Heretical Aesthetics

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer, art critic and one of the most controversial and provocative intellectuals of his time. Most well known for his first and last films, Accattone and Salò, as well as The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Decameron, he was also a prolific essayist and activist. He was murdered in 1975.

Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014), and Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which won an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Writer's Grant. His volumes Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism are forthcoming from Yale University Press, and is writing the Very Short History of Futurism for Oxford University Press in 2024. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program, and is a contributing critic to Art in America and frieze.


Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Nell'officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (Edizioni del Verri, 2014); Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio, 2018), and Ariosto in the Machine Age, which is forthcoming for the University of Toronto Press. He translated the epistolary between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (nottetempo, 2020, with Chiara Valerio) and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (Marsilio, 2022). He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, and in the New Jersey state penitentiary system for the Prison Teaching Initiative. He writes about art, books, and the politics of gender for the Italian newspapers il manifesto and Domani.