Research
Roberto Interdonato is a doctoral candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages (German & Italian) and the Michael Pragnell Scholar in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, St. John’s College (2022-25).
Raised in Messina, Sicily, Interdonato graduated from the liceo linguistico “F. Bisazza”, a non-selective state secondary school where he studied English, French, and German for five years, and Latin for two. He then pursued studies in modern languages and literatures (German, English and Anglo-American, Russian) at the University of Messina, the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (as an Erasmus+ student), and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he obtained an MA in German Studies, defending a thesis on Heiner Müller. Between his master’s and doctoral studies at Oxford, he worked as a trainee and collaborator at the German Centre for Venetian Studies and participated in projects at the German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue at Villa Vigoni on Lake Como (Vigoni Giovani 2021; Doctoral Colloquium 2022). He also conducted research in Romance Studies at the Karl Franzens University of Graz and briefly taught English at a state secondary school in Milan (“I.I.S. Vilfredo Federico Pareto”).
Interdonato came to Oxford to pursue a doctoral research project rooted in comparative literary studies, focusing on a translingual comparison of the writings of the Italian author Anna Maria Ortese (1914-98) and the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73). His thesis specifically examines a broad corpus of works by Ortese and Bachmann, written between 1949 and 1975, with an emphasis on their portrayal of alienation across ocular, spatial, and meta-literary dimensions. His thesis argues that both authors offer a symmetrical aesthetic response to the anti-subjective pressures present in their late-modern European (Italian, West-German, and Austrian) social environments. In writing his doctoral thesis, he engaged with new critical theory’s relational redefinition of alienation, with metaphorical approaches to the body, landscape, and language, and with phenomenological reflections on grief and mourning. Additionally, he conducted archival research at the State Archives in Naples (Archivio di Stato di Napoli) in July 2023 and at the Austrian National Library in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) in July 2024, benefiting from special college grants awarded by St. John’s College for both stays.
Interdonato has enriched his doctoral work by presenting research papers at international conferences in the UK, Germany, and Italy; organizing a bilateral doctoral colloquium and co-editing its proceedings volume; and authoring research articles, book reviews, and conference reports in English, German, or Italian for reputable international journals. His research has spanned multiple media, including theatre, cinema, and literature, offering analyses of works not only by Anna Maria Ortese and Ingeborg Bachmann but also by Emma Dante, Heiner Müller, and Alice Rohrwacher. Moreover, while he was engaged in teaching and offered language lab courses in German grammar within the Sub-Faculty of German during the 2022/23 academic year, he assumed the role of Modern Coordinator of the Italian Research Seminar (IRS) in the Sub-Faculty of Italian starting in the 2023/24 academic year. In this capacity, he has collaborated with numerous researchers, professors, and doctoral colleagues, organizing and/or moderating seminars on a range of topics, including the cinema of Alice Rohrwacher, the influence of U.S. culture on Italian culture, natality in the works of Gaspara Stampa and Goliarda Sapienza, and reproductive (in)justice in contemporary Italy. Lastly, in 2024, he conceived and promoted a forum on Austrian cinema around the theme of love phenomenology at St. John’s College.
Overall, Interdonato’s profile reflects that of a scholar dedicated to developing philosophical, historical, social, and environmental thematic approaches for comparing authors and works from modern German-speaking literature, as well as from other modern European literatures, with a particular emphasis on Italian literature and/or reception. He is also interested in exploring other aesthetic genres and in the practice of literary translation from German into Italian. He is fluent in his native Italian, as well as in English (Cambridge C2 Proficiency, 2019), German (Goethe-Zertifikat C2: Großes Deutsches Sprachdiplom, 2020), and French (Diplôme approfondi de langue française C1, 2020), and has an intermediate understanding of Russian and Spanish. He uses all of these languages in developing his critical endeavors.
Research outputs
Edited volumes
Krise, Jugend und die Kritik am Erwachsensein/Crisi, giovinezza e critica all’adultità, eds. Florian H. Geidner and Roberto Interdonato (Loveno di Menaggio: Villa Vigoni Editore | Verlag, 2024) [funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of the Federal Republic of Germany]. Presented the volume at Villa Vigoni, upon invitation, on 11 November 2024.
Articles
“Anna Maria Ortese and Ingeborg Bachmann: Visual anxiety between Naples and Vienna,” in Austrian Studies, 32 (forthcoming 2024).
“A different spirituality: On Lazzaro’s symbolic potency in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro,” in Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 11:1 (2023), 145–161.
“‘Ich bin nicht erwünscht hier’: Heiner Müllers Medea zwischen Alterität, Totenkult und Atomkatastrophe,” in Links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca. Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, 22 (2022), 75–84.
“‘Ha accise i picciriddi’: Emma Dante’s Sicilian Medea,” in K. Revue trans-européenne de philosophie et arts, 8:1 (2022), 317–326.
Book reviews
“Insa Braun, Reden über Lyrik: Autorkonstitution in Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen von 1959 bis 1989. de Gruyter, Berlin 2024, 288 S.,” in Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 35:1 (forthcoming 2025).
