University of Warwick

Faculty Member, Italian

Other Affiliations: University Of Birmingham, Italian Studies

About

I am Assistant Professor in Italian at the University of Warwick.

As an undergraduate I studied English literature at the University of Pisa (BA, MA 1998-2002) and Italian literature and Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where I was admitted by competition in 1998 and where I have completed the 'corso ordinario' at the Classe di Lettere in 2003.

In 2002-03 I took a Masters in Comparative literature (‘DEA de littérature comparée’) at the University of Paris 4-Sorbonne, with a dissertation on the notion of 'purity' from Sade to the Romantics.

In 2003-06 I completed a PhD in Comparative literature and Modern Literary studies, jointly supervised by the Scuola Normale and Paris 4 ('Perfezionamento in discipline filologiche e linguistiche moderne'/‘Doctorat en littérature comparée’). My doctoral thesis was focused on the metamorphoses of Dante's Vita Nova and the figure of Beatrice in nineteenth-century European literature (Italy, England, France, Germany). In 2005 I published part of my work as a monograph on Dante Gabriel Rossetti ('Beatrice nell'Inferno di Londra'). My research on this topic is forthcoming to be published with the title 'Dante's Book of Youth: The Vita Nova and the Nineteenth Century 1840-1907' (London: igrs books).

In 2007 I undertook a second PhD programme in Italian studies at the University of Birmingham, within the frame of the ‘Zibaldone project’ at the Leopardi Centre, on 'Memory, the Past and the Use of Quotations in Leopardi's Zibaldone'.

In 2008-10 I was Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature, Art History and Psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

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My specialism is nineteenth-century literature and culture from a comparative perspective (Italy, England, France, Germany).

My research interests include problems of history in Western cultural tradition between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, such as the metamorphoses of Dante and of medieval courtly poetry in nineteenth-century neo-medievalism, Giacomo Leopardi and the history of classical tradition in Italian Bourbon Restoration, the ‘second printing revolution’ and questions of material culture in post-Enlightenment Europe.

My research also covers problems of critical theory (intertextuality, theories of quotation, memory studies, literature and psychoanalysis).

At present, my research work is mostly focused on Leopardi and the conceptualizations of historical past in post-revolutionary Europe.

I am currently working on a research project on Italian literature of the Bourbon Restoration years (1815-1848), with a specific focus on the Classicist VS Romantics quarrel of 1816-1827, and on the theoretical implications of the notion of ‘Restoration’.

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