Prof. Renée Laegreid will present “The Legacy of the American West in Contemporary Italy” on Wednesday, March 25, 4 to 5 p.m. in Butch’s Den at the CUB.
In popular culture, connections between the American West and Italy rarely extend beyond consideration of America’s western films that invaded Italy in the post-World War II period and the rise of the so-called Italian Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s. Prof. Laegreid’s presentation widens and deepens this narrow and shallow view by examining three waves of western American influence on Italy in the 20th century, and how Italians have used western American mythology during this time for their own personal, political, and financial purposes.
Prof. Laegreid is the author of Riding Pretty: Rodeo Royalty in the American West (2006), and co-editor of Women on the North American Plains (2011) and “Finding the American West in Twenty-First-Century Italy,” Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2014).