“Daniela Padularosa (ed.), Pathographies of Modernity with Aby Warburg and Beyond: An Astral Map of Warburgian Constellations, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholar Publishing 2024, 329 pp.,” in Links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca. Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, 24 (forthcoming 2024).
“Daniele Gallo, Ellen Patat, Daniela Bombara (eds.), Spazi e Tempi dell’Alterità. Mantova: Universitas Studiorum, 2022. Pp. 555,” in Annali d’italianistica, 42 (2024), 727–729.
“Parham, J. (ed.) (2021), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene,” in Journal of Ecohumanism, 2:2 (2023), 205–207.
Conference reports
“‘ich lebe ich schreibe’ Friederike Mayröcker (1924-2021), Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture, Lancaster University. An online conference, 4-5 July 2024,” in The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 100:1 (forthcoming 2025).
“Ingeborg Bachmann Konstellationen in Rom: Internationale Tagung aus Anlass des 50. Todestages, Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, Rom in Kooperation mit dem Forum Austriaco di Cultura Roma und dem Goethe-Institut Rom. Rom, 17.-20. Oktober 2023,” in Links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca. Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, 23 (2023), 111–113.
Translations
Marta Arnaldi, “Der translationale Turn in der narrativen Medizin: Eine Studie über Margherita Guidaccis Neurosuite [The Translational Turn in Narrative Medicine: A Study of Margherita Guidacci’s Neurosuite],” in Encounters in Translation, 2 (forthcoming 2025); translation of an extended abstract from English to German.
Other publications
“La sola ragione non spiega la vita,” review of Hermann Broch, L’incognita, trans. Luca Crescenzi (Carbonio: Milan, 2022), in L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, 39:3 (2022), p. 22.
“sotto gli alberi di lacrime il mattino,” Italian non-commercial translation of Friederike Mayröcker, “unter Bäumen Tränenmorgen” (13 August 2003), in Gesammelte Gedichte. 1939-2003, ed. Marcel Beyer (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2019), p. 779, in Poetarum Silva, 2 July 2020. URL: https://poetarumsilva.com/2020/07/02/friederike-mayrocker/ (CC license).
Conference papers
“Der gefallene Mensch: Topophobie und Topophilie in kulturkritischer Perspektive in Anna Maria Orteses L’Iguana und Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Wüstenbuch’ und Das Buch Franza.” Paper presented at “Bin ich’s oder bin ich’s nicht?” Bachmanns Echos. Ein Nachwuchs-Kolloquium. 25 and 26 October 2024, Literaturhaus München.
“Loss of Subjectivity, Psychoses and Economic Growth in Anna Maria Ortese’s Silenzio a Milano and Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’.” Paper presented at the Oxford Italian Research Seminar and at the Oxford Modern Languages Graduate Conference. 10 and 20 June 2024, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford.
“From West Berlin to the North African Desert: Mobility and ambiguous attachments to the desert space in Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Wüstenbuch’.” Paper presented at a workshop organised by Oxford University Collective for Pastoralist and Nomadic People. 30 April 2024, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.
“Defective Vision: On Anna Maria Ortese’s “Un paio di occhiali” and Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Ihr glücklichen Augen’.” Paper presented at Reading Bachmann Now: A conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death. 17–19 May 2023, University of London Senate House, and the Austrian Cultural Forum.
“‘Nass von Tränen’: Die Darstellung von Kindern in der Schweizer Literatur am Beispiel von Johanna Spyri und Adelheid Duvanel”. Paper presented at “Nüchtern wie Cellophan”: Die Schriftstellerin Adelheid Duvanel – Meisterin der kleinen Formen. 25 November 2022, Universität Stuttgart/Literaturhaus Stuttgart.
“Pflanzliche Elemente in Büchners und Herzogs Woyzeck”. Paper presented at Büchners Pflanzen. Jahrestagung der Büchner-Gesellschaft. 17–19 November 2022, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.
“Looking for ‘lightness’. Enslavement, Martyrdom, and the Bach Motif in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro.” Paper presented at Blood on the Leaves / And Blood at the Roots’: Reconsidering Forms of Enslavement and Subjection across Disciplines. 19–20 June 2021, University of Warwick.
“Das Malvasia-Motiv zwischen Italien und England: Intertextuelle Beziehungen zwischen Matteo Bandellos Novelle und Shakespeares Richard III.” Paper presented at Malvasier – Weinkultur in der Geschichte Venedigs und Europas. Von der Wirtschaft bis zur Medizin, von der Politik bis zur Kunst und Literatur. 29 August – 6 September 2021, German Centre for Venetian Studies (Venice).
Teaching
German Grammar (“Grammatikübung”), Sub-faculty of German at the University of Oxford, 2022/23 (20 hours of contact time over the course of Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity terms).
Affiliations
2022-present: Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS).
2020-2023: Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (IHMG).
2020-2021: European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE).
Last edit: 15 November 2024, 20:20 (GMT).