Sophia Maxine Farmer

Spring 2017

Sophia Maxine Farmer is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her research focuses on Italian modern art and the socio-political structures that affected the production of artworks during twentieth century. Her dissertation centers on the importance of the machine era to the development of Futurist anthropomorphic objects and imagery. More specifically, her work considers the gendered connotations of the idealized mechanical man formed as a fetishized robotic cyborg in Futurist art and literature. Her research on the Futurist sub-movement, aeropittura, entitled “Aeropittura: Modern Aviation and the Fascist Idealization of the Italian Landscape” will be published in the collective volume Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies: Italy and the Environmental Humanities, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2016.

For her CIMA Fellowship she will be examining the role of citation, repetition and appropriation in the works of Giorgio de Chirico and Giulio Paolini as a way to better understand the ironic perspective presented by Italian artworks that celebrate kitsch, pastiche and parody in the twentieth century.