Rebecca is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at St Hugh’s College. Before coming to Oxford, she studied at the University of St Andrews, was an Associate Lecturer in Italian at St Andrews (2021-22), and held postdoctoral positions at St Andrews (2022-23) and Trinity College Dublin (2023-25).
Teaching:
Rebecca teaches a variety of undergraduate papers in Italian literature and culture from the medieval period to the present day at St Hugh’s, Oriel, and New Colleges. She also lectures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature and teaches Italian-English translation for the sub-faculty.
Research:
Rebecca researches in modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture. Her primary concern has been with the relationship between self-formation and narrative in women’s life-writing in Italian, or rather, in how individual selves are represented in writing and in why particular narrative choices are deemed right or necessary. More recently, she is interested in exploring how theological language and themes are negotiated in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature, and in how theology and modern languuages can speak to one another in productive ways. Her research in these areas has been supported by the Carnegie Trust, the Modern Humanities Research Association, and Research Ireland.
Her first monograph, The Sense of Fracture in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante: Fragile Selves, Fragile Others (2025), uses feminist phenomenological theories of the relationship between the female body, self-consciousness, and the world to explore the meanings of fragmented female identity in the autobiographical writings of Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Novels. She is currently co-editing a special issue of Italian Studies on Catholic writer and activist Michela Murgia and preparing a second monograph on how Italian women writers including Grazia Deledda, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elena Ferrante have grappled with the ‘God question’ in their writing.
Selected publications:
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Reading Michela Murgia, ed. by Rebecca Walker and Gigliola Sulis, special issue of Italian Studies, 82.4 (forthcoming 2027). ‘A “Landscape Called I”: Dead Horse Bay and the Diasporic Self in Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know (2022)’, in Global Landscapes of the Italian Diaspora, ed. by Derek Duncan and Michele Monserrati (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2026). ‘“Leggere tutta la realtà’. La scrittura postsecolare di Michela Murgia’, in Religioni letterarie. Laboratorio su letteratura e post-secolarità (1990-2025), ed. by Marco Zonch (Peter Lang, 2026). ‘In bilico su un “silenzio parlante”. La Storia e la teologia di Elsa’ (with Lucia Battistel), in Elsa Morante e la storia del romanzo, ed. by Massimiliano Tortora (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2026). ‘Transformative Encounters: Sally Rooney and the Moral Worlds of Natalia Ginzburg’, Mapping Jewish Literary Presence in Italy: Circulation, Mediation, Reception, ed. by Natalie Dupré, Inge Lanslots, and Rachelle Gouldemans, special issue of Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2026. The Sense of Fracture in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante: Fragile Selves, Fragile Others (Legenda, 2025). Publication March 17th 2025. ‘“Una metamorfosi straordinaria”: Emotional Epistemologies in “Lo scialle andaluso” and La Storia’, Fifty Years of La Storia: Elsa Morante Beyond History, ed. by Franco Baldasso, and others, special issue of Annali d’italianistica, 42 (2024), pp. 379-404. ‘Compliant and impetuous: The phenomenology of existence in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels’ (with King-Ho Leung), Textual Practice, 38.5 (2023), pp. 789-807. ‘Mean Girls and Melancholics: Insidious Trauma in The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney’, in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Sapienza Editrice, 2022), pp. 335-58. ‘Picking Up the Pieces: Elena Ferrante’s Global Poetics of Fracture’, Elena Ferrante in a Global Context, ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis, Stiliana Milkova, and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, special issue of Modern Language Notes, 136.1 (2021), pp. 75-95. ‘A Language of Her Own: Willful Displacement and Nomadic Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 15.1 (2021), pp. 105-22. ‘Bringing Up the Bodies: Material Encounters in Elsa Morante’s La Storia’, Italian Studies, 76.1 (2020), pp. 82-95. |