Dr Vittoria Fallanca

About

I joined Warwick in April 2024 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow with a project entitled The Anterotic Tradition: Love and its Opposites in Renaissance Europe.

The project investigates a body of writing that ruffles love's feathers. It analyses the French reception of European 'anterotic' philosophical writings, constructing the first analysis of the emergence, rise, and fall of a cross-cultural 'counter-love' corpus (1451-1581), drawing together texts from a wide range of genres, from philosophical dialogue to love lyric, invective to narrative prose. Mobilising the full range of the Greek prefix 'anti' (over, against, opposed to, in mutual relation to), The Anterotic Tradition pays careful heed to those relational aspects traditionally cast as love's opposites—antagonism, friction, asymmetry, and aggression—to argue for a revaluation of our dominant understanding of love, both in the Renaissance and in our current moment.

I came to Warwick from Oxford, where I was Career Development Fellow at New College for three years after completing a doctoral thesis on Michel de Montaigne. I am preparing the results of that period of study for publication as a monograph, entitled The Design of Montaigne's "Essais". The book reads Montaigne through the lens of the polysemic term dessein, which in the sixteenth century spans a spectrum of meanings, from a mental plan to a visual sketch. It recasts debates about the role of intention, chance, and authorial design in the Essais by framing them through the prism of the visual arts and the graphic act.

Research Interests

I situate my work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, theory, and visual art. I am guided by a strong interest in polysemy, verbal and visual play and interdisciplinary, comparative methods.

Teaching

In Autumn Term 2025 I am offering a final-year undergraduate model on Love and Its Opposites in Renaissance France