Ara H. Merjian

Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014), and Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which won an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Writer’s Grant. His volumes Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism are forthcoming from Yale University Press, and is writing the Very Short History of Futurism for Oxford University Press in 2024. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program, and is a contributing critic to Art in America and frieze.