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Professor of Italian Studies, Interim Chair of Italian Studies

Overview

Massimo Riva ​was educated in Italy (Laurea in Filosofia, University of Florence, 1979) and the United States (Ph.D. in Italian literature, Rutgers University, 1986). He is the author of several books published in Italy: on literary maladies in the 18th century (Saturno e le Grazie, Palermo, 1992), national identity in the 19th-century (Malinconie del Moderno, Ravenna, 2001), literature in the digital age (Il Futuro della Letteratura, Naples, 2011), post-humanism and the hyper-novel (Pinocchio Digitale, Milan, 2012). He is the editor and co-editor of four more books, including a fiction anthology - Italian Tales - published by Yale University Press in 2004 (reprinted in 2007) and the Cambridge University Press edition of Pico della Mirandola's Oration "On Human Dignity" (2012, reprinted 2016), the result of a collaborative digital project between Brown and the University of Bologna. His latest major publication, a digital monograph entitled Shadow Plays. Virtual Realities in an Analog World published by Stanford University Press in 2022, is the winner of a 2023 Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in the category of e-Products and a finalist for the 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize. An expanded Italian edition of this monograph was published in January 2025 by Einaudi of Turin (Giochi d'Ombra. Preistoria curiosa della realtà virtuale). 

Prof. Riva is the recipient of three major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, in support of various digital projects now part of the Virtual Humanities Lab. His awards and honors also include the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (with the rank of Ufficiale) for his contribution to the dissemination of Italian culture in North America. At Brown, he is the recipient of a Presidential Faculty Award and a Wriston Merritt and a Frances Wayland Collegium grant, and the co-recipient (Co-PI with Gabriel Taubin, Engineering, Harriette Hemmasi, University Librarian, and Andries van Dam, Computer Science) of a seed grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, for a project entitled: “Advancing Digital Scholarship with Touch-Surfaces and Large-Format Interactive Display Walls.” This grant, and additional external funding, led to a series of interactive installations of the Garibaldi moving panorama featured in the U.K (British Library in London), Brazil (International Council of Museums, Rio de Janeiro), and Italy (various libraries and museums including the Sala Capitolare of the Italian Senate in Rome, the Sala del Risorgimento of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and the Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio and the Biblioteca Sala Borsa in Bologna).

Prof. Riva has held visiting positions at the University of Bologna, the University of Bourgogne at Dijon, the University of London, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the University of Modena, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and the University of Sydney, Australia; and, in the United States, at the University of Connecticut, UCLA, the University of North Carolina, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. His teaching ranges from Boccaccio's Decameron to modern and contemporary literature, film, visual studies, and the digital humanities. In recognition of his research-based teaching, he was nominated Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence (2014-2017). He was the co-recipient (with Fulvio Domini, CLPS) of a 2018 Cogut Institute Collaborative Humanities Course Award for the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course entitled Simulating Reality: the (Curious) History and Science of Immersive Experiences. A sample of student projects from this course can be viewed here.

Prof. Riva is the founder and co-curator of the Cinema Ritrovato on Tour film festival, a collaboration between Brown U. and the Cineteca of Bologna.

Brown Affiliations

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