UMass Italian Hosts Professor Guyda Armstrong and the Consul General of Italy for 2025 Mazzocco Memorial Lecture
“Sociable Materials: the Text, the Book, the World"
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On November 18th, the Italian Studies program and its community gathered for the 2025 Elizabeth Mazzocco Memorial Lecture. This lecture is held in honor of Elizabeth Mazzocco, the former director of the Five Colleges Center for the Study of World Languages as well as Professor of Italian at UMass from 1990 until her death in 2014. In the first lecture in this series since the pandemic, her memory was honored with a lecture grounded in the passion she had for teaching Italian studies as well as her research interests in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This year’s speaker, Dr. Guyda Armstrong, is the Director of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library and Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester (UK). She is a book historian and early modern literary scholar, who works at the intersection of languages, information design, and the digital. Her talk, entitled “Sociable Materials: the Text, the Book, the World" focused on the symbol of the material book. Professor Armstrong discussed how books and stories, specifically those of Italian origin, are transported through history. Literature is sociable; you can read alone, but in the act of reading, you are a part of a wider group of readers through time and space. In a very timely discussion about the digital age and the dangers of it, she offered some advice: to approach the invasion of technology into the literary world as an addition, not a substitute for the physical object of the book. In our society, books are something that we have gathered around to discuss, recognize, and understand. Professor Armstrong urged her audience to be intentional in the art of gathering around literature, for it is crucially important for our past and intellectual future.
Among the audience members in attendance were members of the Mazzocco family, including Elizabeth Mazzocco’s husband, Professor Angelo Mazzocco. Additionally, we were honored to host the Consul General of Italy in Boston, Arnaldo Minuti, who travelled to Amherst for this event. As a part of his visit, the Consul General was able to provide some opening remarks before Professor Armstrong took to the podium. In these remarks, he discussed his visit, the legacy of Professor Mazzocco, and also announced that the Italian government, through the Consulate in Boston, is awarding a substantial grant to support the Italian language program at UMass.