Silvia Vari
About
I am a current MPhil/PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer BurnsLink opens in a new window and Dr. Matt GreenLink opens in a new window.
Research Interests
Focusing on comics narrating the experience of (forced) migration in the Mediterranean, my project investigates the political potential embedded in comics’ form and aesthetics. As a culturally marginalised medium, the research studies comics as “minor narratives” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) and questions how the medium’s cultural stigmatisation may be essential both for its political potential and for its adoption by marginalised communities. Whose stories are told, whose voices are heard, and how individual agency is reaffirmed in comics are pivotal questions grounding this research. Drawing together literary theory, comics scholarship, migration and globalisation studies, with a specific focus on Italy and the Mediterranean area, the project aims attention at a variated corpus of comics narrating the experience of (forced) migration produced in Italy between 2000-2020.
The research aims at analysing the potential of comics to challenge dominant narratives that universalise migratory experience and examines the medium’s formal and aesthetics potential to blur the boundaries between forms of individual and collective narration. My study investigates how the medium’s formal complexity and fragmentary nature can embody and reflect the transitional experience of migrants. Aiming attention at different forms of migrant narratives (autobiography, reportage, autofiction), this study analyses the potential of graphic narratives to challenge mainstream discourses about migration. In investigating comics’ political affordances, the project considers: comics’ hybrid and fragmentary nature, their non-hierarchical networked form, the reader’s agency in putting together the graphic fragments into a cohesive whole, and how the medium as “minor narrative” blurs the boundaries between individual and collective enunciation.
Comics, conceived as “a silent dance between the seen and the unseen” (McCloud 1994, 92), may problematise notions of visibility and invisibility, eventually unsettling the space of the political within which migrant discourses are produced and reiterated. Given the ongoing rise of anti-immigrant sentiment within the Italian socio-political landscape, the present research seeks to break new ground in the discipline of Italian studies by investigating a so-far understudied topic: how comics’ fractured aesthetics can be politically productive in promoting alternative modes of narration and existence based on multiplicity and plurality.
Publications
- Silvia Vari, Dancing with the (un)seen: problematizing the viewer’s gaze through Mediterraneo’s visual aesthetics, in «Mediascapes» (2023).
- Silvia Vari, Fragments of Anger: A Collective Account of Italian Youth Precariousness in «La Rabbia», in «Ticontre. Teoria Testo Traduzione», 15 (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.15168/t3.v0i15.478.
- Silvia Vari, “Fino all’ultimo granello”: Precarietà e frammentazione in Macerie prime e Macerie prime. Sei mesi dopo di Zerocalcare, in «Studi Culturali» (2021).
Teaching
- La Dinamica della Letteratura Italiana (Postgraduate) (University of Amsterdam, 2024)
- IT101 Italian for Beginners (Undergraduate) (University of Warwick, 2023/2024)
- IT116 Introducing Italy: Local and Global Perspectives (Seminar and Lecture, undergraduate) (University of Warwick, 2023/2024)
- IT201 Oral Italian lower Intermediate (Undergraduate) (University of Warwick, 2022/2023)
- IT401 Oral one to one student mentoring (Undergraduate) (University of Warwick, 2022/2023)
Attended conferences and presentations
- "'Playful’ Journeys: Analysing the Gamification of Migrant Experiences in Italian Comics", International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference (University of East Anglia, July 2024)
- "Unruly Comics Anthologies, Roundtable at the Society for Italian Studies", Society for Italian Studies conference (Royal Holloway, June 2024)
- "‘Playful’ Journeys: Analysing the Gamification of Migrant Experiences in Italian Comics", American Association of Italian Studies conference (Sant’Anna Institute Sorrento, June 2024)
- "'Dancing with the (in)visible'. Graphic fragments of forced migration from the Mediterranean" at Comics and the Invisible, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 4 June 2022.
- "Investigating comics’ “powerful marginality”: a medium from and for the margins", at the SMLC Symposium Peripheries and questions of power, 26 May 2022.
- "Autobiography, Labor, and Migrant Storytelling in Italian Comics: the Case of Etenesh", at the OBERT roundtable, online, 22 February 2022.
Organised symposiums and conferences
- ‘In Search of Lost Futures: Visual Media Narratives of Economic Migration in the Mediterranean’ (University of Warwick,
19-20 September 2024).
- SMLC Postgraduate Symposium ‘Peripheries and Questions of Power’ (University of Warwick, May 2022).
Awards and Scholarships
-
Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Best Paper Award from the Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migration Caucus of the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS, 2024)
- Journal of European Studies Conference Grant (2023)
- University of Warwick HRC Conference Funding (2023)
- UCLA California Rare Book School Scholarship (Washington DC, 2023)
- Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnerships (AHRC, 2021)
- Erasmus+ Scholarship (2016)
Book reviews
- Silvia Vari, Immigrants and comics. Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, ed. Nhora Lucía Serrano, New York, Routledge, 2021.
- Silvia Vari, Viaggi minimi e luoghi qualsiasi. In cammino tra cinema, letteratura e arti visive nell’Italia contemporanea, eds. Monica Jansen, Inge Lanslots, Maria Spunta, Firenze, Franco Cesati, 2020, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/narrativa.481
Memberships
- May 2024 - Present: AAIS - American Association for Italian Studies.
- August 2023 - Present: ADI - Associazione degli Italianisti.
- April 2022 - Present: SIS - Society for Italian Studies.
- May 2021- Present: AIPI - Associazione Internazionale Professori di Italiano.
- Jan 2021 - 2023: NECS - European Network for Cinema and Media Studies.
Previous Education
- MRes Literary Studies, University of Amsterdam (Cum Laude).
- BA in Modern Languages and Cultures, Università degli studi 'Roma Tre'.
