Professional Issues in Italian Eighteenth-Century Studies

In the context of the budget cuts and declining enrollments plaguing the humanities, this essay considers the difficulty of measuring the value of liberal arts education outside the metrics of employment training and job satisfaction. To safeguard our disciplines, including scholarship on women and other historically marginalized groups, it proposes to take inspiration from microhistory, an approach that showcases the humanities' ability to draw universal lessons from specific cases. A recent example from Italian eighteenth-century studies is scholarship on Giovanni Bordoni, a transgender person whose life story has given rise to a web of complementary and yet irreducible interpretations.