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MHRA Research Scholar in Modern European Languages 
Lecturer in Italian at St Hilda’s College
Lecturer in Italian at Pembroke College

Academic background

Frances Clemente has completed her doctorate in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She holds a double degree in Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of Pisa and a MSt in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford, which was fully funded by the Modern Languages and Pembroke College Full Scholarship. She was visiting student at the Sorbonne University and Warwick University and visiting scholar at Columbia University.

Research

Her research on Italian cultural and literary production (c. 1850-c. 1930) focuses upon the notions of alterity and otherness, and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving. She draws on methodologies taken from cultural studies, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian, feminist and queer criticism.

Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century Italian culture and literature, comparative literature, gender and queer studies, literature and science, Leopardi studies, Neapolitan culture.

Her doctoral dissertation, fully funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Studentship, the Baillie Gifford Scholarship, and the Clarendon Fund Scholarship, deals with the investigation of the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature between 1861 and 1915, looking at phenomena such as mystical raptures, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hysterical extases, hypnotic trances, orgasms, and the way they are represented by authors like Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is underpinned by the theoretical framing of an ‘ecstatic dis-order’, unveiling a dialectical tension between ecstatic, disorderly drives and normative, orderly ones, against the backdrop of the development of modern Italy. 

Teaching

Lectures
Italian Paper VIII, ‘Modern Period Paper’, ‘Natalia Ginzburg’
-Italian Paper IV, ‘History and Society in Modern Italy’
-Italian Paper VIII, ‘Modern Period Paper’, ‘Literature in the Ottocento’
Seminars and Tutorials
-Italian, Paper IV, ‘Modern Italian Narrative and Cinema’
-Italian, Paper III, ‘Aspects of Italian Lyric Poetry’
-Italian, Paper VIII, 'Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga, Pirandello'
Language
-Italian Language Skills
-Italian Prose (Translation into Italian)       
-Italian Finalists Oral 
-Italian Pre-sessional course

Publications

  • with Greta Colombani, Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
  • ‘Leopardi “larmoyant” e meridionale: sul leopardismo nell’opera di Matilde Serao’, essay in edited volume,Contaminazioni Leopardiane, ed. by Olmo Andrea Calzolari, Alessandra Aloisi, Emanuela Tandello (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2024), 251-270
  • ‘From body of order to body of disorder: Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)’, Italian Studies, 2024, pp. 1–17, DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2024.2344406
  • ‘Alienation, innocence, and death in Naples: unmasking the poetic world of Antonio de Curtis’, The Italianist, 44.1 (2024): 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2024.2327238
  • ‘“And now the great day had come, the 14th of May, 1865!”: Anna Vivanti-Lindau e il seicentenario dantesco’, Italian Studies, 78, 4 (2023): 399-420
  • ‘Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Una lettura queer’, Mimesis Journal, 10, 1 (2021): 169-192
  • ‘“Negletta prole”: Leopardi’s legacy in Morante’s Aracoeli’, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, 28 (2021): 345-368
  • ‘Entre “donneschi furori” et finalités pedagogiques: une lecture de l’Erodiade (1832) de Silvio Pellico’, in Woman Language Literature in Italy, 3 (2021): 53-65
  • ‘A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence. Three months abroad di Anna Vivanti-Lindau. Impressioni di una letterata tedesca sulla Napoli del secondo Ottocento’, Intersezioni. Rivista di Storia delle Idee, XLI, 1 (April 2021): 25-43
  • ‘Where “the blood boils:” Hans Christian Andersen’s sojourn in Naples’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 41, 1, (2021): 95-134
  • ‘Leopardi e Camus al cospetto del problema religioso e divino’, Merope, XXVII, 72 (July 2020): 47-62)
  • ‘Performing childbirth: the figliata of the femminielli’, Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 3 (2020): 305-322