Dr Cecilia Piantanida

About

I joined the Italian section at Warwick in 2021. I previously taught Italian language and literature at Oxford (2014-2017) and Durham University (2017-2021). I hold a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature from King's College London. As an undergraduate I studied English and Classics at Durham University.

Research Interests

My research examines modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture from comparative and transnational perspectives, with a focus on questions of voice, agency, authoriality, and poetics.

My work centres on four interconnected areas:

• Classical reception and comparative poetics
  A longstanding strand of my research investigates the reception and translation of Greek and Latin classics in modern and contemporary Italian poetry, considered in a broader European and North American context. This work explores how classical models shape modernist and postmodernist poetics, as well as discourses of gender, sexuality, and cultural origins.

• Narratives of origins and belonging
  I study literary representations of personal and cultural origins from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to how they engage questions of subjectivity, nationality, race, and postcolonial legacies in contemporary Italian culture.

• Migration, transnationality, and marginal identities
  I examine literary representations of migration and displacement, including the ethics and politics of representing forced migration in Mediterranean contexts.

• Authorship, creativity, and generative AI
  I explore the implications of generative artificial intelligence for literary creativity, authorship, and cultural production, as well as its pedagogical applications in higher education.

My first monograph, Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), develops a comparative study of the modern and contemporary poetic reception of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho (6th c. BC) and her first Latin translator Catullus (1st c. BC), drawing on textual criticism and theories of translation, gender, and sexuality. I have also published on the European reception of Sappho (The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, CUP, 2021), representations of Mediterranean migration (Journal of Romance Studies, 2022), and co-edited volumes on tradition, translation, and intertextuality in Italian literature. I am currently developing a research project on narratives of origins in Italian literature from the 1980s to the present.

Research Supervision

PhD students currently supervised:

Francesca Luppino (with Fabio Camilletti), 'Itself Beyond Death. Contested authorship, Renaissance to Dataism', 2025-

Alessia Carbonaro (with Caroline Summers and Rita Wilson (Monash)), 'Translating Trauma: The Role of Australian Landscape in Contemporary Women's Fiction', 2025-

PhD students supervised to successful completion:

Roberta Passaghe (Durham University - With Martina Piperno and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi), 'Poetic Translations of the Latin Classics in the Work of Italian Poet Edoardo Sanguineti', 2021-2025.

Teaching and Pedagogy

I am strongly committed to pedagogical scholarship and innovative teaching in modern languages. My work focuses on:

• Generative AI in teaching and assessment, particularly in Italian language and culture

• Transnational and intercultural approaches to language and literature teaching

• The use of literature and creative practices in the language classroom

• Equity, inclusion, and decolonising approaches to modern languages education

I have published on transnational approaches to the Italian language classroom (2020) and am currently co-editing a volume on transnational teaching in modern languages.