Enrica Maria Ferrara, PhD (Reading)Teaching Fellow

Enrica Maria Ferrara (PhD, Reading) is a Teaching Fellow of Italian at the Department of Italian where she lectures in Italian Language and Culture since 2008. After completing her PhD at the University of Reading in 2007, she joined Trinity College Dublin as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow of the Irish Research Council and she continued working for the Italian department as a Visiting Research Fellow and then Adjunct Assistant Professor until she was awarded tenure as Teaching Fellow in 2017. From 2018 to 2020, during a career break from TCD, Dr. Ferrara was appointed Assistant Professor of Italian at UCD. At the end of her career break, she resumed her job as Teaching Fellow for the Department of Italian.

Dr. Ferrara’s main research expertise is in Italian Literature, but her research interests are broadly interdisciplinary and her methodological preference is for a comparative approach across various disciplines. The following are among Ferrara’s research interests:

Performance and Performativity in Literature and Film;
Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film;
The works of Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Vittorini;
Gender and Women’s Writing in Italian Literature;
Translation Practice and the Translator’s Visibility.

Research Profile

For several years Ferrara ’s research focused on a unique field of study, namely the intersection of theatre and narrative in 20th century Italian literature. During her postdoctoral studies, through analysis of texts by Calvino, Pasolini, and Vittorini, Ferrara demonstrated that the hybridization of dramatic and narrative modes of expression is consistent with the plurilinguism of Italian literature, thus highlighting continuity, rather than fracture, between the Modernist era and the so-called time of Neo-realism in 20th-century Italy.

Investigating and comparing cultural objects belonging to several cultures and chronological periods, from Boccaccio to Fernando De Rojas, from Shakespeare to Brecht, Ferrara’s research has always been widely interdisciplinary and transcultural, interested in the viewpoint of liminality and hybridity.

This also explains her interest in the practice of translation, which she has cultivated for several years, and in the research strand of posthumanism and environmental humanities. As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed.

Ferrara’s latest research focuses on how such hybrid posthuman identities are represented in contemporary literature and film.

Publications

Books:

Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini, Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014.
Calvino e il teatro. Storia di una passione rimossa, Oxford: Peter Lang, “Italian Modernities”, 2011.
Calvino e il mare dell’altro, Naples: Magma, 2008; available online.

Edited Volumes:

Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film. Boundaries and Identity, edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Staged Narratives /Narrative Stages, co-edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Florence: Franco Cesati, 2017.

Translated Books:

