This is the first meeting of Six Memos for the Present, a lecture series celebrating Italo Calvino's centennial.

This series offers undergraduate and graduate students at USC an interdisciplinary perspective on Italo Calvino's legacy, taking as a point of departure Six Memos for the Next Millenium, the collection of essays he wrote for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard.

The first speaker, Media Studies scholar Paolo Granata (University of Toronto) will discuss Calvino's work as a guide of sorts to today's digitally hyper-connected world.

As an educator, an innovator, and a cross-disciplinary media scholar Paolo Granata's research and teaching interests lie broadly in the areas of media ecology, media ethics, semiotics, print culture, and visual studies. He authored five books: Arte in Rete (2001), Arte, Estetica e Nuovi Media (2009), Mediabilia (2012), Introduction to Media Ecology (2021) and Squid Game Unmasked: A Critical Analysis (2023)—more than 50 publications—essays, articles, book-chapters, and policy reports—in Italian, English, French, and Spanish, and a board game, The MediuM. From 2015 to 2017, he was a Program Curator at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto. Serving since 2018 as a board member of the Executive Committee at the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, his advocacy efforts are focused on digital equity and digital sustainability to explore the potential that information and communication technologies hold for enacting positive social change.