About the Author

Valerio Ferme (PhD, comparative literature, UC Berkeley) is Dean of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati. His books include Tradurre è tradire: La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il fascismo (Longo, 2002); Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Palgrave, 2015); and, with coauthor Norma Bouchard, Italy and the Mediterranean in the Post-Cold War Era (Palgrave, 2013). He is also coeditor of From Otium to Occupatio in Italian Culture, Annali d’Italianistica (2014) and Mediterranean Encounters in the City (2015), and cotranslator of Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (Fordham University Press, 2012). He has published over fifty articles and reviews.

Reviews

"Franco Cassano's Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, finally available to an English-language audience thanks to this long-overdue translation, represents an important contribution to the cultural and philosophical critique of modernity. Cassano's essay traces a "Southern" agenda to thinking and learning about the world. In doing so, Cassano, professor of sociology at the University of Bari in southern Italy, also seeks to unsettle the orthodox topography of Europe and the latter's position within narratives about modernization and development. The text, which originally appeared in Italian in 1996 and was reprinted with a new preface in 2005, has a "cult book" status within Italian academic and public debates." - Nick Dines (Roma Tre University), H-SAE