Italian Research

Diana Berruezo-Sánchez brings together different threads of research that combine the Italian influence and the study of minorities in the Early Modern period. She has explored the literary relations between Spanish Golden Age texts and Italian sources, particularly the novella genre, in her PhD and a number of publications. Her principal interest lies in the way texts circulate beyond their national borders, creating a network of influences that is key to the understanding of the development of literary traditions. More recently, her interests have led her to explore the image of enslaved Black Africans in Early Modern Spanish literature and the enslaved African’s poetry in Spanish, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Her next monograph aims to uncover unheard poetry sung by 16^th- and 17^th-century enslaved Black Africans in Spain, as well as to interrogate –and reverse– enslaved Black African’s invisibility in the Iberian Peninsula.

Alessandro Carlucci is 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.

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.

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.

I work in the field of eighteenth-century literature and thought, with a particular interest in the ways in which authors create a public image of themselves, both in their lifetime and after their death.

My doctorate project focuses on the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) and his 1944 collection of prose sketches L’Adalgisa — Disegni milanesi, with special regard to the autographs of the book.

Barbara Olla is a DPhil candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2006 Barbara graduated in Modern Literature from the University of Cagliari. In 2013 she joined the University of Oxford, earning a MSt in Medieval and Modern Languages.

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.

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.

Research