About

Thomas Harrison is a professor of Italian at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), specializing in European Languages and Transcultural Studies. His research adopts a comparatist approach, spanning Italy, Germany, and Austria from 1860 to the present day. Harrison's primary interests encompass literature, the history of ideas, the visual arts, music, cinema, and especially the interconnections among these fields. At UCLA, he teaches large courses in Italian film and general education, as well as small graduate seminars covering topics from Antonioni to contemporary Italian poetry. He also occasionally offers freshmen seminars exploring aspects of film and popular music, including rock lyrics, progressive rock, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa. Harrison's scholarly work includes a poetic and philosophical exploration of bridges in his book "Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account," which examines the symbolic and cultural significance of bridges through myths, literature, ideology, architecture, and music. His interdisciplinary approach reflects a deep engagement with how cultural communities are formed and transformed through visible and invisible connections. His research contributions extend to essays on figures such as Giacomo Leopardi, Carlo Michelstaedter, and analyses of film adaptations and contemporary Italian poetry, demonstrating a broad and nuanced engagement with Italian and European cultural studies.

Research topics

• Astrobiology
• Physics
• Geology
• Computer Science
• Astronomy
• Earth science
• Biology
• Paleontology
• Geophysics

Selected publications

• Italian Literature and World Literature

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines the relationship of Italian literature and world literature from the Romans through today. While the conception of “world literature” is a contemporary one, literary product has always occupied world contexts, even if more limited ones than those of our current extended globe. Yet those contexts were generally more historical and diachronic than they are now: one wrote for and pondered many generations. The arts spoke and dialogued across time. This chapter assesses two common but unsystematic understandings of world literature today (as globally successful works, on the one hand, and works written by marginal, peripheral, or neglected groups, on the other) to look at Italy’s ambivalent standing in world literature and speculate about the critical issues it prompts us to address. This means not only coming to terms with the top-notch position of Elena Ferrante in worldwide fiction today, but also asking how integrated this fact may be with broader questions facing local and global understandings of literature today.

  PublisherDOI

• Simmel’s Rome: An Essay on Understanding and Self-Transcendence

  Theory Culture & Society · 2023-12-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Georg Simmel’s essay on Rome gives paradigmatic expression to an imponderable method that the philosopher practices for years, symbolized by the idea of a plumb line cast from the unstable waters of a sea to its firm foundations. Here Simmel shows how a complex and transhistorical city receives meaning through its multiply tense urban relations, constituting nonetheless a strangely coherent whole. Only circular thinking can adequately grasp this form of coherence. It requires seeing beyond conflicting facts as well as the reader’s own subject positions, in navigation of a space between inner and outer features of perceptual experience. The fragmented and variegated layout of Rome allegorizes that complex space of historical and cultural relations into which interpreting selves must venture to experience totalities that are neither self-evident in things nor in minds that seek their order.

  PublisherDOI

• Herodotus’ Perspective on the Persian Empire

  Electrum · 2022-10-21 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper reviews the different models commonly used in understanding Herodotus’evidence on the Achaemenid Persian empire. It suggests that these approaches—for example, the assessment of Herodotus’accuracy, of the level of his knowledge, or of his sympathy for the Persians—systematically underestimate the complexity of his (and of the Greeks’) perspective on the Persian empire: the conflicted perspective of a participant rather than just a detached observer.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account

  2021-04-01 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "Always," wrote Philip Larkin, "it is by bridges that we live." Bridges represent our aspirations to connect, to soar across divides. And it is the unfinished business of these aspirations that makes bridges such stirring sights, especially when they are marvels of ingenuity. A rich compendium of myths, superstitions, literary and ideological figurations, as well as architectural and musical illustrations, Of Bridges organizes a poetic and philosophical history of bridges into nine thematic clusters. Leaping in lucid prose between seemingly unrelated times and places, Thomas Harrison gives a panoramic account of the diverse meanings and valences of human bridges, questioning why they are built and where they lead. He investigates bridges as flashpoints in war and the mega-bridges of our globalized world. He probes links forged by religion between life's transience and eternity and the consolidating ties of music, illustrated in a case study of the blues. He illuminates the real and symbolic crossings facing migrants each day and the affective connections that make persons and societies cohere. In fine and intricate readings of literature, philosophy, art, and geography, Harrison engages in a profound reflection on how bridges form and transform cultural communities. Interdisciplinary and deeply lyrical, Of Bridges is a mesmerizing, vertiginous tale of bridges both visible and invisible, both lived and imagined

  PublisherDOI

• Reevaluating the evidence for a Hadean-Eoarchean dynamo

  Science Advances · 2020 · 33 citations

  • Astrobiology
  • Geology
  • Biology

  The time of origin of the geodynamo has important implications for the thermal evolution of the planetary interior and the habitability of early Earth. It has been proposed that detrital zircon grains from Jack Hills, Western Australia, provide evidence for an active geodynamo as early as 4.2 billion years (Ga) ago. However, our combined paleomagnetic, geochemical, and mineralogical studies on Jack Hills zircons indicate that most have poor magnetic recording properties and secondary magnetization carriers that postdate the formation of the zircons. Therefore, the existence of the geodynamo before 3.5 Ga ago remains unknown.

