Elena Coda and Ben Lawton
Please join me in congratulating Elena Coda, associate professor of Italian and comparative literature and incoming associate head of the School of Languages and Cultures, and Ben Lawton, associate professor and chair of Italian studies and co-founder and former long-time director of the Film and Video Studies program, who served as editors of Re-Visioning Terrorism: A Humanistic Perspective, published by Purdue University Press earlier this year.
The book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays, revised and expanded from papers originally presented at the Re-visioning Terrorism conference held at Purdue in September 2011 and sponsored by a CLA Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts grant. It offers different ideological, philosophical, and cultural perspectives on terrorism emerging from a variety of humanistic disciplines, and is intended to provide a complex and even contradictory picture on the topic. The essays range from philosophical interpretations of terrorism, to historical analysis of terror through the ages, to cinematic, artistic, and narrative representations of terroristic events that are not limited to 9/11.
Elena’s work focuses primarily on issues of national and transnational identities in Trieste at the eve of WWI. She is the author of Scipio Slataper and numerous essays, and coedited the bilingual anthology The Promised Land: Italian Poetry after 1975 and the collection of essays Balleriniana.
An U.S. Army veteran of the global wars on terror, Ben is the recipient of the 1977–1978 Purdue University Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award. In addition to translating Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism, he has edited over fifteen volumes on topics ranging from film studies to cultural studies.
Congratulations on your book, Dr. Coda and Dr. Lawton.
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts