Dr Francesco Giusti

BA (L'Aquila), MA (L'Aquila), PhD (Florence and Rome)

After completing my PhD at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Florence and Sapienza University of Rome in 2012, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014-2015), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2018). Before coming to Oxford as a Career Development Fellow in Italian at Christ Church and Associate College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John’s College, I taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin (2019-2021).

I teach most areas of Italian literature for both Prelims papers and the Final Honours School, from Dante and the Middle Ages to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

My research focuses on the Italian poetic tradition and its modern and contemporary ramifications, but my work extends into other genres and media, as well as theoretical dimensions. Over the years I have written on Dante, Petrarch, Francesca Turini Bufalini, Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Eugenio Montale, and Giorgio Caproni, among several others, also exploring questions of temporality, gender, and performance. My new project on 'gestural communities' developed out of my long-term interest in the history and theory of the lyric, which led to my monographs 'Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto' (2015) and 'Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza' (2016), devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry. In recent years, working at the intersection of literature and theory, I have increasingly begun to scrutinise the ways in which lyric discourse offers the possibility to rethink certain concepts and socio-cultural practices in much broader and transdisciplinary terms. My project starts from the investigation of the transnational and transmedia developments of the lyric in the Italian experimental scene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to explore a different model of community formation and its cultural and political implications.

Monographs

Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (Rome: Carocci, 2016)

Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (L'Aquila: Textus Edizioni, 2015)

Edited volumes

A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, co-edited with Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello (Cambridge: Legenda, forthcoming 2022)

The Work of World Literature, co-edited with Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021)

Poesia e nuovi media, co-edited with Damiano Frasca and Christine Ott (Florence: Cesati Editore, 2018)

Latest articles (selected)

'The Hinge of Time: Mothers and Sons in Barthes and Augustine', Exemplaria (forthcoming 2021)

'Rispondere solo a Beatrice: "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" e il rischio della ripetizione lirica', Revue des études dantesques, 2 (2018), 87-109

'Temporalità liriche. Ripetizione e incompiutezza tra Dante e Caproni, Montale e Sanguineti', California Italian Studies, 8 (2018), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87x199p7

'Il cerchio che non chiude. Forme della temporalità nella poesia contemporanea', Sig.Ma. Quaderni di letterature comparate, teatro e arti dello spettacolo, 1 (2017), 75-102

'Tra il "bruco defunto" e la "farfalla apparitura": Gozzano e la crisalide del Modernismo', Critica Letteraria, XLIV, IV, 173 (2016), 707-732

'Per un’etica del discorso lirico: una lettura della "Ginestra" di Leopardi', Between, 5.10 (2015), https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/1695