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 (2014) and an MA in Comparative Literature from King's College London (2009). As an undergraduate I studied English and Classics at Durham University (BA 2007).

Research and Teaching Interests

My research studies modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture from comparative and transnational perspectives. I address questions of voice, agency, authoriality and poetics, in relation to:

• narratives of individual and cultural origins from the nineteenth century to the present
• representations of migration, transnational subjectivity and marginal identities

• synergies between modern and contemporary literature and the Classics, in particular forms of reception and translation of Greek and Latin classics in Italian poetry, seen in a comparative European and North American perspective.

I am currently developing a research project on narratives of origins in literature in Italian from the 1980s to the present. Considering contemporary Italian culture not only as a key intersecting point of the classical heritage, pre-modern and modern literary formations, but also of postcolonial legacies, complex networks of migration and transnational encounters, I study competing models of personal and cultural origins embedded in various types of narratives and how they interact with questions of belonging, subjectivity, nationality and race.

This project is supported by a longstanding research interest in representations of the past, focusing on classical reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian culture seen in a comparative European and North American perspective. My first monograph, Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)Link opens in a new window, studies the interwoven reception of the archaic Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, in literary culture from the 1900s to the present. Through its comparative approach, the book reveals the centrality of the ancient poets in the development of modernist and postmodernist poetics across cultures. It also highlights an enduring transnational discourse which employs classical models to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Grounded in textual criticism, the analysis employs theories of translation, reception, gender and sexuality to study a wide range of texts, including several unpublished manuscripts. Key case-studies include G. Pascoli, E. Pound, H.D., S. Quasimodo, R. Lowell, R. Copioli and A. Carson. I also contributed an essay on the European reception of Sappho for The Cambridge Companion to Sappho (CUP, 2021) and with Teresa Franco I coedited a volume of essays on Echoing Voices in Italian Literature: Tradition and Translation in the 20th Century (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018). At present, I am co-editing a comparative volume entitled Behind the Text, investigating intertextuality as a literary and creative practice across time and cultures.

Recently I have also been exploring the interaction of literature and art with the ethics and politics of representation of forced migration. On this topic, I have published the article 'Defamiliarizing Mediterranean Migration in Contemporary Visual Culture and Literature', Journal of Romance Studies (22.1, 2022)

I am very much invested in pedagogical scholarship and practice related to the teaching and learning of modern languages. I am currently focusing on two areas:

• Artificial Intelligence and Language Teaching, exploring the applications of generative AI in the teaching and learning of Italian, including assessment.
• Transnational and intercultural approaches to teaching Italian language and literature. I am particularly interested in the uses of literature and creativity in the language class, intercultural empathy, and issues of diversity and inclusion in higher education, including decolonising approaches to teaching and learning modern languages. In 2020 I published a practice-based article on 'Transnational Perspectives in the Italian Language Class: The Uses of Non-Native Literature to Develop Intercultural Competence' (2020) and I am currently co-editing a volume on Transnational Teaching in Modern Languages.