In my new monograph, Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing. A Reassessment (University of Toronto Press, 2024) I show how food imagery in different historical periods challenges established political discourses by conveying unexpressed, alternative, or transgressive emotions.Through literary analysis, archival research, and philosophical approaches to the senses, emotions, and food, the book considers a variety of authors, from the celebrated to the hardly known, from the 1920s to the present day. I argue that in different ways, throughout the decades, the conceptual domain of food has helped express forms of selfhood that push the boundaries of womanhood and interact with cultural and political panoramas at national and international levels. Building an alternative history of Italian women and their creativity, the book shows how the interplay of the senses and emotions becomes a profitable way to illuminate overlooked aspects of women’s subjectivity. Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing ultimately reassesses women’s writing, giving value to the marginality of women’s bodies and positions through the conceptual domain of food. This research has been supported by a fellowship at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London, and a Fellowship at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. The book has been awarded the International Flaiano Prize in Italian Studies “Luca Attanasio” 2025.
My research on food and emotions has generated two conferences, public engagement initiatives, and several outputs. I was awarded a public engagement grant to take my food and war research to the War Museum of Scotland and the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh during the Being Human Festival 2019.
Recent publications are my analysis of the dynamics and experiences of the black market in WWII Italy Modern Italy 29, no. 1 (2024): 38–50, doi:10.1017/mit.2023.56 OA and a study of women’s food protests in that same period co-authored with Paula Schwartz (Middlebury College). In the latter article, through the reading of the French and Italian women’s underground press, we examine the anti-fascist discourse around food demonstrations. We shed light on a practice that was in Italy as frequent as in France but that, unlike the French counterpart, has fallen between the cracks of history. The article is part of an Italian special issue on food and war that I have edited and is forthcoming in the Journal of Romance Studies (Liverpool University Press).
My interest in emotion studies started with my work on memory and nostalgia. I edited the volume Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Trauma and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture (FDUP, 2018). More here.
My previous research publications include my monograph Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth-Century Italian Women’s Writing (UTP, 2012) where I uncovered a bond between mother and daughter structured on extra-lingual communication, indeed a corporeal bond. The book has been translated into Italian with the title Corpi e linguaggi (Il Poligrafo, 2014). My research interest in bodies, gender and sexualities has also led me to investigate the interrelations between subjects and spatialities. My edited volume Italian Women Writers 1800-2000: Boundaries, Borders and Transgression (FDUP, 2014) brings together scholars of three continents and deals with concepts of spatial and cultural boundaries, hybridity and border identities as interpreted by Italian women writers and poets. My article in this volume analyses Matilde Serao’s accounts of her journeys to Egypt and Jerusalem, as well as to various places in Italy. With this study, I engage with women’s travel writing and visions of the Orient, topics that I investigate again, as part of my research about visions of Europe and colonial Libya in 1930s travel writing.
I have always been keen to transmit research in my discipline to the wider community. In Melbourne, I founded and organised a series of research seminars ‘Research in Italian Studies in Melbourne’ (RISM). in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture.