Rebecca WalkerResearch Fellow

Email: rewalker@tcd.ie

I received my MA in French and Italian and MLitt in Italian Studies from the University of St Andrews, respectively in 2016 and 2017. In 2021 I was awarded a PhD in Italian from St Andrews, the research for which was funded by the Carnegie Trust. Before joining Trinity College Dublin as a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow, I was Associate Lecturer in Italian at St Andrews (2021-22), a Research Associate with the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (2022-23), and a Modern Humanities Research Association Postdoctoral Scholar (2022-23).

Research

My research is focused on twentieth and twenty-first century women's writing across languages, with a particular concentration on Italian. My doctoral research examined the motif of fragmentation in the novels of Elena Ferrante and Goliarda Sapienza, arguing that the contributions of women writers are central to and innovative within a broader canon of fragmented narratives in twentieth-century Italy which includes modernist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern texts. This has culminated in my first book, Fragile Selves, Fragile Others: Fragmentation in the Novels of Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante, which I am presently preparing for publication. Beyond this, I have published in Italianist and comparatist contexts on the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Sally Rooney, and continue to work in this area.

My IRC fellowship and second book project is titled Madonnas, Mystics, and Materialists: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Italian Women’s Writing. This work investigates how scholarship in Italian Studies can better account for the religious dimensions of modern and contemporary Italian women’s writing. The research underscores how a diverse cohort of women writers from Grazia Deledda to Shirin Ramzanali Fazel have reflected in a literary context on questions at the intersection of spirituality, society, and identity, and addressed existential problems with rigour and creativity. My aim is to provide a window on the various responses to Roman Catholicism and the complex spiritual landscapes represented in the work of women writers in modern Italy, revealing Italy as a plural religious space where theologies, beliefs, and practices interact and conflict. I also hope to advance a move within the broader Humanities towards re-elaborating or recuperating the role which religion continues to play in modern texts, presenting a post-secular or religiously engaged critical approach to modern Italian literature as one which solidifies the interdisciplinary outlook of contemporary research in Modern Languages.

Selected peer-reviewed publications

with King-Ho Leung, ‘Compliant and impetuous: the phenomenology of existence in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels’, Textual Practice (2023), pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2210117. Open access.

‘Mean Girls and Melancholics: Insidious Trauma in The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney’, in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022), pp. 335-358. Open access.

‘Bringing Up the Bodies: Material Encounters in Elsa Morante’s La Storia’, Italian Studies, 76/1 (2021), pp. 82-95. Highly commended runner-up for the Society for Italian Studies Article Prize, 2021.

‘Picking Up the Pieces: Elena Ferrante’s Global Poetics of Fracture’, Modern Language Notes, 136/1 (2021), pp. 75-95.

‘A Language of Her Own: Willful Displacement and Nomadic Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 15/1 (2021), pp. 105-122.