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Department of Italian

Eleonora Lima Visiting Research Fellow

contact: limae@tcd.ie

Eleonora Lima is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Italian at Trinity College Dublin, where she recently completed an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship with the project Mapping Remediation in Italian Literature Beyond the Digital Revolution (MAREITA). The goal of the project is to offer the first comprehensive history of computing in Italian literature, from the 1950s to the present. A monograph dedicated to the topic and titled A Literary History of Computing: Italian Authors Write Computer Culture is in preparation for the publisher Legenda.


Eleonora has published on the interconnection between literature, science, and technology, as well as on Italian cinema, and visual arts and literature. Her latest book, Le tecnologie dell’informazione nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi. Tre storie di rimediazione,was published by Firenze University Press in 2020.


Eleonora is a member of the Ethically Aligned Design for the Arts Committee (a part of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems), which engages in policy research and advocacy for an ethical practice and design of Artificial Intelligence in the arts.


She is also the blog editor and website manager for the AHRC-funded project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia.


Eleonora holds a BA in Italian Philology (University of Florence, 2005), a Master’s in Modern Philology (University of Florence, 2008), and a PhD in Italian and Cultural and Media Studies (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015). She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian at the University of Toronto (2017-2018), where she conducted research on the impact of cybernetics on Italian literary production of the 1960s-70s and taught both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level.


Research


Eleonora’s research mainly falls into two research streams: the convergence between Science and Technology Studies and literature, and the intermedial dialogue between literature and visual arts and media.


Eleanora is currently preparing a book manuscript arising from her Marie Curie project and titled A Literary History of Computing: Italian Authors Write Computer Culture, which is slated to be published by Legenda in the series Italian Perspectives. The book will be the first comprehensive history of computing in Italian literature and will investigate how, since the advent of computers and information science in 1950s, writers had to rethink the status of their very own tool—language—as well as the definition of human creativity. The book will provide a detailed evaluation of the process of remediation in Italian literature during the three main phases of the history of computers: the mainframe computer era (mid 1950s-1970s), the personal computer era (1980s-2000s), the ubiquitous computing era (2000s-present). To this end, Eleonora is combining interdisciplinary critical analyses of literary texts with Social Network Analysis and preparing a website called Narrating Computingdedicated to host and disseminate her research.


Eleanora's work on the interconnection between literature, science and technology has also resulted in a number of publications in top-ranked academic journals. She was invited to write the entry on “Technology” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and was selected by Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and PI of the research project Global AI Narratives, as the author of a chapter on AI in Italian literature for the forthcoming volume Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press 2022).
Eleonora’s research interests and publications also include literature and science; literature and the posthuman; the impact of cybernetics on the Italian culture of the mid-20th century; film and media studies.


In 2020, she published the monograph Le tecnologie dell’informazione nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi. Tre storie di rimediazione (Firenze University Press). The book addresses the effects of new media and technologies on the work of Italo Calvino and Paolo Volponi. By analysing their works dealing with the advent of information technologies, it provides a fresh look on the production of two Italian authors rarely studied from a comparative perspective, and offers a new interdisciplinary approach combining insights from the fields of literary criticism and media studies.

Publications

Authored Books

  1. Eleonora Lima, Le tecnologie dell’informazione nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi. Tre storie di rimediazione. Firenze University Press, 2020.
  2. Eleonora Lima (ed), Carlo Betocchi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Lettere, 1946-1970. Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2012.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters (published and accepted)

