Dr Francesco Giusti
College Lecturer in Italian
Career Development Fellow & Tutor in Italian, Christ Church
After completing my PhD at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Florence and Sapienza University of Rome in 2012, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014-2015), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2018). Before coming to Oxford as a Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church and Associate College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John’s College, I taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin (2019-2021).
I teach most areas of Italian literature for both Prelims papers and the Final Honours School, from Dante and the Middle Ages to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
My research focuses on the Italian poetic tradition and its modern and contemporary ramifications, but my work extends into other genres and media, as well as theoretical dimensions. Over the years I have written on Dante, Petrarch, Francesca Turini Bufalini, Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Eugenio Montale, and Giorgio Caproni, among several others, also exploring questions of temporality, gender, and performance. My new project on ‘gestural communities’ developed out of my long-term interest in the history and theory of the lyric, which led to my monographs Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016), devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry. In recent years, working at the intersection of literature and theory, I have increasingly begun to scrutinise the ways in which lyric discourse offers the possibility to rethink certain concepts and socio-cultural practices in much broader and transdisciplinary terms. My project starts from the investigation of the transnational and transmedia developments of the lyric in the Italian experimental scene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to explore a different model of community formation and its cultural and political implications.