Jennifer Scappettone’s dissertation, Retrospection’s Futurity: Venice’s Place in Modernist Aesthetic Historiography, tracks foreign responses to a fallen republic and foregrounds the role that Venice played in both structuring and upsetting aesthetic and civic ideals abroad. Modernist authors return over and over again to a ”putrefying post-empire,” Scappettone argues, because they seek there what both the mechanisms of modernity and the manifestos of modernism disavow. A candidate for the Ph.D. in English, Scappettone describes her study as bridging literary scholarship and art in its pursuit of ”a nostalgic strain in literary modernism poised amid regret, reproduction, and reconfiguration.”