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Dr Manuele Gragnolati

Dr Manuele Gragnolati
Laurea Pavia, MA Oxf, DEA Paris, PhD Columbia

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Position: Fellow and University Reader in Italian Literature, Tutor in Italian

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Manuele Gragnolati studied Classical Philology, Medieval Studies and Italian Literature at the Universities of Pavia (BA and MA), Paris (MA) and Columbia in NYC (PhD). Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2003, he taught Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. A significant part of his research focuses on Dante and medieval literature and culture, especially on the relationship between identity and corporeality in eschatological representations, on understandings of physical pain and on concepts of desire. He also interested in the intersections between language and subjectivity from Dante's Vita Nuova to the present and in modern appropriations of Dante.

He is the author of Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (2005) and the co-editor of The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli" (2009), Aspects of the Performative in the Middle Ages (2009, with Almut Suerbaum), Dante's Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity (2010), Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2011), The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Traditions, Subjectivities, and Geographies (2012), and Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012). He collaborated with Teodolinda Barolini on an edition of Dante's Rime (2009) and published essays on medieval and modern authors from Bonvesin da la Riva and Guido Cavalcanti to Giovanni Pascoli, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giorgio Pressburger. His new volume "Amor che move". Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini, Morante is forthcoming in 2013. This book offers a joint exploration of the concept of selfhood in Dante and authors who have engaged with Dante's oeuvre in the late twentieth century from a "feminine"/feminist and queer position.

Manuele enjoys studying and teaching literature for its critical potential to challenge traditional ways of thinking and is particularly intrigued by texts that propose different figurations of reality, whether in the past or in the present. He continues to be interested on issues of (inter)subjectivity and language in diachronic and multi-disciplinary perspectives, on feminist and queer questions, and in general on ways to rethink and "open" concepts of selfhood and subjectivity. He believes in an interdisciplinary approach to culture and in collaborating with colleagues with different intellectual histories and backgrounds. He serves as Associate Director at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
 

 We are grateful to the Il Circolo Italian Cultural Association for its continuing support for the teaching of Italian at Somerville.