Primo Levi's "Periodic Table" at 50: Scientists and Writers Speak
On the 50th anniversary of Primo Levi's Periodic Table, a celebration of the book from many perspectives. Scientists, translators, and writers come together to address the impact of this influential memoir/collection of stories.
"The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing," said Toni Morrison.
Levi (1919–1987) observed his life—his Italian Jewish community, his time as a chemist and as a partisan, and then his imprisonment in Auschwitz—with wry humor, compassion, and the lucidity of a scientist doing a lab report.
Speakers:
Elena Aprile (Centennial Professor of Physics; Director of the Italian Academy, Columbia)
Andrea Capra (Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, NYU)
Cristiano Galbiati (Professor of Physics, Princeton)
Ann Goldstein (Translator; Editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi)
Jhumpa Lahiri (Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, Barnard; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
Christian M. Rojas (Professor of Chemistry, Barnard)
Please click here to register.
Check-in for registrants begins 30 minutes before the event.
This event is in-person only.
The organizers do not intend to make a video recording for publication.
Produced by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program of the Barnard College English Department and by the Barnard Chemistry Department
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Elena Aprile, Columbia's Centennial Professor of Physics, has served as the Director of the Italian Academy since July 1. An experimental particle physicist, she has been at Columbia University since 1986 and is the founder and spokesperson of the XENON Dark Matter Experiment, a world-leading project to discover the origin of the elusive dark matter in the universe. She received her degrees from the University of Naples, Italy, and the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University before joining the faculty at Columbia. Professor Aprile is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lancelot Berkeley Prize of the American Astronomical Society and the 2021 recipient of the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society.
Andrea Capra is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at NYU. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian from Stanford University and was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows. Capra is a literary scholar whose work, drawing from philosophy and the history of ideas, focuses on the 19th through the 21st century. His forthcoming book Ordinary Horror: The Aesthetics of Deformation from Leopardi to Ferrante studies how horror manifests in literary texts not part of the horror genre, and provides a phenomenology of this experience along with an analysis of its role in modernity. Capra also explores the role that storytelling plays in current discourses around computational technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. Some of his writings have appeared in venues such as Modern Language Notes, Angelaki, il verri, Italianistica, Italian Quarterly, Studi novecenteschi, The Cambridge History of the American Essay, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Cristiano Galbiati is professor of physics at Princeton University. He joined the Physics Department at Princeton in 1999, upon graduation from Università degli Studi di Milano and Accademia Navale in Leghorn. His research interests include solar and supernova neutrinos, dark matter, double beta decay, nucleon decay, low-counting experiments and radioactive background, ultra-high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. He has served on several scientific committees, including the Fermilab Long Baseline Neutrino Committee, the Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee, and the Scientific Committee of the Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has served as a referee for the U.S. National Science Foundation and for the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. He holds several patents for novel technologies, including a cryogenic distillation column for isotopic separation, a system for onboard storage of ammonia and hydrogen production in absence of carbon and NOX emissions. During the COVID-19 emergency, he co-led with Prof. Art McDonald of Queen's University the development of the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, which is to our knowledge the sole ventilator developed by the research community that received full approval in the U.S., Canada and EU, and went into production.
Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elsa Morante, among others, and is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. Other books include The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award, and the essay collection, Translating Myself and Others. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. The translator of three novels by Domenico Starnone and editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama and was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella.
Christian M. Rojas is Professor of Chemistry at Barnard College. Over the past 28 years, he has shared Levi's Periodic Table with thousands of Barnard students in his organic chemistry courses, taught master classes for The Academy for Teachers based on the book's "Carbon" chapter, and described "Carbon's Italian Family Connections," in a Levi-inspired talk as part of Chemistry Nobelist Roald Hoffmann's Entertaining Science series at the late, great Cornelia Street Café.