I am an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL (since 2008). During Fall 2009, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in International Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. I received my PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2007), with a specialization in Modern Italian Studies, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature (Italian and French). I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Gender in the Novel. The Ideology of Character in Modern Italian Novels." Organized around the work of four Italian authors, this project explores the intersection between narrative, epistemology and gender in modern Italian literature. I am particularly interested in the literary category of character as an ideological notion. Characters constitute the privileged focus of an analysis of the novel that encompasses both structure and reference, and that takes gender as its central analytical and ideological paradigm. Through the discussion of specific characters, I explore how gender informs not only the characters' biography and behavior, but the very narrative and epistemological structures that shape their fictional existence and literary works at large. I have also a passion for the history of publishing and of print technologies. My second book project will be devoted to a sample of Italian "storia dell'editoria" within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on Milanese publisher Sonzogno.
Articles and Book Reviews
Gendered Quests: Analysis, Revelation and the Epistemology of Gender in Neera's "Teresa", "Lydia" and "L'indomani", The Italianist (2008)
This essay is devoted to Milanese fin-de-siècle writer Neera, more specifically to the three novels...
Book Manuscript
The Ideology of Character: An Introduction (2007)
I discuss here the theoretical and critical concerns that shape my analyses of Alessandro Manzoni's...
Presentations
Narrative, Masculinity and Homosexuality: Gender Ideology in Elsa Morante, CICIS Conference (2007)
In this paper I analyze the character of Manuele, the protagonist of Elsa Morante’s last...