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Robert Pogue Harrison (born 1954 in Izmir, Turkey) is a professor of literature at Stanford University, where he is Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature in the Department of French & Italian.
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Robert Pogue Harrison (born 1954 in Izmir, Turkey) is a professor of literature at Stanford University, where he is Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature in the Department of French & Italian.
Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984. In 1985, he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992, and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997, Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian, which he continued to be until 2010. In September 2014, he once again became chair of the department. [1] He retired in 2024 and is now professor emeritus. [2]
He began his academic career as a Dante scholar, publishing The Body of Beatrice in 1988. His work quickly expanded to concern itself broadly with the Western literary and philosophical tradition, focusing on the human place in nature and what he calls "the humic foundations" of human culture.
In 1992, he published Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, a wide-ranging history of the religious, mythological, literary, and philosophical role of forests in the Western imagination.
In 2003, he published The Dominion of the Dead, in which he probes the relations the living have maintained with the dead in a number of secular domains, among them burial places, houses, testaments, images, dreams, and political institutions.
In his book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008), Harrison focused on the role that care and cultivation play in human culture, arguing that gardens embody "the vocation of care" that defines the inner core of our humanity. Like his earlier books, Gardens offers a philosophically based vision of humanity's relation to the natural world that is founded on mortality and finitude.
His books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Italian.
In addition to his academic books, he has also written many articles, chapters, and essays, including ones on figures such as Dante, Vico, and Nietzsche, as well as philosophical problems related to architecture, modernity, poetry, and nature. His own philosophical orientation reflects an enduring commitment to the phenomenological tradition.
He also contributed several essays to the New York Review of Books, to which he has been a regular contributor since 2009. He has written essays on John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giacomo Leopardi, Dante Alighieri, Harold Bloom, the King James Bible, America's natural history, and Margaret Fuller. He also recently contributed a critique of Silicon Valley culture to the New York Review of Books online blog. [3]
He has also contributed to the Financial Times, reviewing an English-language translation of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone. [4]
In addition to his writing, he played lead guitar for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave, with whom he recorded an album in 2010.
He is also host of the radio program Entitled Opinions on Stanford's station KZSU 90.1. Entitled Opinions features hour-long conversations on topics of intellectual interest, including but not limited to history, literature, music, philosophy, and science. Most of his guests have been Stanford-affiliated thinkers, including René Girard, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Marjorie Perloff, Richard Rorty, and Michel Serres, but have sometimes been outside guests, such as Vinton Cerf, Shirley Hazzard, Orhan Pamuk, and Colm Toibin. He has also interviewed a number of prominent scientists, including Andrei Linde, Paul Ehrlich, and Michael Hendrickson.
He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007. In October 2014, he was decorated with the title of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. [5]
| Genre | literary talk show |
|---|---|
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| Home station | KZSU |
| Starring | Robert Harrison |
| Produced by | Christy Wampole |
| Recording studio | Stanford, California |
| Original release | September 14, 2005 – June 21, 2019 |
| Website | entitledopinions |
| Podcast | iTunes |
Entitled Opinions is a literary talk show hosted by Robert P. Harrison. The show was started in 2005 and it is available as a podcast. Topics range broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience. Shows are typically a one-on-one conversation with a special guest about select topics or authors about which he or she is especially entitled to an opinion. Guests have included Werner Herzog, Marilynne Robinson, and Paul R. Ehrlich, among others. The program airs from the studios of KZSU, 90.1 FM, Stanford. [6] [7]
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(with Michael R. Hendrickson, Robert B. Laughlin and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht)
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 
Count Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. He is considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in world literature, as well as one of the principals of literary romanticism; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition—of sensuous and materialist inspiration—has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century but routinely compared by Italian critics to his older contemporary Alessandro Manzoni despite expressing "diametrically opposite positions." Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and, through his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era. The strongly lyrical quality of his poetry made him a central figure on the European and international literary and cultural landscape.
Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
Robert Betts Laughlin is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, he was awarded a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics for their explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
Pietro Giordani was an Italian writer, classical literary scholar, and a close friend of, and influence on, Giacomo Leopardi.
Hans Ulrich "Sepp" Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary theorist whose work spans philology, philosophy, semiotics, literary and cultural history, and epistemologies of the everyday. As of June 14, 2018, he is Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature at Stanford University. Since 1989, he held the Albert Guérard Chair as Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian in Stanford's Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. By courtesy, he was also affiliated with the Departments of German Studies, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Since retirement, he continues to be a Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the University of Lisbon and became a Presidential Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020.
The phrase Leopardian poetics refers to the poetical theories of Giacomo Leopardi.
Gaëtan Brulotte is a Canadian writer from Quebec and a professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
A zibaldone is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states.
William Compaine Calin was a senior scholar of Medieval French literature and French poetry at the University of Florida. His work has focused on Occitan Studies and on Franco-British literary relations.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès was a French novelist, essayist, playwright, theatre director, and university professor.
Count Monaldo Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, nobleman, politician and writer, notable as one of the main Italian intellectuals of the counter-revolution. His son Giacomo Leopardi was a poet and thinker with completely opposite views, which were probably the root cause of their discord.
Cesare Garboli was an Italian literary and theatre critic, translator, writer and academic.
Andrea Wilson Nightingale is an American scholar working in the field of Classics. She is a Professor of Classics at Stanford University. She works on Ancient philosophy and literature, focusing on the intersection of philosophy and literature. She has also taught and written on ecological issues from a literary and philosophical point of view.
Small Moral Works is a collection of 24 writings by the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, written between 1824 and 1832.
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
Dante Della Terza was an Italian academic living and working in the United States.
Richard Dixon is an English translator of Italian literature. He translated the last works of Umberto Eco, including his novels The Prague Cemetery, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012, and Numero Zero, commended by the judges of the John Florio Prize, 2016. He has also translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Roberto Calasso and Antonio Moresco.
Anne Paolucci (1926–2012) was an Italian-American writer, scholar, and educator. She was a research professor and chair of the English Department at St. John's University in New York City, and a prolific writer who published plays, short stories, novels, poetry, literary criticism, and translations.
Antonio Ranieri was an Italian writer, patriot and politician, better known for his juvenile intimate friendship with Giacomo Leopardi, the most renowned 19th-century Italian poet.
Giorgio Ficara is an Italian essayist and literary critic. He is Full Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Turin.
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