Dr. Maria Versari

Biography

Maria Elena Versari is a visiting professor specializing in Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She is an art architectural historian whose research focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the intersection of art and technology, and international avant-garde aesthetics under totalitarian regimes. Versari studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore and received her PhD in Art History, with her doctoral dissertation focusing on the international relations of Futurism in the 1920s. She has held positions including Assistant Professor of 19th-20th Century Art at the University of Messina and Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University. She has also served as the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professor in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University and as a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Her professional experience includes working as a Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, and the Wolfsonian Museum Library. Versari is a member of the Material Life and Things Research Group and currently contributes to various projects in art curation, including exhibitions focused on totalitarian architecture and memory. She has published widely on topics related to Italian Futurism, avant-garde internationalism, 20th-century sculpture, and Fascist totalitarian aesthetics, among others.

Research Interests