My research interests

Orality and folklore

My main research interest is the perception of orality (narrative, life histories) from the second half of the nineteenth century to modern days, with particular attention to notions like “folk”, “people”, “popular” and the connotations they carry along. I am also interested in the way the idea of nation was formed and spread among the population through elements symbolising a national heritage (e.g. folklore collections), as well as in the role that the population played in this operation.

Cultural translation

My interest revolves around those processes that may not generally be defined as translation (e.g. the transfer of oral material into a written form), but that nevertheless show some important similarities with it and, as such, may benefit from an approach drawing from Translation Studies theories.

 
You can read my thesis' abstract here. 

 

 Articles

  • “Formation, Evolution and Degeneration of a Boundary, with reference to 19th-Century Italian Folkloristics.” Gemma Twitchen and Jenni Ramone (eds), Boundaries: Critical, Creative and Interdisciplinary Methods of Making, Breaking, and Negotiating Boundaries, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press 2007, pp.159-176
  • “Ethnography as a Metaphor of Translation.” Norwich Papers: Studies in Translation 11, 2003, pp. 67-78

Papers

  • “ ‘Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: the Hybridising Process of the Self-Help Genre in Italy”, Interpreting, Representing and Recording, University of Warwick, Coventry (UK), 9-10 June 2006
  • “Remembering the New: Creating National Identity Through Folklore Collections”, Betwixt and Between II: Memory and Cultural Translation, Queen’s University, Belfast (UK), 18-21 April 2006
  • “Authorship in Orality: A Feasible Hypothesis?”, Translation, Memory, Identity, University of Warwick, Coventry (UK), 17-18 June 2005
  • “What is Folk? The Creation of a Concept”, ACUME project Memory and Mediation – European Narratives of Identity, University of Southern Denmark, Odense (DK), 10-11 September 2004
  • “Italian 19th-Century Folkloristics and the Construction of a National Folk”, Writing Back in/and Translation, Umeå University, Umeå (Sweden), 6-7 November 2003