Dr. Maria Elena Versari, Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professor in the Humanities Research Center

In 1993, following a nationwide examination, Maria Elena Versari was one of 14 students to be accepted for all fields of the humanities by the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy. After finishing her undergraduate studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore, she went on to pursue her graduate studies there and at the University of Pisa. In 1997, she defended her tesi di laurea (MA, University of Pisa) devoted to the arts and architecture periodical Quadrante (1933-1936). The following year, she obtained a Masters degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Institute for Diplomatic Studies of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the University of Bologna.  In that same year, she also received the Diploma del Corso Ordinario from the Scuola Normale Superiore with a thesis on the birth of the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in early 20th-century Italy.

In 2001-2002, she studied at the University of Geneva, where she completed the Diplôme d'études approfondies in literature and aesthetics by defending a thesis on early 20th-century French and Italian theories of painting and poetry. She received her PhD in Art History from the Scuola Normale Superiore with a dissertation entitled Futurism 1916-1922. Identity, misconceptions, strategies. The international relations and the evolution of Futurism’s identity, in which she examines the strategies of confrontation outlined by Italian Futurism within the context of the European avant-garde.

She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Udine, and has been invited to give talks on topics ranging from the avant-garde to the arts under the Italian Fascist Regime at the University of Cambridge (UK), Florida International University and the University of Pittsburgh.  She has worked as a Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Institut Nationale d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris and the Wolfsonian Museum and Library. In 2007 she was selected as Ricercatrice con incarico di insegnamento (Assistant Professor) in Art History at the University of Messina, where she taught courses on 19th- and 20th-century art and methodology. More recently, she was the  Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University.

She is the author of monographic studies on Constantin Brancusi and on Wassily Kandinsky and has written several articles devoted to Italian Futurism, Cubism, Fascist aesthetics and architecture. She is currently preparing the re-publication of Ruggero Vasari's seminal Futurist drama, The Anguish of the Machines, and editing a collection of essays on the politics of iconoclasm and conservation in relation to totalitarian architecture in the 20th century.

While at Rice, she will work on her book manuscript, The Foreign Policy of the Avant-Garde: International Networks, National Politics and the Development of European Art in the 1920s, and pursue research for a second book on avant-garde historiography.