Academic Background

After completing my PhD at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Florence and Sapienza University of Rome in 2012, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014-2015), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2018). Before coming to Oxford as a Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church and Associate College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John’s College (2021-2024), I taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin (2019-2021). Currently, I am Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (research fellow) at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. 

Research

My research focuses on the Italian poetic tradition and its modern and contemporary ramifications, but my work extends into other genres and media, as well as theoretical dimensions. Over the years I have written on Dante, Petrarch, and Renaissance Petrarchist poets (Stampa, Turini Bufalini), as well as modern and contemporary authors such as Leopardi, Gozzano, Montale, Caproni, Sanguineti, Zanzotto, and Valduga, exploring questions of temporality, cognition, gender, environment and mourning, as well as the reception of medieval poetics in contemporary poetry. 

My new project on 'gestural communities' developed out of my long-term interest in the history and theory of the lyric, which led to my monographs Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016), devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry. In recent years, working at the intersection of literature and theory, I have increasingly begun to scrutinise the ways in which lyric discourse offers the possibility to rethink certain concepts and socio-cultural practices in much broader and transdisciplinary terms. My project starts from the investigation of the transnational and transmedia developments of the lyric in the Italian experimental scene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to explore a different model of community formation and its cultural and political implications.

Since 2022 I have been coordinating the interdisciplinary research project Rethinking Lyric Communities, which sets out to explore the relationship between lyric poetry and community formation in both premodern and modern times in a global perspective. 

Teaching

At Oxford I taught most areas of Italian literature for both Prelims papers and the Final Honours School, from Dante and the Middle Ages to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Publications

Monographs

Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (Rome: Carocci, 2016)

Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (L'Aquila: Textus Edizioni, 2015)

Edited volumes & special issues

Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024)

Teoria/Theory. Perspectives on Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature, special issue of Status Quaestionis, 26 (2024), ed. by Elisabetta Abignente, Mimmo Cangiano, Irene Fantappiè, Guido Mattia Gallerani, Marco Gatto, and Francesco Giusti

A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022)

The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021)

Poesia e nuovi media, ed. by Damiano Frasca, Francesco Giusti, and Christine Ott (Florence: Cesati Editore, 2018)

Latest chapters and articles (selected)

‘Gestural Communities: Lyric and the Suspension of Action’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 71–96

'From Distance to Difference: Knowledge and Error in Leopardi', The Italianist (2024), pp. 1–20

'Lyric Gestures Between Written and Visual Poetry: Lamberto Pignotti's New Vita Nova', Italica, 99.4 (2022), pp. 523–542

'Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s Versi livornesi', in A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti and Emanuela Tandello, Italian Perspectives, 54 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022), pp. 47-70

'An Interminable Work? The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions', in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 23–43

'The Hinge of Time: Mothers and Sons in Barthes and Augustine', Exemplaria, 33.3 (2021), Special issue: The Case for a Medieval Barthes, ed. by Jennifer Rushworth and Francesca Southerden, pp. 280-295

'Dante dopo Brecht: gesti lirici e modalità comunicative', Rivista di letteratura italiana, XXXIX/3 (2021), pp. 151-161

'Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature', in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 75–103

'Recitation: Lyric Time(s) I', in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2019), pp. 35–47

'Reversion: Lyric Time(s) II', in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2019), pp. 151–61

'Rispondere solo a Beatrice: "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" e il rischio della ripetizione lirica', Revue des études dantesques, 2 (2018), pp. 87-109

'Temporalità liriche. Ripetizione e incompiutezza tra Dante e Caproni, Montale e Sanguineti', California Italian Studies, 8 (2018)

'Risonanze dell’io: forme liriche e sequenze narrative nelle Rime di Francesca Turini Bufalini', in Francesca Turini Bufalini e la 'letteratura di genere', ed. by John Butcher, introduction by Antonio Lanza (Città di Castello: Edizioni Nuova Prhomos, 2018), pp. 71-94

'Il cerchio che non chiude. Forme della temporalità nella poesia contemporanea', Sig.Ma. Quaderni di letterature comparate, teatro e arti dello spettacolo, 1 (2017), pp. 75-102

'Tra il "bruco defunto" e la "farfalla apparitura": Gozzano e la crisalide del Modernismo', Critica Letteraria, XLIV, IV, 173 (2016), pp. 707-732

'Per un’etica del discorso lirico: una lettura della "Ginestra" di Leopardi', Between, 5.10 (2015)