I did my undergraduate and MA studies at the University of Bologna, Italy. In 2006 I came to King's to do a PhD in Comparative Literature and I took up a lectureship there in 2009. I have been Reader in Comparative Literature since 2021.

I co-edit Comparative Critical Studies, the journal of the British Comparative Literature Association. I have been part of the Leverhulme International Network grant "Landascapes of Realism" (2016-2019) and was co-I in the AHRC-funded project "Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture Between Britain, France and Italy, 1789-1815" (2019-2023), which seeks to uncover the mobility of revolutionary language and the role of translators as political actors. 

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Comparative literature and theories of world literature
• Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in the European languages
• Literature and political thought, especially in the age of revolutions
• Translation and cultural transfer
• Literary geographies
• Literature in dialects, lesser used and minority Languages
• Distant reading, network theory and the digital humanities

My research interests are quite diverse, but tend to centre on the transnational communication of languages and ideas and on theories of cultural spaces (regional, national, global) I am the author of Realism and Space in the Novel (Routledge, 2013) and one of the editors of Landscapes of Realism (John Benjamins, 2021-2022), which received the 2024 ESCL Exellence Award for Collaborative Research. I have worked above all on the European nineteenth century, including writers such as Goethe, Manzoni, Flaubert, Dickens, George Eliot, Leopardi, P.B. Shelley and Byron; I have also written about Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Claudio Magris and Orhan Pamuk; and about issues including national stereotypes, historical perspective, and questions of scale in comparative and world literature.

I have supervised and am happy to supervise PhD students whose interests connect with any of my interests; previous students' work has been diverse geographically (concerning France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, China and Japan), temporally and in approach.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

Theories and methods of comparative literature, the European and world novel, literature and revolution, poetry in minority and endangered languages. 

Expertise and Public Engagement

In connection with my work on revolutionary-era translations, I have organised a series of collaborative translation workshops with Cristina Viti, Dr Sanja Perovic and students across Europe, which led to performances, a film, a radio programme and the book An Anarchist Playbook (Tenement Press, 2024). My research on minority languages, especially Friulian, has been featured in newspaper articles and interviews in Friuli and in the diaspora. Cristina's and my translation of Pasolini's The Turks in Friuli has been used to subtitle the televised performance of the play on Italian national TV. 

Selected Publications

• Radical Voices and Revolutionary Discourses of Translation (Routledge, forthcoming). Editor and contributor. Other editors: Nigel Ritchie, Jacob McGuinn, Sanja Perovic.
• Realism and Space in the Novel (Routledge, 2013).
• Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021). Editor and contributor. Other editors: Dirk Goettsche and Robert Weninger.
• Perspective and Historical Knowledge: Magris, Sebald, and Pamuk, MLN 133 (2028): 1254-1257.
• Pasolini and Minor Comparativism: Transnationalizing Dialect Poetry"", in Comparative Critical Studies 20.2-3 (2023): 267-292"