About

Professor Ann Caesar teaches and researches in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, Literary Modernism, the History of Women's Reading and the Nobel Prize winning Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.

Professor Caesar completed her PhD at the University of London and went on to teach in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Language at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 1999. From 1985 to 1999 she was also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She joined the Department of Italian Studies at Warwick as a Professor in 1999.

Research interests

Professor Caesar's early research was on the Scapigliatura, a literary and artistic movement active in Milan and Turin soon after Italian Unification, which gave rise to ongoing research and teaching interests in theatre, the European avantgarde and literary modernism.

For the past decade, Professor Caesar's research has focused on the literary and cultural history of the novel in Italy, from the contemporary novel and the 20th century to the origins of the modern Italian novel in 18th-century Venice. Essays on the development of the novel in post-‘45 Italy and on narrative by women in the inter-war period 1919-1939 led into research on readerships and the novel in late nineteenth-century Italy, where her main interest has been on the rise of a female reading public and the development of the domestic novel in Italy in the period immediately after the creation of the nation state.

Alongside the novels themselves, Professor Caesar's research has drawn on women's journals, on conduct literature, on letters and autobiographical writings, and on pedagogical writing.

In her current work, she explores the emergence of an Italian novel of entertainment in late-18th-century Venice, its borrowings and adaptations from French and English sources, its close links with theatre and the different ways in which the relationship with readers was carefully managed by leading writers of the period.

Professor Caesar is currently engaged in two projects; She is working with a group of scholars on how a sense of ‘italianità femminile’ – of what it took and how it felt to be an Italian woman – was created and reinforced in the period immediately following the country’s Unification and she is also engaged in preparatory work for a monograph on the rise of the modern novel in Italy.

Teaching and supervision

Examples of research topics supervised (PhD)

• Language at the Border: Svevo and Proust
• Metaphor and Epiphany in Pirandello’s Novels
• Digression in Italian Fiction from Manzoni to the present day
• The interaction of journalism and literature in five Italian women writers
• Translation and narrative fiction in Banti, Mansfield, Woolf and Morante
• The double in nineteenth-century Italian narrative 1860-1920
• Science and the writings of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino

Current topics include:

• Women writers and the twentieth century fantastic
• De Filippo, translation on stage
• Domestic realism and nineteenth-century narrative by women

PhD students supervised

Alessandra De Martino Cappuccio, Translation of Dialect and Cultural Transfer: an Analysis of Eduardo De Filippo's Theatre

Katharine Mitchell, Between Domestic Realist Fiction and Journalism: La Marchesa Colombi, Matilde Serao, Neera (1866-1910)

Clea Rivalta, Representing Fascism in the Italian post-fascist novel (1945-1965)

Elisabetta Tondello, Construction and disruption: an analysis of the thematic and structural contribution of children and animals in the works by Paola Masino and Anna Maria Ortese

Current professional roles

• Pro-Vice-Chancellor (50th Anniversary)
• Panellist for the Research Excellence Framework 2014
• Panel member for the Philip Leverhulme Prize for European Languages and Literatures

Selected publications

• Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello (Oxford University Press, 1998)
• Modern Italian Literature since 1690. A Cultural History (Polity Press, Oxford/ New York, July 2007) (co-authored)
• 'History or Pre-history? Recent Revisions in the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Italy' in Remapping the Rise of the European Novel 1500-1800 (ed. Jenny Mander), (Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2007), pp. 215-25.
• ‘Sensation, Seduction, and the Supernatural: Fogazzaro’s Malombra’ in The Fantastic in Italy ed. F. Billiani and G. Sulis, (Farleigh Dickinson U.P., 2007), pp. 98-117.
• Trends in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980-2007, ed. G.Ania and A.Hallamore Caesar, (Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, 2007).

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Qualifications

• BA (Kent)
• MA (Cambridge)
• PhD (London)