Frances Clemente

Academic background

Frances Clemente 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, which was fully funded by the Modern Languages and Pembroke College Full Scholarship. She was visiting student at the Sorbonne University (Paris-IV), Warwick University, and Columbia University.

 

Research

Her research on Italian cultural and literary production (c. 1790-c. 1920) is focussed 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 and literary history, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian, feminist and queer criticism.

Her research interests include Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Italian Culture and Literature, Comparative Literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Literature and Science, Leopardi Studies, Neapolitan Culture.

Her DPhil project, fully funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Studentship, the Baillie Gifford Scholarship, and the Clarendon Fund Scholarship, 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 are represented by authors like Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, Gabriele D’Annunzio.

 

Publications

  • Clemente, Frances. “ ‘Negletta prole’: Leopardi’s legacy in Morante’s Aracoeli” in Cuadernos de Filología Italiana (28, 2021: 345-368)

  • Clemente, Frances. “Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Una lettura queer” in Mimesis Journal (10,1, 2021: 169-192)

  • Clemente, Frances. “Entre «donneschi furori» et finalités pedagogiques: une lecture de l’Erodiade (1832) de Silvio Pellico»”, in Woman Language Culture Literature in Italy (3, 2021: 53-65)

  • Clemente, Frances. “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” in Intersezioni. Rivista di storia delle Idee (XLI, 1, aprile 2021: 25-43)

  • Clemente, Frances. “Where the ‘blood boils:’ Hans Christian Andersen’s sojourn in Naples” in Quaderni d’Italianistica (41, 1, 2020: 95-134)

  • Clemente, Frances. “Leopardi e Camus al cospetto del problema religioso e divino” in Merope (XXVII, 72, July 2020: 47-62)

  • Clemente, Frances. “Performing childbirth: the figliata of the femminielli” in Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies (3, 2020: 305-322)

 

 

 

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