Seashore Essays

Research

I completed my DPhil in English at the University of Oxford in 2021 and I specialise in comparative literature between English and Italian in the modernist period. In particular, I am fascinated by the imaginative way in which modern authors write about literature and reflect on their own writing in essays, articles, letters, diaries and creative work. I like to look at different theories of genre, style and the creative process from a cross-cultural perspective, to uncover how language and culture shape our understanding of literature’s value and desired effects. This, in turn, made me interested in the interplay and in the gaps between authorial intention and reader response.

My DPhil research focused on the theories of poetry in prose developed by Virginia Woolf and the Italian essayist and journalist Emilio Cecchi. On this topic I published an article – ‘The poetics of “pattern” or “arabesco“: a comparative analysis of Virginia Woolf’s and Emilio Cecchi’s theories of style’, Ermeneutica letteraria, 16 (2020) – and turned my thesis into the monograph Poetic Effects in the Prose of Virginia Woolf and Emilio Cecchi (forthcoming with OUP). Through the perspectives of these two authors, who wanted their novels and essays to fulfil some of poetry’s roles, the book analyses poetic effects as strategies aimed at inviting the reader to respond to a prose text, or parts of it, as poetry. The modes of this invitation, which may be unsuccessful, are shaped by an author’s cultural context, which continuously alters and defines the meanings of the ‘poetic’ as an elusive value exceeding verse.

I have also recently written an article on the poetic effects of Virginia Woolf’s essays.

Teaching

I am Departmental Tutor at Oxford Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education, where I teach English and comparative literature. I specialise in adult learning to encourage people to make literature a source of enrichment and pleasure throughout their lives, but I also teach undergraduates on visiting student programmes and summer schools at different Oxford Colleges, as well as translation from English into Italian at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

I recently taught a course on Women’s Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century where we looked at the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. I also have an exciting upcoming summer course on Writing Novels with Virginia Woolf, where we will explore the challenges of creative writing from Woolf’s perspective to discover how she developed her unique approach to fiction.

In my teaching, I combine the dialogic method typical of Oxford tutorials with mini-lectures that provide key concepts and contextual information. I believe in learning through discussion, starting from students’ own responses to literary works, and in reading together to make texts come to life, have fun with them, and experience their power as a group. I give my students plenty of space to explore their ideas and experiences of reading, while putting them in touch with the most exciting trajectories of scholarly research.

As a freelance tutor, I offer small-group online workshops and private tutorials (one-to-one or in pairs) in modern English literature, academic writing, and Italian. If you are interested in private tutorials and would like to discuss what options might suit you, please get in touch using the form below.