Current Position
Associated professor
University of Pisa (IT)
Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Specialist Field
Italian Literature
Master Degree
Master Degree in Classical Studies: Degree dissertation in Italian literature (University of Pisa, June 1995); final grades: 110/110 with honours; subject: Omero e le favole antiche: l’interpretazione allegorica, la storia naturale e l’Omero italico in Ciro Saverio Minervini e nell’ambiente napoletano del tardo Settecento.
Doctorate
Doctoral dissertation: Le lezioni accademiche di Benedetto Varchi (1543-1565), University of Pisa (May 2001).
ASN (‘Abilitazione scientifica nazionale’)
Italian national certifications (2012) both as Associated Professor and as Full Professor. (Note: The Italian certification process is based on the evaluation of a candidate’s file accompanied by 18 publications). Specialist fields: Italian literature, history of literary criticism and comparative literature (10/F1).
Research Fields
Literature and Culture of Renaissance Italy
History of literary criticism: Dante and Petrarch during the Renaissance
Culture and politics in Florence in the 16th century: the Accademia Fiorentina
Benedetto Varchi and vernacular Aristotelianism during the Renaissance
Literature and culture of the Age of Enlightenment
The history of tradition and classical studies in Italy – the reception of Homer (17th to 18th century)
Giambattista Vico and the ‘Discoverta del vero Omero’
Historiography and literature of the Age of Enlightenment in Italy
Social revolution and geological disasters in the thought of the Age of Enlightenment
The Feminine Novel in the Second Half of the 20th Century
Alba de Céspedes and the narrative of the Italian Resistenza
The role of women’s writing for the 20th-Century literary canon in Italy
Italian Literature in the Digital Era
Written communications in Italian in the Digital Era
Italian literature and communication via the Web
The economy of culture and humanities: a debate in litblogs
The use of digital databases in Italian literature teaching
Professional Career
• 1992-1995: summer study scholarships from DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and ÖAD (Österreichischer Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Leipzig and Marburg (Germany) and Vienna (Austria)
• 1996: European fourth-month scholarship ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ at Istituto italiano di Cultura in Paris (France)
• 1999-2000: research scholarship from the University of Zurich (Switzerland)
• 2000-2002: lecturer in Italian language and literature at the Universities of Pisa and Parma (Italy)
• 2001-2003: tenured middle-school teacher of Italian in Pietrasanta (Lucca), Italy
• 2003-2007: research fellow at Dipartimento di Studi italianistici of the University of Pisa (Italy)
• 2007-2008: fellow at ‘Villa I Tatti’, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
• 2008-2018: university researcher in Italian literature at Università IULM, Milan (Italy)
• 2010-2015: member of the Professors Committee of the ‘Scuola di Dottorato in Letterature comparate’ at IULM University, Milan
• Since 2013: member of the Professors Committee of the ‘Scuola di Dottorato in Letterature e media: narratività e linguaggi’ at IULM University, Milan
• Member of Milan’s inter-university research centre on gender cultures ‘Culture di genere’
• Since 2014: editorial co-director of ‘Nuova Rivista di Letteratura italiana’ (Italian literary review with an ‘A’ rating from ANVUR [the Italian national agency for the Evaluation of the university and research systems])
• Since 2014: co-director of the literary publications series ‘Alla giornata. Studi e testi di letteratura italiana’ (published by Edizioni ETS, Pisa, Italy)
• 2014: Vincenzo Cuoco Prize from Associazione Vincenzo Cuoco and Rotary Club Termoli (Distretto 2090) for the edition of ‘Platone in Italia. Traduzione dal greco’ (Bari [Italy]), Laterza 2006 and 2013)
• Since 2014: member of the Executive Board of ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti [the Italian literature specialists’ association], www.italianisti.it)
• Peer-review referee for various international books and publications
• Evaluating expert for the funding proposals of Fund for Scientific Research-FNRS (F.R.S.-FNRS) of Brussels (Belgium)
• Contributor to Huffington Post Italy (www.huffingtonpost.it) on topics associated with literature and culture in the Digital Era
Research work, conferences, organizational activities, conventions
• Since 1998: participation, as either speaker or organizer, in several conferences and conventions at a national or international level. Some of the recent years’ conventions are listed below:
• the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Conventions in Chicago (2008) and Los Angeles (2009);
• the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) at Oxford (2012);
• ‘Aristotelian Philosophy and the Vernacular in the Renaissance’ by University of Warwick and CTL-SNS, Pisa (Italy), Scuola Normale Superiore, 2012;
• ‘Petrarca, l’Italia, l’Europa: sulla varia fortuna di Petrarca’, Bari (Italy), May 2015;
• ‘Varchi e dintorni’, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, March 2016;
• Annual conventions of ADI – Associazione degli Italianisti (participation in the Rome convention [2015] and membership of the Scientific Committee);
• ‘Italianità e oltre l’italianità’, 16th International Congress of SEI (Società spagnola degli italianisti), Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), 16th to 20th November 2016.
• Latest conference: reading of Dalla parte di lei by Alba de Céspedes at the convention ‘Rompendo il muro del silenzio: voci di donne nel Mediterraneo’, Università di Foggia (Italy), 4th to 5th May 2017, with the support of ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti), CISVA (Centro interuniversitario internazionale di studi sul viaggio adriatico), AUDEM (Asociación Universitaria de Estudios de las Mujeres), Grupo de Investigacion Escritoras y Escrituras (Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Sevilla), Ufficio pari opportunità della Regione Puglia.
• Creation within ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti) of the thematic group ‘Studi di genere nella letteratura italiana’ (‘Gender studies in Italian literature’). Among the group’s activities are the organization of roundtables on the literary canon and methodologies, the coordination of the roundtable on the literary canon during the ADI convention in Rome in 2015 and the coordination of the parallel session ‘Women’s Narrative from the 1940s to the 1960s’ during the ADI convention in Naples in 2016.