Valeria Federici

Travel Fellow

Valeria Federici is a PhD candidate In Italian Studies as well as an MA student in History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, Providence, RI. Her interdisciplinary PhD thesis project, entitled “Network culture in Italy in the 1990s and the making of a place for art and activism,” explores how contemporary art practices, political activism, and information technology intertwine. In particular, her project focuses on political activism in Italy after 1989 and the use of information as an artistic medium. Valeria’s research interests revolve around themes of sovereignty, space, social movements, cultural identity, technology, and art. She graduated in Letters with a concentration in History of Art from the Università Roma Tre in Rome, Italy, with a thesis that explored the role of local and central government in controlling the cultural representation through the Museo Artistico Industriale (Applied Art School) and through initiatives such as the Universal Exposition held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of the Italian kingdom. She has curated independent art projects and participated in several guest lectures and roundtables about arts management, art and activism, and the role of cultural institutions in place-making and community-building in post-industrial cities. As an independent art editor she published exhibition reviews, book reviews, and artist interviews for different magazines and online publications including The Oxford Art Journal. Her recent research projects include a study of the representation of women in Italian TV and cinema in the 1950s to be published in the volume Female Identity and Its Representations in the Arts and Humanities: Neoclassic to Twenty-first Century (Cambridge Scholars), and an investigation over the possibilities of exploring, displaying, and interacting with old and new digital artworks and artifacts. With the collaboration of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University, she has completed a digital interface that explores the relationships between the Garibaldi Panorama (a painting, two hundred sixty feet in length, which has been digitized at Brown University) and the visual and textual materials collected in the Harvard Risorgimento Preservation Collection. She is a Research Team Associate for the project The Garibaldi Panorama and The Risorgimento at Brown University.

For her CIMA travel fellowship, Valeria will conduct research related to her dissertation in archives and other sources in Florence, Prato, Rome, and Venice. In particular, she is focused on studying the transformation of a former military fort located in Rome into a site for art and activism, through three spatial narratives—geographical, political, and relational.