MHRA Research Scholar in Modern European Languages
Lecturer in Italian at St Hilda’s College
Academic background
Frances Clemente has completed her doctorate in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She holds a double degree in Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of Pisa and a MSt in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She was visiting student at the Sorbonne University and Warwick University and visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Research
Her research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian cultural and literary production focuses upon the notions of alterity and otherness, and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving. She draws on methodologies taken from cultural studies, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, feminist, ecofeminist, and queer criticism. Her research is distinctive for its broad chronological arc as well as its interdisciplinary outlook.
Her first monographic project, entitled The Ecstatic Dis-Order: A Cultural and Literary Investigation of Post-Unification Italy (1861-1915), deals with the investigation of the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature between 1861 and 1915, looking at phenomena such as mystical raptures, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hysterical extases, hypnotic trances, orgasms, and the way they were represented by authors like Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, and Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is underpinned by the theoretical framing of an ‘ecstatic dis-order’, unveiling a dialectical tension between ecstatic, disorderly drives and normative, orderly ones, against the backdrop of the development of modern Italy.
Her new project, entitled The Woman Is a Beast: Animalising Female Characters from Post-Unification to Fascist Italy (1861-1943), will investigate in-depth the association of women with animals in Italian literature and culture from their scientific debasement during the post-unification years to their othering/exoticisation under colonialist and fascist rule. Drawing on ecofeminist and psychoanalytic thought, it will offer innovative attention to the theme and to the way it explores questions of animality, gender, and race in the years under study, ultimately tracing a genealogy of the subalternisation of women as beasts, and foregrounding it as a timely trope for the present day.
She has published on authors like Giacomo Leopardi, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Elsa Morante, Matilde Serao, Antonio De Curtis (Totò), Silvio Pellico, Hans Christian Andersen, and Anna Vivanti-Lindau.
She has a distinctive interest in Southern Italian and, specifically, Neapolitan culture, history, and literature, which she pursues both at an academic and public engagement level.
Teaching
Lectures
Italian Paper VIII, ‘Modern Period Paper’, ‘Natalia Ginzburg’
-Italian Paper IV, ‘History and Society in Modern Italy’
-Italian Paper VIII, ‘Modern Period Paper’, ‘Literature in the Ottocento’
Seminars and Tutorials
-Italian, Paper IV, ‘Modern Italian Narrative and Cinema’
-Italian, Paper III, ‘Aspects of Italian Lyric Poetry’
-Italian, Paper XII, 'Modern Italian Women Writers'
-Italian, Paper VIII, 'Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga, Pirandello'
Language
-Italian Language Skills
-Italian Prose (Translation into Italian)
-Italian Finalists Oral
-Italian Pre-sessional course
Publications
- with Greta Colombani, Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
- with Gennaro Ambrosino and Jacopo Francesco Mascoli, ‘Scientific and Technological Imaginaries in Italian Literature and Culture’, special issue of Notes on Italian Studies, 3 (2025)
- ‘Leopardi “larmoyant” e meridionale: sul leopardismo nell’opera di Matilde Serao’, essay in edited volume, Contaminazioni Leopardiane, ed. by Olmo Andrea Calzolari, Alessandra Aloisi, Emanuela Tandello (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2024), 251-270
- ‘From body of order to body of disorder: Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)’, Italian Studies, 2024, pp. 1–17, DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2024.2344406
- ‘Alienation, innocence, and death in Naples: unmasking the poetic world of Antonio de Curtis’, The Italianist, 44.1 (2024): 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2024.2327238
- ‘“And now the great day had come, the 14th of May, 1865!”: Anna Vivanti-Lindau e il seicentenario dantesco’, Italian Studies, 78, 4 (2023): 399-420
- ‘Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Una lettura queer’, Mimesis Journal, 10, 1 (2021): 169-192
- ‘“Negletta prole”: Leopardi’s legacy in Morante’s Aracoeli’, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, 28 (2021): 345-368
- ‘Entre “donneschi furori” et finalités pedagogiques: une lecture de l’Erodiade (1832) de Silvio Pellico’, in Woman Language Literature in Italy, 3 (2021): 53-65
- ‘A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence. Three months abroad di Anna Vivanti-Lindau. Impressioni di una letterata tedesca sulla Napoli del secondo Ottocento’, Intersezioni. Rivista di Storia delle Idee, XLI, 1 (April 2021): 25-43
- ‘Where “the blood boils:” Hans Christian Andersen’s sojourn in Naples’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 41, 1, (2021): 95-134
- ‘Leopardi e Camus al cospetto del problema religioso e divino’, Merope, XXVII, 72 (July 2020): 47-62)
- ‘Performing childbirth: the figliata of the femminielli’, Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 3 (2020): 305-322