Rate My Professor Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon is the Serena Professor of Italian and Head of the Department of Italian in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, a position he has held since 2012. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Prior to Cambridge, Gordon served as Lecturer in Italian and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. His doctoral research examined the writer, intellectual, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, which formed the basis of his first monograph.

Gordon's academic interests focus on twentieth-century Italian and comparative literature, cinema, and cultural history, with particular emphasis on the cultural memory of the Holocaust. His prolific publications include The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010 (Stanford University Press, 2012), ‘Sfacciata fortuna’. La Shoah e il caso / ‘Outrageous Fortune’. Luck and the Holocaust (Einaudi, 2010), Bicycle Thieves (BFI/Palgrave, 2008), Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2001), Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 1996), and A Difficult Modernity: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Italian Literature (Duckworth, 2005). He has edited key volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Auschwitz Report by Leonardo De Benedetti and Primo Levi (Verso, 2006), The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961-1987 by Primo Levi (New Press, 2000), Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (Legenda, 2013), and Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (Legenda, 2005). Additionally, his most recent book addresses luck in modern film and literature (UCL Press, 2023). Gordon has provided scholarly DVD and Blu-ray commentaries for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem (BFI, 2007) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Arrow, 2011). His work has substantially influenced scholarship in Italian studies, film studies, and representations of the Holocaust, exploring themes including censorship, early cinema, art cinema by Fellini and Antonioni, documentary film, and familial dynamics on screen.