Ara H. Merjian is an art historian and professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. He has written and edited several books, including Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (2024), Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960–75 (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2027). His most recent volume, Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s Other America, is due out with Verso in 2026.