Claudio Fogu is the current Director of the Italian Program. His research interests include the relationship between Italian modernism and mass culture, and the theory and philosophy of history, especially in relation to the development of visual, and now digital culture. A cultural-intellectual historian by training, he is the author of The Historic Imaginary: Politics of Hstory in Fascist Italy (2003) and co-editor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2007). He is working on a book-project on the Mediterranean imaginary in twentieth-century Italian culture entitled The View from the Mediterranean.