Columbia Center for Archaeology Seminar

Konstantina Zanou

Assistant Professor of Italian, specializing in Mediterranean Studies

Soldiers of Fortune: The Cesnola Brothers and the Adventures of Antiquities from the Mediterranean to Gilded Age New York

Friday October 28, 2022 5:10pm EST

963 Schermerhorn Extension

In-person ONLY

For CU affiliates

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Abstract:

Konstantina Zanou presents her work-in-progress about the fascinating lives of two brothers, Luigi and Alessandro Palma di Cesnola (1832–1904 and 1840–1914), who traveled all around the world transforming themselves from military men into diplomats, and from explorers and gold diggers into archeologists and forgers of antiquities. One of them became the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first and longest-serving director. By unearthing the multiple layers of one family history, Zanou offers a personal, microhistorical account of the emergence of archeology and the making of modern museums between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Bio:

Konstantina Zanou is Assistant Professor of Italian, specializing in Mediterranean Studies, in the Italian Department at Columbia University. She is a historian of the long nineteenth century in the Mediterranean and of the trajectories and ideas of people on the move. Her book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press 2018) won the 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize in Modern Greek History, the 2019 Marraro Prize in Italian History, and the 2020 Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize. It has been translated into Italian and Greek. She is also the co-author of Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2016).