Background and research information
Born and raised in Italy, Silvia Valisa holds an undergraduate degree from Università di Pavia, and a D.E.A. (Diplome d’études approfondies) in French Literature from the Université la Sorbonne Nouvelle. She received a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2007, and in 2009 was a post-doctoral fellow at the Cogut Center for International Humanities, at Brown University.
Her research interests include modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture, gender studies, comparative literature (Italian and French), the history of publishing, visual culture, and trauma theory.
Recent publications include an essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’odore dell’India and post-colonial trauma, a study of the relationship between literature and photography in Neera’s Fotografie matrimoniali, as well as an introduction to the history of the first forty years (1861-1900) of Milanese publishing house Sonzogno.
Her book manuscript “Dissonant Quests. Subjects, Knowledge and Narrative in Modern Italian Novels” explores the intersection between narrative, epistemology and gender in a selection of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian novels, from Manzoni’s I promessi sposi to Morante’s Aracoeli. Her research explores how gender informs not only the characters' biography and behavior, but the very narrative and epistemological structures that shape their fictional existence and the novel at large.
Her second project is borne out of her interest in the history of publishing. It will be focused on one of the editorial protagonists of post-Unification Italy, the publishing house Sonzogno. Its aim is to render its catalogue accessible online and to analyze its cultural, ideological and economic role in shaping a different literary, ideological and information system in Unified Italy.
See also:
.Courses taught in Fall 2011:
ITT 3430, Masterpieces of Italian Literature and Culture in Translation
ITA 5940, Teaching Practicum |
