Biography
Frances Clemente has completed her doctorate in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She holds a double degree in Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of Pisa and a MSt in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford, which was funded by the Modern Languages and Pembroke College Full Scholarship. She was a visiting student at the Sorbonne University (Paris-IV) and Warwick University and visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Her research on Italian cultural and literary production (c. 1850-c. 1930) is focussed upon the notions of alterity and otherness, and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving. She draws on methodologies taken from cultural and literary history, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian, feminist and queer criticism.
Her research interests include Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Italian Culture and Literature, Comparative Literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Literature and Science, Leopardi Studies, Neapolitan Culture.
She is currently working on the conversion of her doctoral dissertation into a monograph, to be titled The Ecstatic Dis-Order: A Cultural and Literary Investigation of Post-Unification Italy (1861-1915). The latter deals with the investigation of the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature between 1861 and 1915, looking at phenomena such as mystical raptures, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hysterical extases, hypnotic trances, orgasms, and the way they are represented by authors like Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Recent Publications
- with Greta Colombani, Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
- 'Leopardi “larmoyant” e meridionale: sul leopardismo nell’opera di Matilde Serao’, essay in edited volume,Contaminazioni Leopardiane, ed. by Olmo Andrea Calzolari, Alessandra Aloisi, Emanuela Tandello (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2024), 251-270
- 'From body of order to body of disorder: Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)’, Italian Studies, 2024, pp. 1–17, DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2024.2344406
- 'Alienation, innocence, and death in Naples: unmasking the poetic world of Antonio de Curtis’, The Italianist, 44.1 (2024): 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2024.2327238
- '“And now the great day had come, the 14th of May, 1865!”: Anna Vivanti-Lindau e il seicentenario dantesco’, Italian Studies, 78, 4 (2023): 399-420
Positions
- Lecturer in Italian
Subjects
- Italian
