Italian Staff
Statutory Professors
Professor S A Gilson
Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian; Fellow of Magdalen College
Simon Gilson studied Italian and French at Leeds University and took his PhD in Italian Literature at Cambridge University. He was lecturer in Italian at Leeds University (1998-99), and at Warwick University was Professor of Italian (2010-17) where he served as Chair of Italian (2006-09), Chair of the Sub-Faculty of Modern Languages (2012-14) and Chair of the Arts Faculty (2015-17).
Postholders
Professor Emma Bond
Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies
Emma joined the sub-faculty as Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies in 2022. She is Tutorial Fellow of Italian at St Hugh’s College, and Lecturer at New College and Oriel College.
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
Professor of Italian
Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College
Lecturer in Italian, St Catherine’s College and Lady Margaret Hall
Academic background
Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages
Prof Martin 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 inflexional 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
Laming Junior Fellow, The Queen’s College, Oxford
Stipendiary Lecturer, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
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.
Dr Francesco Giusti
Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian, Christ Church
Francesco Giusti’s research focuses on the Italian poetic tradition and its modern and contemporary ramifications, with a specialisation in lyric studies, but his work extends into other genres and media, as well as comparative and theoretical dimensions. He has written on Dante, Petrarch, Turini Bufalini, Leopardi, Gozzano, Montale, and Caproni, among several others, also exploring questions of lyric theory, temporality, identity, performance, and community formation.
Dr Lachlan Hughes
Lecturer and Director of Studies in Italian, St Hilda's College
Research
Sean Wyer
Sean Wyer is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His forthcoming dissertation explores ‘cosmopolitan’ rhetoric and cultural memory in Sicily, using a mixture of cultural studies and anthropological methods.
Research Fellows/Researchers
Dr Laura Banella
Honorary Research Fellow
Laura Banella is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame, US.
Dr Alberica Bazzoni
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature (Università per Stranieri di Siena); Hon. Faculty Research Fellow (Oxford); and Affiliated Fellow (ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)
Alberica Bazzoni is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena; Hon. Research Fellow at the University of Oxford; and Affiliated Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She completed her DPhil in Italian Literature at the University of Oxford, and then was Lector in Italian at the same university, Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at St. Hugh’s College (2018-2019), British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick (2017-2020), with a project on gender and the Italian literary canon, and Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin (2020-2022), with a project on the temporality of the present and trauma. Her main research areas are modern Italian literature, literary theory, sociology of culture, and feminist, queer and decolonial studies.
Dr Rebecca Bowen
AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Rebecca Bowen is a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC project ‘Envisioning Dante, c. 1472-c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page’. She is also an associate scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz — Max-Planck-Institut.
Maria Clotilde Camboni
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowhttps://oxford.academia.edu/MariaClotildeCamboni
Marie Skłodowska-Curie project Between rediscovery and recreation: Renaissance accounts of medieval Italian vernacular literary tradition (1476-1530). The research aims to provide the first historical reconstruction of the evolution of views on the medieval Italian vernacular literary tradition in Italy during the period that leads to the formation of an established canon of vernacular literary authors (1476-1530)
Dr Alessandro Carlucci
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Alessandro Carlucci is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Dr Carlucci’s research concerns the role of language contact, 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 Giacomo Comiati
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Current Position
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow (Oxford) and Research Fellow (Padua, Italy)
Professor G A Stellardi
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
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.
Junior Research Fellows
Dr Adele Bardazzi
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Dr Adele Bardazzi is Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Honorary Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She completed her D.Phil at Christ Church, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Emanuela Tandello.
Dr Serena Vandi
Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature, St Hugh's College
Research
Research Assistants
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
Dr Alice Gussoni
Lecturer in Italian Language
Alice Gussoni, Ph.D (University of Oxford)
Lecturer in Italian Language
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
Dr 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 doctoral 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
University Lecturer
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
Emeritus Fiat Serena Chair of Italian
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.
Professor E Tandello
Associate Professor in Italian
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.
Prof D Zancani
Faculty Lecturer
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.
Medieval Period (900-1450)
13th Century
14th Century
15th Century
Early Modern Period (1450-1750)
16th Century
17th Century
19th Century
20th Century
20th Century (to 1950)
20th Century (1950 onwards)
Comparative Literature
Contemporary Literature
Cultural History
Cultural Studies
Early Modern
Film
History
History of the Book
Literary History
Literature
Literature and Theory
Medieval
Medieval Literature
Modern
Modern Literature
Novel/Narrative Prose
Poetics
Poetry (post 1950)
Prose (post 1950)
Translation