Disaster Narratives in Early Modern Naples. Politics, Communication and Culture, edited by D. Cecere, C. De Caprio, L. Gianfrancesco, P. Palmieri, translated from Italian to English by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Rome: Viella, 2018.
Osvaldo Gueriglia, Moralità. Etica universalista e soggetto morale, translated from Spanish to Italian by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Naples: La Città del Sole (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici), 2002.
Baltasar Porcel, Mediterraneo. Tumulti di un mare, translated from Spanish to Italian by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Naples: Magma, 1998.
Verso un nuovo scenario di partenariato Euromediterraneo, translated from Spanish to Italian by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Naples: Magma, 1997.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“Grief and Posthuman Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels: The Precarious Life of Women and the Right to Disappear”, MLN, Special Issue, Elena Ferrante in a Global Context, edited by T. de Rogatis, S. Milkova and K. Wehling-Giorgi, Vol. 136 No. 1, January 2021, pp. 96-117.
“Queering Family Roles and Gender Norms in Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino”, Reading in Translation, Special Issue edited by Stiliana Milkova, February 2021, https://readingintranslation.com/2021/02/22/queering-family-roles-and-gender-norms-in-natalia-ginzburgs-valentino/
“Il realismo performativo de ‘La Fiaba di Natale. Il sorprendente viaggio dell’Uomo dell’aria’ di Simona Baldelli, Nazione Indiana, 16 January 2021.
“Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels”, in Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film. Boundaries and Identity, edited by E. M. Ferrara, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
“How Italians Became Posthuman”, in Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film. Boundaries and Identity, edited by E. M. Ferrara, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
“Romanzo e teatro nel Novecento italiano”, in Storia del Romanzo in Italia, vol. III, edited by Giancarlo Alfano and Francesco De Cristofaro, Rome: Carocci, 2018.
“Nota introduttiva”, in Clarice Gouzy Tartufari, L’uomo senza volto, Ancona, Antonio Tombolini Editore, 2018, pp. 5-10.
“Introduction”, with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, in Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages. Essays on Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre, edited by E. M. Ferrara and C. Ó Cuilleanáin, Firenze, Franco Cesati Editore, 2017, pp. 9-29.
“Theatrical Realism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italian Narrative”, in Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages. Essays on Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre, edited by E. M. Ferrara and C. Ó Cuilleanáin, Firenze, Franco Cesati Editore, 2017, pp. 53-72.
“The Reception of Celestina in Italy: a Polyphonic Discourse”, Renaissance and Reformation, special issue edited by S. Jossa and A. Moroncini, 2017, pp. 91-120.
“The Author Re-codified: Pasolini between Giotto and Boccaccio”, Heliotropia,14, 2017, special issue edited by Guyda Armstrong and Stephen J. Milner, pp. 343-359.
“Elena Ferrante e la questione dell’identità”, Oblio, 26-27, 2017, pp. 47-55.
“Una riflessione su Domingo Notaro e tre poesie inedite”, Carte Allineate, 58, 2017 (23-09-2017).
“Macbeth and The Tempest: Shakespeare, Vittorini and the Anti-Fascist Struggle”, in Transnational Exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: From the Early Modern Period to the Present, edited by Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis, London, Routledge, 2017, pp. 208-220.
“Pirandello and Brecht’s Epic Theatre”, Carte Allineate, 55, 2017 (01-03-2017)
“Foreword”, in Domingo Notaro, Dall’irraggiunto irraggi percezione – From the Unreached Let Perception Radiate, translated by Kay McCarthy, Dublin, Dalkey Archive Press, 2017
“Calvino, Posthumanism and Sterne”, Carte Allineate, 54, 2017 (21-02-2017).
“Performative Realism and Post-humanism in The Days of Abandonment”, in The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins, edited by Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie Love, New York, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 129-157.
“Calvino, Ariosto e i centenari”, Carte Allineate, 52, 2016 (21-12-2016).
“Cinema di poesia e identità di genere ne L’odore dell’India di Pasolini”, Oblio, IV, 14-15, 2014, pp. 37-49.
“Vittorini in conversazione con Wilder”, Italica, 90, 3, 2013, pp. 398-421.
“Vittorini in conversazione con Shakespeare. Teatro e cultura popolare”, Italian Studies, 67, I, 2012, pp. 105-119.
“Il neo-realismo magico di Mariolina Venezia”, in Specchi di realtà. Aspetti del rapporto tra narrativa e società in Italia dopo il 1989, edited by Roberto Bertoni, Torino, Trinity College & Trauben, 2011, pp. 97-110.
“La Conversazione teatrale di Elio Vittorini”, in Un secolo per Vittorini. Atti della giornata di studio. Trinity College, Dublino, 18-04-2008, edited by Roberto Bertoni, Torino, Trinity College & Trauben, 2009, pp. 35-47.
“Calvino fra Lukács e Brecht: una lettura in chiave brechtiana de La panchina di Italo Calvino”, The Italianist, 27, 2007, pp. 99-124.
“La poetica teatrale giovanile di Italo Calvino”, l’Abaco, 2-3 (2003-2004), pp. 175-198.
“Un palombaro della superficie”, in Il fantastico e il visibile. L’itinerario di Calvino dal Neorealismo alle Lezioni Americane, Napoli, Libreria Dante & Descartes, 2000, pp. 270-276.

Selected Book Reviews:

Translators and Their Ghosts: Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales, Translated from Italian by Lawrence Venuti. Review by E. M. Ferrara and Stiliana Milkova, Reading in Translation, December 2020.
Elena Ferrante’s Key Words by Tiziana de Rogatis, translated by Will Schutt (Europa Editions, 2019), Annali d’Italianistica, Vol. 38 (2020), pp. 559-561.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, RTÉ Culture, 15 September 2020.
Evelina e le fate by Simona Baldelli, in “Translators on Books That Should Be Translated”, Reading in Translation, 1 August 2020.