Stanislao G. Pugliese is professor of modern European history at Hofstra University. He is a former research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the University of Oxford. A specialist on the Italian anti-fascist Resistance and Italian Jews, he is the author, editor or translator of a dozen books on Italian and Italian American history. His first book, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard University Press, 1999) has been translated into Italian, Russian and Romanian. An excerpt has been translated into Dutch as “Politiek als een ethisch ideaal. Het liberaal socialisme van Carlo Rosselli” (Politics as an Ethical Ideal. The Liberal Socialism of Carlo Rosselli) in Euopees humanisme in fragmenten, a volume of essays including  George Steiner, Tzvetan Todorov, Ugo Dotti, Adam Michnik, Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kolakowski, Michael Ignatieff and Yves Bonnefoy.

Professor Pugliese is also the editor of Italian Fascism and Antifascism: A Critical Anthology as well as The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy. His essays on Italian and Italian-American history and culture regularly appear in academic and popular journals. He is the translator of Andrea Bocelli’s autobiography, The Music of Silence and editor of the Italian and Italian-American Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan. At Hofstra University, Professor Pugliese directs the Italian-American Lecture Series, has organized several international conferences and has edited a volume Frank Sinatra: History, Identity and Italian-American Culture. His essay, “The Books of the Roman Ghetto Under the Nazi Occupation” was presented as the 17th Annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 1999, was awarded the Peter E. Herman Literary Award at Hofstra University and has been translated into Italian. A frequent book reviewer, he is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review. His most recent books are Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti From the Nazi Prison in Rome, 1943-1944 and an anthology, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy. A volume of collected essays, The Legacy of Primo Levi appeared in 2005. Columbia University Press published his new edition of Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom in 2008. Presently, he is editing a volume of essays Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall and collaborating on a film documentary on the Jews of Rome under the Nazi occupation.  In 2009, Farrar, Straus & Giroux is publishing his biography, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)

A deep knowledge of history makes fanaticism impossible.
Ignazio Silone, The School for Dictators (1938)