Professor Ela Tandello held her valedictory lecture on Tuesday 8 June 2021, to mark her retirement.
This lecture was given to a small audience in person at the faculty, and livestreamed to a wider audience, as a celebration of a fruitful career at the University.
The lecture was entitled ‘Mortiferous Poetry: mourning and the lyric in Leopardi’s Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e le sue Mummie’, and drew on Ela’s recent research on this text. The lecture was recorded and can be viewed on the Faculty’s YouTube channel.
Ela said: "It was thrilling to be in a lecture room with a live audience, after months and months of online teaching, and to experience again the the atmosphere of excitement and engagement that we have all been privileged to enjoy in our teaching career. I will miss it, but I am looking forward to more research. And time to paint and play my piano!"
Chair of Faculty Board, Professor Almut Suerbaum, says: "Professor Tandello's lecture was very special: the first faculty event in months to take place 'in person'. It was a delight to listen to her lively reading of Leopardi's poems, and wonderful to see her joined by so many early career researchers, whom on their journey from supervisees to collaborators she had encouraged to spread their wings."