2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

My time at the Italian Academy benefited greatly not only from
the wonderful resources of Columbia University, but also from the
interdisciplinary nature of the cohort. It was insightful for me, for
example, to receive feedback from art historians about contemporaneous
patterns of cyclical time as represented in art. The interdisciplinarity
of the Academy also inspired me to directly confront the
challenge posed to all of the Fellows by Professor David Freedberg
on the very first day of the semester: to be able to explain the
importance of my research to an educated group of non-specialists.
This is indeed a worthy challenge and a valuable point for future
researches, which was gained from my experience at the Italian
Academy.
Brian Ogren takes up a new position as Assistant Professor in the
Department of Religious Studies at Rice University.
Alessandro Pignocchi
My project for the Italian Academy was to write a book on cognition
regarding movies. The book uses a cognitive model of our relationship
with artworks, which I laid out in an earlier book (L’oeuvre
d’art et ses intentions, Odile Jacob, 2012), to build a detailed analysis
of a set of movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo,
Fritz Lang’s M, Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line and Tree of Life, and
Apichatpong Weerasetakhul’s Boonmee’s Uncle. I chose to present
my work at the Academy’s weekly seminar early in the semester in
order to clarify my ideas before I began to write. I also presented my
work at Barbara Tversky’s practicum at the Psychology Department
of Columbia University. Having the reactions of these two very
different audiences has been very useful. The Fellows of the Italian
Academy gave me the viewpoint of potential readers who study art
but who are without precise knowledge of the cognitive sciences
(which is the kind of reader I had in mind when preparing my
book), whereas the Fellows in Prof. Tversky’s practicum gave me the
viewpoint of specialists in cognitive science who are (some of them)
without precise knowledge of art history and art theories.
Now that the semester is ending, the book is almost finished.
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