Profile

Since I was a teenager, I have been attracted by literature and and philosophy when I sought meaning in my life and in my relationships with others and with the natural landscape. Starting from this original youthful impulse, I have developed my career as a teacher, researcher and writer. My youthful questions and the search for meaning in my life have never abandoned me and have constituted the deepest nourishment of my long years of teaching and research. Even today I continue on this path and I try to learn by reformulating those questions in the new context in which I live. Indeed, the emergence of a reality organized around the Internet is provoking a profound crisis of identity in which the older principles of self-orientation and communitarian identification lose their effectiveness. What concepts, what methods do we need to understand the “knowledge space” in which we live an increasing part of our life? How can we orient our individual and professional identity within it? These are some of the questions that nurture my life and I keep in mind for myself and my students.

My research addresses from different points of view the problem of Humanism in our time and reflects on the crisis of traditional notions of human subjectivity. In this perspective, in my first book, Le muse, le maschere e il sublime. G.B. Vico e la poesia nell’età della “ragione spiegata” (1994), I have studied the emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture that for Vico testifies to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss both of the constitutive referentiality of language and of its supposed “natural” origin. In my recent publications, including the essays “Vico’s More than Human Humanism” and “Vico's Wilderness and the Places of Humanity”, I developed an original ecocritical approach to culture and literature that emphasizes the relationality, processuality, and possible demise of the human subject. I further developed this approach editing two volumes on L'autobiografia nell'epoca dell'impersonale (2007) and on Humanisms, Posthumanisms and Neohumanisms (2008).

In my second authored book, Il vuoto della forma. Scrittura, testimonianza e verità (2001), I studied how writers such as Antonio Gramsci, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Paul Celan bear witness to tragic historical events such as WWI, WWII and the Holocaust. In 2006 with Norma Bouchard, I coedited, Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo.

In my research in the area of Digital Humanities, I study  the reconfiguration of literary studies  introduced by the use of digital technologies and the remediation of literature in social and new media. In this context, since 2003 I am the Principal Investigator of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book hypertext project, and I have led students to the creation of the first complete Twitter edition of Francesco Petrarca's Canzoniere (2014). Moreover, I explore the cognitive dimension of computer technology focusing on digital research, topic modeling, textual analysis, close and distant reading. Finally, since 2010 I am the Editor in Chief of the journal Humanist Studies & the Digital Age. In this capacity, I have co-edited seven monographic issues of this peer-reviewed e-journal including Lector in Rete: Figures of the Readers in Digital Humanities (2015) and Steps Toward the Future: More-Than-Human-Humanism in the Age of AI (2022).