Adele Bardazzi (she/her) is a theorist of literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work places Italian poetry in transnational dialogue to explore how material practices — from textile art to computer programming — reshape authorship and creative authority. 

At present, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University. In addition, she is Honorary Faculty Research Fellowship at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where she completed her DPhil in 2018 at Christ Church, and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Prior to these appointments, she was awarded an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, a Laming Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College, Oxford, a Stipendiary Lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Lectureship at the Sub-Faculty of Italian at Oxford. She has held various visiting fellowships, among which at University of Southern California, Yale University, New York University, University of Toronto, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, and University of Groningen. 

Research

Her research connects modern and contemporary Italian poetry with gender, material practice, and technological change. Her first monograph, Eugenio Montale: A Poetics of Mourning (Peter Lang, 2023), developed a relational approach to lyric, examining how poetic form sustains attachments between the living and the dead. This enquiry also informs the edited volumes A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, together with Emanuela Tandello and Francesco Giusti (Legenda, 2022), The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature, together with Roberto Binetti and Jonathan Culler (Brill, 2025), and Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters, together with Roberto Binetti (Peter Lang, 2025), The Poetics of Fabric: Intermedial Craft in Poetry and Textiles (under contract with Bloomsbury). She has also edited the special issues Weaving Media in Modern and Contemporary Italian Poetry (Italica 99:4, 2022) and Elegy Today: Resistance, Revision, Re-Mapping, together with Roberto Binetti and Jonathan Culler (Journal of World Literature 8:1, 2023). Across these projects, she places Italian poetry in transnational dialogue and reconsider how literary communities and canons take shape. Her work on gender and literary authority, developed in the co-edited volume Gender and Authority Across Disciplines, Space and Time, together with Alberica Bazzoni (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), also informs her second monograph, A Textile Poetics of Entanglement (under contract with Brill). Bringing women’s poetry into dialogue with textile art and computer programming, the book examines how material practices reshape authorship and creativity. Her co-edited special issue Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice, together with Brandon Essary, Paola Italia, Massimo Riva, and Michelangelo Zaccarello (Annali d’italianistica, 2025) extends this enquiry into technological change, placing Italian literary culture at the center of wider interdisciplinary debates.

In addition, her profile combines literary scholarship with creative and translational practice: she is an award-winning poet (with three multilingual published collections in Italian, English, and French; Award: 7th Edizione Premio Nazionale Editoriale di Poesia Arcipelago Itaca) and a translator from English to Italian (she has edited and translated Victoria Chang’s OBIT. Poesie per la fine, Interno Poesia, 2024).

At present, she is working on her third monograph: Dopo Penelope: Poesia e Arte Tessile. Percorsi critici e quindici dialoghi inediti. She is also co-editing Non solo muse: Panorama della poesia contemporanea italiana dal 1970 a oggi, which include over twenty interviews to contemporary Italian women poets and examines the diversity of women’s poetic practices and their relationships with contemporary history, literary recognition, and lyric authority, contributing to an account of Italian poetry attentive to the institutions and communities through which a canon takes shape (more information about this project can be found here: https://avid3828770.altervista.org and https://www.youtube.com/@nonsolomuse4434)

In addition, she is completing the co-authored monograph Anne Carson: letteratura liquida (under contract with Mimesis): the first monograph in Italian on the poetry of Anne Carson, which will include a significant portion of the book on the reception of her work in Italian contemporary poetry. 

She is the co-founder of the Weaving Media Research Network (2022–Present), Non solo muse: panorama della poesia contemporanea italiana (University of Oxford, 2021–2024), Italian Poetry Today (University of Oxford, 2019–2024), and the Gender & Authority Network (2016–2019).

Please visit her Utrecht University’s webpage for more information: https://www.uu.nl/staff/ABardazzi