"Gramsci's Bones: Reclaiming the Material Life of the Subaltern" with Mauro Puddu and Saskia Kroonenberg

https://buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: Antonio Gramsci is often remembered through a single image: the imprisoned intellectual, the theorist of hegemony, the author of the Prison Notebooks. His concepts have traveled across disciplines—from political theory and cultural studies to education, media, and postcolonial thought. Yet in becoming an icon, Gramsci has also been flattened into a head without a body, a thinker detached from the material conditions that made his thought possible.Joining me today are Mauro Puddu and Saskia Kroonenberg to discuss their co-authored article, "Written on the Subaltern Body: Gramsci and the Material Politics of Sardinian and Italian Prison Lives," published in Cultural Studies by Routledge. The work brings together archaeology, literary studies, history, and materialist philosophy to rethink Gramsci through bones, objects, illness, food, labor, and imprisonment. Rather than treating Gramsci as an isolated genius, they reconstruct the social and bodily world that produced his political imagination. Through osteobiography, archaeological evidence, prison letters, and historical archives, they reveal how colonialism, poverty, disability, nutrition, and everyday material life became conditions of thought itself.Biography: Mauro Puddu is an Italian archaeologist whose research focuses on the Roman world, particularly the archaeology of identity, mobility, and marginalized communities in the ancient Mediterranean. He is a Young MSCA Researcher Fellow at the University for Foreigners of Siena, where he leads the PAAST (Posthumanist Approaches to Ancient Social Transformations) project, examining mobility and social inequality in Roman-period Sardinia through posthumanist, feminist, and archaeological perspectives. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Cagliari, a second M.A. in Theoretical Archaeology from University College London, and a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals including the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. His work combines archaeology, postcolonial theory, and bioarchaeology to recover the histories of marginalized communities and reinterpret the ancient Mediterranean through questions of inequality, embodiment, and social justice. Biography: Saskia Kroonenberg is a cultural studies scholar at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research explores Italian literature, the political philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and new materialism. As a Fellow at Inheritance and Transformation, she investigates the intersections of epigenetics and literary studies, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches to questions of memory, embodiment, and history. She previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities in Cologne and has been a visiting fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, the Eric Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Zurich, and Utrecht University. Her doctoral research examined Gramsci's political philosophy, postcolonial literature, and new materialism, earning the Antonio Gramsci Dissertation Prize from the Associazione Internazionale Gramsci di Biella. Her work bridges literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural theory to examine how marginalized histories and embodied experiences shape political thought.Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2026.2615901