LHub Book Event: Aleardo Zanghellini, Constitutional Innovation and Same-Sex Desire in D’Annunzio’s Fiume, 1919–1920 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024)
- Event type
- Seminar
- Address
- IALS Conference Room, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR
- Event dates
- Contact
- ials.events@sas.ac.uk _
Join us to discuss the book with Prof. Aleardo Zanghellini, Prof. Melissa Lane, and Prof. Daniel Monk.
Drawing on novel archival evidence that sheds light on Anglo-Italian diplomatic relations and the French-Italian contest for power in the Adriatic, Constitutional Innovation and Same-Sex Desire in D’Annunzio’s Fiume, 1919–1920 recounts the story of decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume. Determining the fate of this Italian enclave in coastal Croatia had proved impossible at the Paris Peace Conference. In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his ‘legionnaires’ installed themselves in Fiume in a bid to embarrass Italy into declaring its annexation. In the months that followed, the poet did his best to fashion Fiume into his ideal political community, culminating in the proclamation of a Constitution known as the Carnaro Charter. The Charter was as visionary as it was short-lived: having reached an agreement with Yugoslavia on the status of Fiume, Italy put an end to the poet’s socio-political experiment in December 1920. In addition to offering the most comprehensive and detailed analysis to date of the Carnaro Charter, the book shows what has eluded all historians of D’Annunzio’s Fiume: that the sublimation and discursive circulation of same-sex desire was integral to shaping and sustaining the political and legal order of the occupation, and that D’Annunzio’s love-lore in Fiume was continuous with broader homoerotic preoccupations in his oeuvre.
Speakers:
ALEARDO ZANGHELLINI is Professor of Law & Social Theory at The University of Reading. Zanghellini's work sits at the confluence of law and the humanities. He is the author of three research monographs: Constitutional Innovation and Same-Sex Desire in D’Annunzio’s Fiume, 1919-20 (2024); Imaginative Resistance, Queer Fiction & the Law (2022); and The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority (2015). Zanghellini is also the author of The Spellbinders (2018), a novel retelling the story of Edward II, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser.
MELISSA LANE is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy. In 2024-25 she is based in the UK on sabbatical: in the fall of 2024, at Oxford as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor, and in the winter and spring of 2025, in London as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies and the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy, and as Honorary Visiting Professor in Philosophy at UCL. She also holds a non-teaching appointment as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. An earlier work related to this event is Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (Duckworth, 2001).
DANIEL MONK is Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London. Drawing on diverse methods his research has explored a wide range of issues relating to families, children, education and sexuality: from siblings in the public care system and elective home education to royal divorces and literary wills. He is currently exploring the relationship between inheritance and family law and the visual.
This event is free to attend, but booking is required.
