Francesca Luppino

About

BA CompLit, MA CompLit, I'm a PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, funded by Chancellor’s International Scholarship, under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Camilletti and Dr. Cecilia Piantanida. Link opens in a new window and

Research

My research investigates the evolving notion of modern authorship, from Renaissance origins through its Romantic and Postmodernist reconfigurations, up to its potential dissolution in the age of generative AI and Dataism, where LLMs challenge traditional understandings of authorship by producing texts in the style of deceased authors, questioning the very notion of authorial subjectivity. In particular, I focus on authorship as a constantly contested and floating notion, by undertaking a comparative analysis of four case studies challenging stable paradigms: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and Patrizia Valduga (1953-–), with the aim of showing how challenges currently associated with generative AI are part of a longer genealogy of ‘contested authorships’.

Building on this genealogy, my research also explores the intersections between literature, technology, philosophy, and thanatology addressing how digital environments 'resuscitate' literary voices and enhance the author-reader relationship. My focus is on phenomena such as posthuman authorship, algorithmic memory, and the “digital afterlife” of authors, drawing on theories of necromanticism and spectrality to examine how AI-generated contents revive the practice of speaking with the dead and how literature thereby emerges as a performative space of resurrection.

Research Interests

• History and theory of authorship
• Forms of lyrical subjectivity
• Comparative literature and intertextuality

• Legacy, anonymity, crises of subjectivity, plagiarism, and cannibalistic poetics

• The performativity of authorship in AI-generated discourse
• Dataism and posthuman literary theory
• AI-generated literary texts, thanabots, and posthumous literature
• Posthuman authorship and the ontology of digital afterlife
• Literary afterlife, digital immortality, Necromanticism, algorithmic memory, and the aesthetics of literary resurrection
• Theories of reception, and reader-response criticism

• Eidolopoeia, ventriloquism, spectrality, catabasis, literary necromancy and performative encounters with the dead

Teaching

Tutor in Comparative Literatures [L-FIL-LET/14] (November-December 2023) for Undergraduate students - Università di Torino

Teaching Assistant in 'Workshop on Italian and English academic writing' [L-LIN/10] (April-May 2024) for Undergraduate students - Università di Torino

Tutor in English Literature [L-LIN/10] (February-June 2024) for Undergraduate students - Università di Torino

Publications

From non omnis moriar to Dataism. How Literary Legacy Anticipated AI Authorship, 'Creative Disruption: Impact of AI on English Language and Literature Studies', Authorspress (2025).

Conference papers

Sunt lacrimae rerum: android sadness, degenerate posthuman narratives and Douglas Adams’ paranoid android. International Conference on “Posthuman Fictions: Rethinking the ‘Human’ in Contemporary Culture”. Università di Genova. September 2024.

Liturgy of the avatar-faber: virtual rituality in a comparison between Artaud's theatre of cruelty and Extended Reality. V-Cybercult 2024 International Conference on “Visuality and Cyberculture”. National University of Arts George Enescu, Research Centre for Aesthetics and Artistic Creation, Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art, Iaşi, Romania. November 2024.

Letteratura digitalmente incarnata: il cambiamento di paradigma dei processi di fruizione e memoria letteraria nell’era digitale. Compalit annual conference (Associazione di Teoria e Storia Comparata della Letteratura), “Dov’è la letteratura?”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. December 2024.

Say a body where none. Authors’ AI afterlife and the necromantic allegory of reading. Doctoral Conference "The Materiality of Absence. Denied Presences, Silent Traces, Suspended Memories". Università di Genova. October 2025.

Scholarships and Awards

• Recommendation for publication honour for Master Thesis “Memoria monumentale e performativa. L’immortalità artistica nell’era digitale”, Università di Torino, 2024.

• Chancellor’s International Scholarship, University of Warwick, 2025.

Qualifications

MA in Comparative Studies, Università di Torino, 2024.

BA in Modern Cultures and Literatures, Università di Torino, 2022.