Professor Robert S. C. Gordon

Robert Gordon works on modern literature, cinema and cultural history, focussing in particular on Italy. He is the author or editor of over fifteen book-length works, including a monograph on the writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity), several volumes on the work of Primo Levi (e.g. Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report, The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Innesti, Primo Levi magico), and a major study of the wider field of postwar cultural responses to the Holocaust (The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010). He is also the co-editor of the collection Holocaust Intersections, a special issue of the Jewish history journal Quest, and the volume Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th-Century Italy. His work on cinema includes the book on Pasolini, the BFI Film Classics volume Bicycle Thieves, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries, and articles and essays on diverse topics including Holocaust cinema, early film and literature, 'Hollywood on the Tiber', Antonioni and Gianfranco Rosi. He has also written a general account of modern Italian literature, A Difficult Modernity: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Italian Literature. He recently published a comparative study on the role and function of luck in modern narrative (Modern Luck). He has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, is a former Senior Editor of the journal Italian Studies, a former member of the Council of the British School at Rome, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.

Enquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students are welcome.