Mariarita Martino Grisa'

Teaching and Research Interests

Psychoanalytic Criticism (Freud, Lacan, Žižek)
Intersemiotic Translation
Theories of the Gaze, Voyeurism and Exhibitionism
Italian Cinema
Cinema and Painting (Renaissance, Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, Realism)
Film/Literary Theory and Analysis
Comparative Literature and Anglo-American Literature
Jazz and Literature (Kerouac)

Ph.D. Thesis
An Analysis of Scopophilia in an Intersemiotic Context: Four Italian Case Studies

How can scopophilia be analyzed in an intersemiotic context? My Ph.D. research has analyzed how the reader and the spectator may share similar psychoanalytic receptive experiences by analyzing how narratives, both written and visual, enact scopophilic scenarios and their ideological implications, and how those narratives are shifted from the original novel to the film.

The project has intended to a) explore film adaptation in the Italian comparative panorama focusing on the reception of both written and filmic language; b) develop and implement innovative methods in the areas of intersemiotic analysis and the semiotics of reception; c) open up new approaches to the study of film adaptation.

Academic Profile
Mariarita Martino Grisa's academic background covers both Italian (Cinema, Contemporary Literature) and Anglo-American Studies-oriented research (Adaptation Studies, Beat Generation and Jazz Music, Edith Wharton and Women's Writing, Ghost Stories). She studied Foreign Languages and Literatures in the Department of Philology and Literary Criticism at the University of Siena, where she obtained a BA (Hons) in 2004 in Anglo-American Literature and and Criticism focusing on adaptations of novels to film. In the UK she studied in Edinburgh (Summer Programme) and in Warwick as an undergraduate research student in the Department of Film and Television Studies, and as a postgraduate taught student in the Department of Italian. She graduated with a University of Birmingham and University of Warwick combined MA in Italian Studies: Culture and Communication in 2006 with a thesis on Liliana Cavani's Trilogy (The Night Porter, 1974; Beyond Good and Evil, 1977; The Berlin Affair, 1983). She has recently submitted her Ph.D. thesis on intersemiotic translation of scopophilia from a written code (novel) to a visual code (film) in the works of Pasolini, Brass, Boccaccio, and Tanizaki, and she will be vived in Spring 2010.

In the United Kingdom and in Italy, Mariarita has taught at various academic and non-academic levels at the University of Birmingham, at the University of Warwick (where she currenlty teaches translation, reading conprehension and Italian language to Art Historians, Italian Cinema), at language schools in Birmingham and Manchester, and at the University of Siena. In 2008 she has worked as an intersemiotic translator for the Royal Shakespeare Company for the project Directing the Image. She has also provided tutorial assistance for the Year Abroad students in 2008 at the Lamaro Pozzani Residence in Rome, and in 2009 at the Palazzo Papafava in Venice. In Venice, she provide also language provisions to History and History of Art students at the Palazzo. From 2009, Mariarita collaborates with CineMonitor: Osservatorio Cinema.