Italian Staff
Postholders
Prof G Bonsaver
Research interests: modern Italian cultural history. Recently worked on censorship during the Fascist regime and on immigration in contemporary Italian cinema; currently working on the influence of U.S. culture in Post-Unification Italy.
Dr V De Gasperin
Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998); Vivian Lamarque (1946-); Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789); Benvenuto Italiano’s Il Passaggiere / The Passenger (1612); the history of teaching and learning Italian as a foreign language in Britain.
Prof N Gardini
The Renaissance; Stylistics and poetics; poetry; autobiographical fiction; translation from Latin and Greek, and from English. I am currently working on a book exploring lacuna and omission in the construction of literary sense.
Professor E Lombardi
Her main area of research is Dante and the Middle Ages. Her first book explores the interrelations between the notions of syntax and desire in medieval theology (Augustine), grammar (Modistae) and poetry (Dante). Her second book explores concepts of love and desire in the Middle Ages with focus on the episode of Francesca in Inferno 5. She has also published on early Italian poetry (the Sicilian School. Guido Cavalcanti, Petrarca). Other areas of interest are idea of the book in the Middle Ages, and the theme of intertextuality in the Renaissance epic-chivalric poem.
Prof F Southerden
Associate Professor of Medieval Italian
Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College
Lecturer in Italian, St Catherine’s College and Lady Margaret Hall
Academic background
Professor G A Stellardi
Chairman, Modern Languages FHS
Giuseppe Stellardi studied in Pavia and Paris and worked in Cape Town and Lancaster, before joining Oxford University . His main research areas lie in modern Italian literature, but he’s also interested in literary theory and continental philosophy. He has written on Dossi, Tarchetti, Michelstaedter, Svevo, Gadda, Moravia, Eco, Morante; also, on Deconstruction (Derrida), on Pensiero debole (Vattimo), and on metaphor. He has published a book on metaphor in Derrida and Heidegger, and one on the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda, as well as a translation in English of Carlo Michelstaedter’s “La persuasione e la rettorica”. He currently works on temporality in 20th-century Italian literature.
Professor E Tandello
E. Tandello’s research interests include Contemporary Italian poetry (in particular the poetry of Amelia Rosselli), Modernist drama (Pirandello), 20th century poetry in dialect; Leopardi.
Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages
Prof M D Maiden
Professor of the Romance Languages, Fellow of Trinity College
Martin Maiden’s principal research interests are in the field of the history of the Romance languages (with particular attention to inflectional morphology and dialectology), general historical linguistics, general morphological theory. While the main focus of his attention is Italo-Romance and Daco-Romance (Romanian), he maintains strong interests in French, Spanish, Dalmatian, Romansh and other Romance languages.
College Fellows and Lecturers
Dr Marta Arnaldi
Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian, St. Anne's College, Oxford
Stipendiary Lecturer, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature; Comparative Literature and Criticism; Diaspora Studies; Women’s Studies; Translation and Translation Studies.
Dr Marco Dorigatti
Marco Dorigatti graduated from Florence and then obtained a doctorate from the University of Oxford. His primary field of research is the chivalric poem of the Italian Renaissance from Boiardo to Tasso, especially Ariosto. He has edited various digital texts for the Oxford Text Archive and has published numerous articles on Boiardo, Ariosto and the chivalric tradition in the Renaissance, with significant studies also on the modern period (Grazia Deledda, Sibilla Aleramo, Virginia Woolf, Giuseppe Dessì) and on cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman). He is above all a philologist, and in this capacity he has produced the first-ever critical edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso secondo la princeps del 1516 (Florence, Olschki, 2006), published under the High Patronage of the President of the Italian Republic. Related interests: textual criticism and editing, textual bibliography, history of the book, Renaissance theatre and Renaissance women writers.
Research Fellows/Researchers
Dr Giacomo Comiati
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Member of the AHRC-funded project ‘Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c.1350-c.1650’
Dr G. Della Rocca de Candal
ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2014-18, Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages and the Bodleian Libraries15thBOOKTRADE project
Member of the 15cBOOKTRADE: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance project, Geri is in charge of liaising with libraries worldwide for inclusion of their incunabula descriptions into MEI, liaising with the Data
Dr C Dondi, OSI
PI ERC Project 15cBOOKTRADE, 2014-2019
Apr. 2014–Mar. 2019 ERC Consolidator Grant for the project 15cBOOKTRADE: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance, http://15cbooktrade.ox.ac.uk/
Dr Vincenzo Vitale
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Vincenzo Vitale studied Literature and Philosophy at the Universities of Salerno, Salzburg and Basel. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, working on the research project ‘Il pensiero della storia in Dante’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Research Assistants
Dr Marianna Bolognesi
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Marianna Bolognesi is a postdoctoral researcher working within the large UK AHRC-funded project Creative Multilingualism, a multi-institutional research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Creative Multilingualism involves a large cross-disciplinary team of academics working on the nexus between linguistic diversity and creativity.
Dr Alessandro Carlucci
Retained Lecturer, Pembroke
Alessandro Carlucci is a Retained Lecturer in Italian at Pembroke College and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Dr Carlucci’s research concerns the role of multilingualism, linguistic theories, and language policies in Italian history, from the Middle Ages to the present. He has published widely on the linguistic views that the Italian philosopher and political leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) expressed in his writings, and on neglected aspects of Gramsci’s biography. He is interested in the history of the Italian language, Italian cultural and political history, and the history of linguistics.
Dr Matthew Reza
I look at the migration of oral and written narratives, particularly the fairy-tale, from Italy to the US during the twentieth century. My research has also focused on fantastic literature, utopian narratives, the role of psychoanalysis in literature, possible world theory, and representations of madness.
Dr Elisabetta Tarantino
I am an honorary research fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and I sometimes help with the organization of conferences and the editing of books.
Language Teaching Staff
Angela Minini
Prof.ssa Angela Minini has been appointed by MAECI, Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, Lettrice di Ruolo di Lingua Italiana in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University.
Graduate Teaching Staff
Lucy Rayfield
Research Associate, St Benet's Hall
Lucy is a specialist in early modern drama and theatrical literature and culture, primarily in France and Italy. Her thesis considered the reception of Italian comedy in early modern France, investigating how sixteenth-century French writers used Italian sources to transform erudite comedy from a scholarly exercise into an autonomous literary genre, which could be employed by humanists both to enrich their culture and to elevate their language.
Retired Postholders
Prof P R J Hainsworth
Peter Hainsworth’s main research interests are in 13th- and 14th-century poetry and in 20th-century poetry and prose, particularly in the relationship between literature and Fascism.
Prof M L McLaughlin
Italian Renaissance Literature; Renaissance Humanism; Renaissance Literary Theory; Renaissance Biography; Alberti; Petrarch; Poliziano; Tasso; The Classical Legacy in Italian Literature; Translation in the Renaissance; Contemporary Italian Fiction; Italo Calvino; Andrea De Carlo; Translation and Translation Studies.
Prof D Zancani
History of Italian language and dialects; history of early printing; editing 15th-century texts; Renaissance literature and Italian courts; contemporary literature, especially Loi, Montale, Tondelli.
In Memoriam
Dr Paola Tomè
Marie Curie Fellow
Paola Tomè’s research interests focused on fifteenth-century scholarly works and culture. She has worked on Giovanni Tortelli (1400 c.ca – 1466), the first librarian of the rising Vatican Library, on the translations from Greek into Latin printed in the Veneto region in the fifteenth century, and has also dealt with the grammatical traditions from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
