role, Margaret will be able to closely study the Olnick Spanu Collection, which includes seminal works by artists central to the Arte Povera movement and contemporary Italian artists as well as utilize the museum’s Germano Celant Research Center.
Having recently received her PhD in Italian Studies from Columbia University, Margaret will use her residency to complete her first book on the radical politics of the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi and the director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative literature, political theory, and intellectual history, and explores the role that literary and art criticism played in both figures’ thought. At Magazzino, she will use the Germano Celant Research Center’s holdings on postwar Italian art, as well as the gallery’s collections, to write a new chapter on Lonzi’s relationships with Italian artists, which considers their influence on her feminism. Margaret’s experimental scholarship in aesthetics and politics will contribute to the historiography of Italian feminism and postwar Italian art, and to our understanding of contemporary Italian philosophy.
During her time in Cold Spring, Margaret will collaborate with the Magazzino team on new publications, exhibitions, and film series. In spring 2024, she will develop a four-part lecture series dedicated to exploring the politics of gender and sexuality in postwar Italian art.
About Margaret Scarborough
Margaret Scarborough is a scholar, writer, and translator. She received her PhD in Italian Studies with a concentration in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she completed a dissertation on the instrumental role of philology in postwar Italian approaches to selfhood. Before coming to Magazzino, Margaret taught courses in comparative literature, Italian language, and the Core Curriculum at Columbia. In Fall 2022, she was the Bruno Munari Research Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York. Margaret also holds a BA in European and Middle Eastern Languages and an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Oxford.
Magazzino Italian Art | 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY
