Announcing the Recipient of the 2023 Sorbello Fellowship Grant

The funded research project is titled The Poverty of Others: New Deal Photojournalism to Italian Neorealism (and Back). Bertellini’s research will explore how Italian neorealist filmmakers, functioning as periodical editors, screenwriters, and film directors, reworked, often without public acknowledgment, photojournalistic reportages about American poverty widely published on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1930s until the early 1950s.

In Bertellini’s own words: “Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s famous insight that those who have the faculty to observe the unfortunate do not share their suffering, I show how in both Italy and the U.S., critics used the suffering of others to advance specific narratives about postwar Italy and the Cold War.”