About

Dott.ssa Giulia Brecciaroli started her PhD (fully funded by a Chancellor's Scholarship) in the Department of Italian in October 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer Burns and Dr Fabio Camilletti. Her research offers an account of the post-war transition in Italy through different literary voices, belonging to various genres, and their original and complementary narration of post-war Italy’s changing geography. Two chapters of the dissertation concentrate on Milan and Turin, the expanding industrial cities of the North, in the novels of Bianciardi and Volponi, and Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini, respectively. The focus of the last chapter broadens to embrace the socio-cultural landscape of the country, through the analysis of post-war Italian travel writing and the specific examples of Piovene, Ortese and Arbasino.

The exploration of literary geographies, corroborated by theories of space in contemporary societies, is functional to challenge narrations of the boom as chiefly a time of growing prosperity and optimism, and instead exposes ambiguous feelings about Italian modernity. The post-war years are seen as a period in which feelings of hope and anxiety coexist and inter-mingle, and where existential uncertainty provides a driving force for the examined authors to challenge accepted ways of seeing and being, in the framework of the postmodern theories that are slowly infiltrating the Italian cultural debate in those years. The innovative selection of authors and genres sheds new light on the inconsistencies of post-war development, as well as reframing key issues in post-war Italian society, such as the inability to incorporate a critical reflection upon the past into the process of nation and identity building in this crucial moment of the country’s history.

Research interests

Dott.ssa Giulia Brecciaroli's broader research interests include:

• Post-war narrative fiction
• Urban representations and perceptions in literature
• Environmental humanities
• Italian crime fiction tradition
• Political and ethical commitment in literature

Teaching

2014-2015 Reading Group for IT113 Forms & Fashions in Italian Intellectual Culture 

2015-2016 IT103 Italian for Literature Students

2016-2017 IT103 Italian for Literature Students

Selected conference papers

'Uncanny City: A Psychogeographical Exploration of Milan and Turin in in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini', Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Urban Space (University of Florence, 27-28 June 2016)

'Urban Modernity and War Rhetoric in Luciano Bianciardi's La vita agra', La città italiana. Spazio urbano e rappresentazione (University of Bergen, 12-14 September 2016)

'Mapping Italy’s Economic Boom: Rome, Milan and Turin in 1950s-1970s Italian Literature', IMLR Graduate Forum (12 November 2015)

'Milan and Turin in 1960s and 1970s Italian Crime Fiction: A Comparative Analysis on Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini', Italian Studies Doctoral Colloquia (University of Warwick, 1 December 2014)

Qualifications

BA in Anthropological Sciences (University of Bologna)

MA in Italian Studies, European Literary Cultures, Linguistics (University of Bologna)

MA for Research in Italian Studies (University of Warwick)