  DOI

• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-03-13 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  At least since the best-known attempt to locate the 'place of Herodotus in the history of historiography' – that of Arnaldo Momigliano, now more than sixty years ago – the story of Herodotus's afterlife has tended to be told in linear terms. Herodotus had barely laid down his pen before Thucydides began highlighting his shortcomings. From that point on, the Father of History was 'cut off from the stream of ancient historiography', admired for his style rather than his reliability. 'Defeated in antiquity', however, Herodotus 'triumphed in the sixteenth century'. Ethnography came back into vogue following the 'discovery' of the Americas and, as the explorers of the New World reported customs even more extraordinary than those described in the Histories, Herodotus was vindicated.

  PublisherDOI

• Hadean Earth

  Springer eBooks · 2020 · 49 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Astrobiology
  • Earth science
  DOI

• Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century

  2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century traces the impact of Herodotus' Histories during a momentous period in world history - an era of heightened social mobility, religious controversy, scientific discovery and colonial expansion. Contributions by an international team of specialists in Greek historiography, classical archaeology, receptions, and nineteenth-century intellectual history shed new light on how the Histories were read, remembered, and re-imagined in historical writing and in an exciting array of real-world contexts: from the classrooms of English public schools and universities to the music hall, museum, or gallery; from the news-stand to the nursery; and from the banks of the Nile to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. They reveal not only how engagement with Herodotus' work permeated nationalist discourses of the period, but also the extent to which these national and disciplinary contexts helped shape the way both Herodotus and the ancient past have been understood and interpreted

  PublisherDOI

• Reinventing the Barbarian

  Classical Philology · 2020-04-01 · 74 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since the publication of François Hartog’s Le Miroir d’Hérodote, Edith Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian, and a flurry of subsequent works, there has been a marked backlash against the Barbarian in classical scholarship. The theme of Greek–Barbarian polarity has been seen as a narrowly Athenian phenomenon, irrelevant to other regional contexts. Scholars have increasingly presented evidence of contact with, or borrowings from, non-Greek cultures, on the assumption that these are incompatible with the rhetoric of polarity. This article questions some of the central assumptions of this scholarly trend, exploring possible explanations for it, and proposes that the Barbarian still should have currency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Constraining crustal silica on ancient Earth

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 61 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Astrobiology
  • Geology
  • Earth science

  Accurately quantifying the composition of continental crust on Hadean and Archean Earth is critical to our understanding of the physiography, tectonics, and climate of our planet at the dawn of life. One longstanding paradigm involves the growth of a relatively mafic planetary crust over the first 1 to 2 billion years of Earth history, implying a lack of modern plate tectonics and a paucity of subaerial crust, and consequently lacking an efficient mechanism to regulate climate. Others have proposed a more uniformitarian view in which Archean and Hadean continents were only slightly more mafic than at present. Apart from complications in assessing early crustal composition introduced by crustal preservation and sampling biases, effects such as the secular cooling of Earth's mantle and the biologically driven oxidation of Earth's atmosphere have not been fully investigated. We find that the former complicates efforts to infer crustal silica from compatible or incompatible element abundances, while the latter undermines estimates of crustal silica content inferred from terrigenous sediments. Accounting for these complications, we find that the data are most parsimoniously explained by a model with nearly constant crustal silica since at least the early Archean.

  DOI

Recent grants

• Facility Support: The UCLA National Ion Microprobe

  NSF · $1.6M · 2014–2017

• Discovering Hadean Earth

  NSF · $299k · 2010–2015

• Collaborative Research: Lhasa Block Top to Bottom--Lithospheric Evolution of Asia's Leading Edge

  NSF · $582k · 2011–2017

• Insights into the Earliest Magmas from Inclusions and Trace Elements in Zircon

  NSF · $281k · 2016–2019

• Exploring the Hadean Earth

  NSF · $320k · 2007–2010

Frequent coauthors

• An Yin

  148 shared

• S. J. Mojzsis

  109 shared

• Philippe Hervé Leloup

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  104 shared

• Robin Lacassin

  Institut de physique du globe de Paris

  100 shared

• P. Tapponnier

  97 shared

• Elizabeth A. Bell

  85 shared

• Marty Grove

  82 shared

• F. J. Ryerson

  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  82 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature

  Graduate Center, CUNY