1746 - present
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton University is a private Ivy League university located in Princeton, New Jersey. It is one of the oldest universities in the United States, boasting numerous Nobel Prize winners among its alumni and faculty members, including figures who have played an important role in cultivating cultural relations between Italy and the United States
Among the alumni of Princeton University was the essayist and academic William Fense Weaver (1946), one of the most prolific translators to English of the works of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Giorgio Bassani. In the decades following the end of the Second World War, Weaver also translated into English the works of authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Pirandello, Ugo Moretti, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Berto, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Carlo Cassola, Ignazio Silone and Raffaele La Capria.
In 1955 the university appointed its first African American faculty member, Charles T. Davis, an eminent Dante scholar. Supported by methodological rigor and the careful use of original sources, Davis's seminal work, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford, 1957), placed the figure of Dante Alighieri in a precise historical and intellectual context.
In 1963, Raymond Grew, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, was awarded the Unità d'Italia Prize for his monograph work A Sterner Plan for Italian Unity: The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento. The text was published later the same year by Princeton University Press.
Noteworthy is also Princeton University Art Museum's collection. It includes several Roman artifacts, among which the marble portraits of emperors Octavian Augustus and Marcus Aurelius found during the excavations of Antioch conducted by the university in the 1930s as well as several works by Italian artists from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. After the Second World War, the museum periodically hosted exhibitions devoted to Italian art. The exhibition titled 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings took place in the late 1960s and featured several works of Luca Cambiaso, Parmigianino, Guercino, Giambattista Tiepolo, Amedeo Modigliani, Vittore Carpaccio, Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Related Vectors
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writer, director, actor, painter
Umberto Eco
Italian scholar, novelist and intellectual
Sources
Brown, Alison. "Ricordo di Charles T. Davis." Archivio Storico Italiano, vol. 157, n. 1 (1999): 89-91.
Giles, Laura. "In Depth: 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum." https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/indepth-500-years-of-italian-master-drawings-from-the-princeton-university-art-museum.
Noether Emiliana. "A Sterner Plan for Italian Unity: The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento by Raymond Grew." The American Historical Review, vol. 70, n. 1 (1964): 151-152.
Osborne, Frederick. "Two Hundred Years of Princeton University." Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1943-1961), vol. 24, n. 2 (1946): 90-96.
Princeton University. "History." https://www.princeton.edu/meet-princeton/history.
Scholz, Janos. "Italian Drawings in the Art Museum of Princeton University." The Burlington Magazine, vol. 109, n. 770 (1967): 290-299.