I am Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow in Italian at Trinity College Dublin as well as Honorary Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford.
Prior to this, I was Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow and Laming Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford, working on a project on the contemporary Italian poet Antonella Anedda. I hold a DPhil in Italian from Christ Church, Oxford, and a BA in English and Italian from Royal Holloway, University of London. I have also been awarded various visiting fellowships, among which at University of Groningen, University of Southern California, and New York University.
Research
My research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry, with a series of cross-disciplinary, comparative, and gender-orientated foci. In particular, my research interests are lyric poetry (with an emphasis on elegy), discourses of mourning and loss, issues of translation and self-translation, and the cross-fertilisation between the verbal and the visual.
Among my recent and forthcoming publications are several peer-reviewed articles including in California Italian Studies; the edited volume Gender and Authority Across Disciplines, Space and Time with Alberica Bazzoni (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); the monograph Eugenio Montale: A Poetics of Mourning (Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2021); the edited volume A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry with Francesco Giusti and Emanuela Tandello (Legenda, forthcoming in 2022); the special issue Elegy Today: Rejections, Re-mappings, Rewritings with Roberto Binetti and Jonathan Culler (Journal of World Literature, forthcoming in 2023).
At present, I am completing my second book project, provisionally entitled A Textile Poetics of Entanglement. This interdisciplinary project investigates the relationship between the poetic text and textiles, arguing that the interaction between the language of poetry and that of textile practices, which is at the core of what I call ‘textile poems’, can be understood through a paradigm of productive entanglements.
Since my doctorate I was involved in several projects that allowed me to further extend the focus of my research. Among these projects is the interdisciplinary Research Network ‘Gender and Authority’, which I co-founded in 2016 with funding from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and The Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute. As part of this project, I co-organised a two-day international conference on Women and the Canon (Christ Church, 2016). By bringing researchers from different disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences — as well as periods and geographical contexts — into conversation, this Network aimed to advance our understanding of the question of authority in the artistic, cultural, and political fields, and specifically where they intersect with issues of gender. The network legacy is a co-edited volume Gender and Authority Across Disciplines, Space and Time (Palgrave, 2020). The Network fostered my interest in issues of gender, which is at the core of both my second book A Textile Poetics of Entanglement as well as a further collaborative project on contemporary Italian women poets. The latter, co-authored with Roberto Binetti and provisionally entitled Panorama della poesia femminile contemporanea italiana: dal 1970 a oggi, examines and problematises the notion of women’s writing within the Italian poetic context by interviewing fifteen poets, among whom are Antonella Anedda, Laura Pugno, Elisa Biagini, Mariangela Gualtieri, Vivian Lamarque, Dacia Maraini, and Giulia Martini. This project is funded by the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford and represented by the literary agency Curtis Brown.
In addition, I have co-founded a number of Reading Groups on poetry with focuses on mourning, translation, and gender. At present, I am co-ordinating Italian Poetry Today, which includes a series of seminars devoted to contemporary Italian poetry. One of its principal aims is to promote conversations about both well-established and emerging poets.
Teaching
I have taught a broad range of topics within modern Italian Literature. Among my past teaching posts, I was appointed Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at Christ Church in 2019 and I held a teaching lectureship at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages in 2018. These two positions gave me the opportunity to teach a variety of authors such as Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Elsa Morante as well as language courses (from grammar to literary translation, as well as reading and essay writing). Since 2016, I have been an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Publications
For a full list of publications and more information about my research, please visit my Academia Profile.