University of California, Santa Barbara
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Faculty

Maurizia Boscagli

Professor of English, affiliated with Feminist Studies and Comparative Literature

Maurizia Boscagli Profile Image
  • Office:
    South Hall 2707
  • Office Hours:
    By appointment.
  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
  • Education:
  • Ph.D., Brown University

My research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literature and culture, modernism, contemporary critical theory, feminist and gender theory, materialism, Marxism and Autonomism, migration, globalization and cosmopolitanism, urban studies, as well as the environmental humanities.

I am the author of Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity on the Early Twentieth Century (1996), and Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (2014). I coedited with Enda Duffy the collection Walter Benjamin and Magical Urbanism (2011). I am also the translator of Antonio Negri’s book Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (2009) and of essays by Italian Autonomists.

My recent publications discuss plastic pollution and migration art in the Wasteocene, 1970s Italian Autonomia, utopia, and feminism, the materiality of alter-modernism and queer style, art in the age of capitalist realism and ecological disaster, as well as an essay on Virginia Woolf’s materialist approach to female exhaustion and women’s labor.

My current research includes a new book manuscript on work and the politics of not doing.

I am the director of COMMA, the Center on Modern Culture, Materialism and Aesthetics at UC Santa Barbara. At COMMA we study twentieth century and contemporary culture from a materialist perspective, through a range of critical approaches: Marxism, feminist and queer theory, decolonial and migration studies, urban studies, and ecocriticism. We sponsor yearly colloquia and conferences (“Commoning Precarity”, 2012) and a year-long reading group that brings together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. Among our speakers are feminist theorist Silvia Federici, Marxist critic Etienne Balibar, architect Neil Denari, anthropologist Tarek Elhaik, and literary scholars Allison Caruth, and Warren Montag. Topics of our discussion series include: “Marxism in Reverse”, “The Dialectic 2.0”, “EcoMarx”, “Biopolitics and Materialism”, and “Possible Futures.”

 

Research Areas

  • c. 1800-1945
  • c. 1945-present
  • American Literature
  • British Literature
  • Environment and Ecocriticism
  • Genders and Sexualities
  • Global Literatures
  • Marxism, Critical Theory, and/or Historical Materialism

Research Center Affiliations

Maurizia Boscagli Profile Image
  • Office:
    South Hall 2707
  • Office Hours:
    By appointment.
  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

  • Articles & Chapters

  • “Marx, Materialism, and the Natural Sciences”, The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (2018)

     

  • “The Work of Art in the Age of Capitalist Realism: Materiality/Aura/Apocalypse” in How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to the Study of Literature (2020)

     

  • “On the Beach: Porous Plasticity, Migration Art, and the objet trouve’ of the Wasteocene”, in Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity (2020)

     

  • “Refrigeration, “Bliss”, and the Modernist World Order of Imperial Culture”, co-authored with Enda Duffy, in Katherine Mansfield and “Bliss”, (2020)

     

  • “The Furniture of Alter-Modernism: Eileen Gray’s and LeCorbusier’s Two Orientalisms”, in Modernist Objects (2021)

     

  • “Minor Apocalypses: Italian Autonomia, Utopia, and the Women”, Open Library of the Humanities (2021)

     

  • “Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria: Gesture, Modernism”, co-authored with Enda Duffy, in A Modernist Cinema: Film Art 1914 to 1941 (2022)

     

  • “The Biopolitics of Laziness: Marx, Lafargue, and the Laboring Body”, Nineteenth Century Prose, Special issue: Marx in His Own Times (2022)

     

Maurizia Boscagli's Bookshelf

Courses Taught

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