Manuele Gragnolati
Senior Research Fellow; Professor of Italian Literature, University of Paris-Sorbonne; Associate Director, ICI Berlin
Manuele Gragnolati is Full Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Associate Director of the ICI Berlin, as well as Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.
He studied Classical Philology, Medieval Studies, and Italian Literature at the Universities of Pavia (BA and MA), Paris IV-Sorbonne (MA) and Columbia in NYC (PhD).
Before joining the University of Paris-Sorbonne, he taught at Dartmouth College from 1999 to 2003 and from 2003 to 2015 at the University of Oxford, where he was Full Professor of Italian Literature. A significant part of his research, including his first monograph “Experiencing the Afterlife”, focuses on Dante and medieval literature and culture, especially on the significance of corporeality in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century eschatology.
He is also interested in the concept of linguistic subjectivity from Dante’s “Vita Nova” to the present, in modern appropriations of medieval texts, and in feminist and queer theory. He has written a substantial commentary on Dante’s Rime and published essays on medieval and modern authors. His second monograph “Amor che move” offers a ‘diffractive’ exploration of body, language, desire in Dante and authors who have engaged with Dante’s oeuvre in the late twentieth century from a “feminine”/feminist and queer position.
Manuele Gragnolati enjoys studying and teaching literature for its critical potential to challenge normative ways of thinking and is particularly interested in texts that propose different figurations of reality, whether in the past or in the present. He believes in an interdisciplinary approach to culture and in collaborating with colleagues with different intellectual histories and backgrounds. At the ICI Berlin he has run several interdisciplinary projects on Dante, Elsa Morante, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, which have often resulted in collective volumes.
Publications
Books / Edited Volumes
The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi et Francesca Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
‘Petrolio’ 25 anni dopo. Biopolitica, eros e verità nell’ultimo romanzo di Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. by Carla Benedetti, Manuele Gragnolati, and Davide Luglio (Macerata, Quodlibet, 2020)
Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: il Saggiatore, 2013)
The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies, co-ed. with Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012)
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations and Rewritings in the Twentieth- and Twenty-first Centuries, co-ed. with Fabio Camilletti and Fabian Lampart (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011)
Dante’s Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, co-ed. with Sara Fortuna and Jürgen Trabant (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)
Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)
Articles
‘L’estetica queer di Petrolio, il gioco e il paradosso dell’impegno’, in ‘Petrolio’ 25 anni dopo, ed. by Carla Benedetti, Manuele Gragnolati, and Davide Luglio (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2020), pp. 63–77; with Christoph Holzhey
‘Insegnare con un classico. La complessità di Dante e lo spirito critic’, in In cattedra. Il docente universitario in otto autoritratti, ed. by Chiara Cappelletto (Milano: Cortina, 2019), pp. 177–214
‘Autobiografia d’autore’, Dante Studies, 136 (2018), p. 143–160; with Elena Lombardi
‘Zwischen Unsterblichkeit und Auferstehung: das körperliche Jenseits der Göttlichen Komödie’, Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch, 93 (2018), pp. 56–72
‘Una performance senza gerarchia: la riscrittura bi-stabile della Vita nova’, in Vita nova. Fiore. Epistola XIII, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Luca Carlo Rossi, Paola Allegretti, Natascia Tonelli, and Alberto Casadei (Firenze: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018), pp. 67–86
‘From Paradox to Exclusivity: Dante’s and Petrarch’s Lyrical Eschatologies’, in The Unity of Knowledge in Pre-modern World: Petrarca and Boccaccio between Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (with Francesca Southerden), ed. by Igor Candido (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 129–52
‘Active Passivity? Spinoza in Pasolini’s Porcile‘ (with Christoph F. E. Holzhey), world picture, 10 (2015), pp. 1–10
‘Differently Queer: Sexuality and Aesthetics in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio and Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli’, in Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing: Rethinking Subjectivity, History and the Power of Art, ed. by Stefania Lucamante (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), pp. 205–18
‘Gluttony and the Anthropology of Pain in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio’, in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. by Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 238–50