Working Papers

Working papers include fictions, essays, musings, presentations, collaborative works, and blog posts.

 

Essays

Theatre and Dream-Vision: Venice, Dickens, and the Modern City

READING DICKENS: PLEASURE AND THE PLAY OF BERNARD HARRISON’S “SOCIAL PRACTICES”

Love and Figure/Ground: Reading Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Primo Levi “Thinking in German”

Il Ghetto: Exile and the Modern Imagination

Primo Levi’s “Small Differences”

Outsiders and Insiders: Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture

On Seeing the Venice Ghetto Through the Eyes of Thomas Coryat

Blog

murraybaumgarten.blogspot.com

 

Collaborations

IL GHETTO: Forging Italian Jewish Identities Exhibit

 

Herbert Jacobsen and Trieste: The Papers of Herbert Jacobson

baumgarten_italy

Herbert Jacobsen (i.e. Jacopo Erbi) was the Allied High Commissioner for Trieste after World War II, in charge of reviving the radio station and the city government,

Jacobsen was a friend of Thornton Wilder, a film maker, and worked in the UN during its early years. He married a woman from Trieste and learned the history of the city, and his papers are a treasure trove of information about World War II and the post-War period. Jacobsen’s film Aquila is an early-fifties neorealist propaganda piece about an unemployed Italian laborer who finds work at a refinery that is being rebuilt with aid from the Marshall Plan.

A friend, Amy Worthen, is the executor of Jacobsen’s papers and has asked me to see if scholars would be interested in doing historical and biographical research.

For further information, please contact Amy Worthen (aworthen@desmoinesartcenter.org) and Murray Baumgarten (dickens@ucsc.edu).