  1. Eleonora Lima, ‘Between Divinity and Dullness: The Advent of Personal Computers in the Italian Literature’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, vol. 40 no. 2, 2020, pp. 5-42.
  2. Eleonora Lima, ‘Disegnare il caos: scienza e pittura in Passare la spugna di Paolo Volponi’, Bollettino di italianistica, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 175-199.
  3. Eleonora Lima, ‘Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language, Gendered Technology and Female Body in Luciano Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpa’. In Enrica Maria Ferrara (ed) Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity. Palgrave, 2020, pp. 163-184.
  4. Eleonora Lima. “Technology.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2015. Article published March 25, 2021.
  5. Eleonora Lima, ‘Making Poetry Out of Industrial Alienation: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Deserto rosso’. In Carlo Baghetti, Jim Carter, Lorenzo Marmo (eds) Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor. Peter Lang, Italian Modernities Series, 2021, in press.
  6. Eleonora Lima at al., ‘The Voice of the Artist in the Age of the Algorithm.’ The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, 2021, in press.
  7. Eleonora Lima, ‘Francesco Leonetti e l’arte lunga di Arnaldo Pomodoro’, Retoriche dell’ecfrasi nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Letteratura & Arte), 2021 (accepted).
  8. Eleonora Lima, ‘Ranxerox: An Italian cyberpunk Golem.’ In Kanta Dihal and Stephen Cave (eds), Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, Oxford University Press, 2022 (accepted).
  9. Eleonora Lima, ‘Fellini’s Notes on Camp to John Waters.’ In Fellini, Italy, Cinema: International Conference on the Centenary of Federico Fellini’s Birth (1920-2020), Conference proceedings (accepted).
  10. Eleonora Lima, ‘Dino Buzzati’s Intelligent Machines.’ Quaderni d’Italianistica. Special issue on Dino Buzzati, 2022 (accepted).
  11. Eleonora Lima, ‘Megalopolis: Roberto Vacca’s and Herbert Pagani’s Dystopic Rock Opera.’ In Daniel Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo and Marco Malvestio (eds), Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities (provisional title), Liverpool University Press, 2023 (accepted).
  12. Eleonora Lima, ‘My mother was a computer: corporeità femminile e tecnologico postumano in Luciano Bianciardi e Tiziano Scarpa.’ In Marina Paino, Maria Rizzarelli and Antonio Sichera (eds.) Scritture del corpo, Atti del XVIII Convegno Internazionale della MOD (Catania 2016), ETS, 2019, pp. 389-396.
  13. Eleonora Lima, ‘Seguendoti, lottando con il tuo esistere e capire. Le collaborazioni e l’amicizia con Giuseppe Ungaretti.’ In Antonia Ida Fontana and Marco Marchi (eds) Ricordare Betocchi, Edizioni dell’Assemblea, 2018, pp. 55-73.
  14. Eleonora Lima, ‘Paolo Volponi’s La macchina mondiale as a Cybernetic Utopia: The Limits of a Solely Allegorical Interpretation.’ Forum Italicum, Fall 2017 issue, Vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 618-640.       

Others

  1. Eleonora Lima, ‘Amy Luckenbach & Luciano Berio, ‘A-ronne–Novissimum Testamentum’ (1997).’ Web video blog. Interdisciplinary Italy. 24 June 2020.
  2. Eleonora Lima, ‘Stripsody: Transforming Comics into Vanguard Art.’ Web blog post. Interdisciplinary Italy. 25 May 2020.
  3. Eleonora Lima, ‘When Literature and Technology Fail to Align.’ Web blog post. Interdisciplinary Italy. 25 September 2019.
  4. Eleonora Lima, ‘Verba Picta: Navigating Multimediality in the Italian Poetry of the Last Half Century.’ Web blog post. Interdisciplinary Italy. 21 March 2017.
  5. Eleonora Lima, ‘Book review: Jansen, Monica, and Maria Bonaria Urban (eds.) Televisionismo. Narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2015)’. Vol. 35: Annali d’italianistica, 2017.
  6. Eleonora Lima, ‘Contaminating the Opera Genre: Lo Specchio Magico (Urban Art Dance Opera).’ Web blog post. Interdisciplinary Italy. 28 June 2016.

In Preparation

  1. Eleonora Lima, A Literary History of Computing: Italian Authors Write Computer Culture (book in preparation for Legenda).
  2. Eleonora Lima, ‘Joys and Perils of Information Overload: Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco’ (in preparation for Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society).