Anna Camaiti Hostert

In 2013 she co-founded with Nicola Fano, Gloria Piccioni and Gabriella Mecucci the online culture newspaper Succedeoggi, of which she is a columnist. She holds conferences and seminars at many Italian and foreign institutions. In the last few years, she has combined her theoretical and journalistic work with literary and screenwriting activities.

This work is linked to Camaiti Hostert’s parallel research into the field of Film Studies. Regarding this domain of studies, the two particularly relevant essays collection (both edited in 2002) are Sentire il cinema (2002; Feeling Cinema) - entirely composed of Camaiti Hostert’s essays and interviews (with directors such Bernardo Bertolucci, Fiorella Infascelli, Wilma Labate and Mario Martone) – and Scene italoamericane. Rappresentazioni cinematografiche degli italiani d’America edited with the Italian American scholar Anthony Julian Tamburri (Luca Sossella editore 2002, American edition Screening Ethnicity. Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States, Bordighera Press, 2002 ), including essays by Ben Lawton, Fred Gardaphé, Alberto Abruzzese among others as well as by Camaiti Hostert and Tamburri.

In 1999 she founded along the philosopher Mario Perniola the magazine Agalma: Magazine of Aesthetic and Cultural Studies of whose editorial committee she is still a member.

Because of her intellectual, academic and existential relation with the United States and with the socio-cultural dynamics of this country, Camaiti Hostert first developed themes related to comparative literature (see for instance her afterword to the American edition of the Dacia Maraini’s novel, The Silent Duchess, Feminist Press 1998) and then has moved towards the Cultural studies with the analysis of the post-colonial theories, especially by focusing on the subaltern subject and on identity construction.

Visual Studies - that were born as a field of interdisciplinary research on the wake of the Anglo-American Cultural Studies – have become since the late 1990s the focus of Camaiti Hostert’s research. In Metix. Cinema globale e cultura visuale (Meltemi 2004, Metix. Global Cinema and Visual Culture) - work that collects Camaiti Hostert’s findings during those years - she has analyzed the structure of the vision, the dynamics of the gaze and the processes of images production in contemporary cinema (mainly American cinema, but not only Hollywood).

The same historical-philosophical perspective defines also the second work by Camaiti Hostert titled Politica e diritto di resistenza. Kant ed Erhard: democrazia e libertà del soggetto (1987, The Politics and the Right of Resistance. Kant and Erhard: Democracy and Human Freedom). In this work Camaiti Hostert has traced the relationship between the German Jacobinism, of which Johann Benjamin Erhard is one of the most representative authors, and Kant’s theory of Public Right, Political Will and Civil Liberty. Through the concepts of «resistance» and «insurrection», she interprets Erhard’s theses as an attempt to build a theory of the antagonistic subject.

Since 1986 she has been part of the Italian Bar Association of Journalists and for several years the press attaché to the Governor of Tuscany Region. Later, she had a TV program about cinema on RaiSat channel titled Metix from the title of one of her books. She has been a guest at numerous Film Festivals in Italy and of several TV and radio cultural programs. She has collaborated with the director Fiorella Infascelli in the movie Italiani presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1998.

The initial period of Camaiti Hostert’s research focused on the history of political philosophy following the methodological analysis of Nicola Badaloni, under whose tutelage she studied at the University of Pisa. In her first work, Giuseppe Toniolo. Alle origini del partito cattolico (1984; Giuseppe Toniolo. The origins of the Catholic Party) – that resulted from her dissertation in Philosophy – she traced the intellectual biography of the thinker Giuseppe Toniolo, by retrieving his prominent figure in the Catholic Movement, and casting light on his role in the subsequent foundation of the first Catholic Party in its relationship with the Marxist concept of the main political subject.

Anna Camaiti Hostert (born July 19, 1949, in Florence, Italy) is an Italian American philosopher and a scholar of Visual Studies. She lives and works between Italy and the United States.