Fellows Spotlight: Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey, a Stanford alum and former resident of our very own Casa Italiana, has spent the decade since she’s graduated developing a new lens through which to view nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature—through the lens of an actual camera. With a PhD from UCLA, she returned to Stanford as a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow last year. Carey’s work on campus includes developing her new book Envisioning Italy: Photography and the Narrating of a Nation, alongside teaching a class based on the intersections of photography, literature, and cinema in Italian art. She will be introducing and screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “The Passenger” at the first meeting of this year’s Humanities Circle on October 26, 2011 in Building 260, Room 113 at 6:00 pm.

You teach several courses at Stanford. Can you get into depth about one of them?

I’m most interested in the course that I’m teaching right now, which is based on my primary research interest: the relationship between photography and Italian literature and film. I am very interested in looking at texts with students that not only describe photography, but also include images, as well looking at films that seem to draw upon the aspects of still photography.

What I’m asking students to think about are the ways in which visual culture influences national identity: how do photographs give us an idea what Italian identity might be, what Italian nationhood might be? What I’ve found from my own research is that photography has been used, ever since it’s invention and dissemination, to create a visual representation of the nation that the citizens can then identify with.

It’s great because it’s so interdisciplinary. It’s not tunnel vision on one subject, but it opens up into many other fields. It gives students a lot of flexibility on what they want to do for a final project: they can work on film, the history of photography, or even hybrid texts that use both photographs and prose.

What is it that’s really particular about the way photography functions in Italian culture, that sets it apart?

Well take the Civil War. It was heavily documented in that States by photographers, right on the field. But that didn’t happen in Italy.

What’s interesting is that Italy, even in comparison to the United States, is a very young country. It didn’t become a country until 1861, and that was about twenty or thirty years after the first inventions of photography. So those first couple decades of photography happened to be a time in which the Italian peninsula was in a lot of turmoil, and in the process of unification.

You would think they would have documented a lot of these events with photographers on the field. But it wasn’t used during those years. It was used after the unification. Oddly enough, they wanted to use photography to recreate the events during that time. So they would stage certain battles, or even take pictures of locations and then paint in representations of what had happened. So photography didn’t serve its natural documentary purpose, but as a way to tell a story, sort of after the fact. They used photography to narrate, rather than to document. I think this appeals to Italian writers and directors. For a scholar in any art field this would provide a lot of material that has not yet been explored, and there could be a lot of projects that delve into archives that have not yet been tapped into.

Any ways to get involved with Italian culture?

Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco is a great reference point. On campus, I lived in Casa Italiana, which has a lot of great events. It’s funny because I taught a course last year which I had to take when I was a student, “Italian Literature and History.” And actually, the study abroad program in Florence was probably what led me to pursue the path that I’m on right now. So it’s a blessing to be back at the place that started it all.