Honorary degree awarded to Professor Stephen Orgel

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice awarded an honorary degree in European, American and Postcolonial Language and Literature  to Professor Stephen Orgel on Wednesday 21st of June. 

The award ceremony held in Ca' Dolfin palace was initiated by Flavio Gregori, Provost for the University’s Cultural Activities and Relations. After the official initiation of the ceremony, Anna Cardinaletti, head of the Linguistics department, welcomed Professor Orgel. 

In her Laudatio, Loretta Innocenti, professor of English literature in the department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural  studies, traced Stephen Orgel’s prestigious academic career from his education at Columbia and Harvard to his current appointment as Reynold Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University. She emphasized his versatility as an academic writer in his studies on literature, drama studies and textual history, many of which he presented in international seminars at Ca’ Foscari.

Stephen Orgel delighted his audience with his Lectio Magistralis, developing his central theme of the Archeology of the book by offering humorous anecdotes of his experiences in Venice as a part of Peggy Guggenheim’s artistic circle and brilliantly relating them a wider appreciation of the essential role textual marginalia, illustrations and the materiality of textual production play in our understanding of cultural history. By showing pictures of different editions of the same books, he emphasized that “books are a historical process, elements of historicity rather than mere objects. The same texts can have very different meanings according to the reader. The most appropriate scientific approach depends on what our expectations are from the literature itself.”   The role of the original text and its subsequent appropriations, he argued, bring the reader to question not only formalist lenses that tend to de-historicize text but also trans-historical approaches to reading that attempt to consider the entirety of meanings attributed to a book in its history. 

The academic community at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice decided to award Professor Orgel with an honorary degree for his long and fruitful career as a scholar of historical and political context in renaissance arts of literature, theatre and painting. His interdisciplinary focus has engendered important scientific and cultural debates on the Early Modern period, an area of expertise of many scholars from the department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural studies at Ca’ Foscari.