Educating by Design: Maria Montessori, Beauty, and Pacifism

In this lecture, Erica Moretti, author of The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights (UW Press, 2021) explores Montessori's early collaborations with artists, feminists, and social reformers such as Sibilla Aleramo, Duilio Cambellotti, and Alessandro Marcucci, unearthing the eclectic foundation of the educator's pedagogical approach. A contemporary of most of the artists in CIMA's current exhibition, Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880-1917, Montessori dedicated her life and work to the same children, whom she referred to as 'neglected citizens', who are represented in the exhibition artworks.

About the lecturer:

Erica Moretti is an Assistant Professor of Italian at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY. Her research — rooted in biopolitics, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory — focuses on pacifism, refugees and displacement, and humanitarianism in Modern Italy. She has published on Progressive-era assimilation policies in the United States, on the Italian feminist movement, and on Italian colonialism, among other topics. Moretti’s first book, The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children’s Rights (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), reframes Montessori’s pacifism as the foundation of her educational activism, emphasizing her singular vision of the classroom as a springboard to reshaping society. Moretti is currently working on Family Reunifications at the End of the Empire, an inquiry into how population movements (including displaced children) have tested the boundaries of diplomacy, humanitarianism, and decolonization. Taking as its departure point the children of Italian nationals in Libya, the book examines postwar transformations in theories of kinship and of women and children’s rights, within the analytical framework of Catholic humanitarianism.

Moretti’s work has been supported by awards and residential fellowships provided by the Barbieri Endowment Grant in Modern Italian History, the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (NYU), the Remarque Institute (NYU), the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund (Columbia U), and the Laura Bassi Foundation. She is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Moretti has written on European history, politics, and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post and Il Manifesto.