Enrico Cesaretti
Enrico Cesaretti is a Professor of Italian at UVA, and a Mellon Humanities Fellow for 2016-17. He holds a Laurea in Modern Languages and Literatures (English and German) from the University of Pisa (Italy), a M.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Yale University. His articles appeared in Italian Studies, Italica, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Ecozon@ and Symposium, among others. His most recent research has been focused on the fields of the Environmental Humanities and ecocriticism.
He is the author of four books: Castelli di carta: retorica della dimora tra Scapigliatura e Surrealismo (Longo, 2001), Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature (Peter Lang, 2013), Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities (co-edited with Serenella Iovino and Elena Past, University of Virginia Press, Series “Under the Sign of Nature”, 2018), and Elemental Narratives. Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy (Penn State University Press, 2020). This latest book explores the narrative eloquence and agency of some of the materials (i.e. concrete, steel, marble, petroleum, asbestos) that have contributed to make (and, simultaneously, “un-make”) modern Italy.
His current research deals with the cultural and ecological significance of plants in the Italian context, from their presence in literature and other media to the grounded, material threats posed by monocultures to historic landscapes and farming practices in the peninsula.
PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
Cesaretti, Enrico. Elemental Narratives: Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy. Penn State University Press, 2020.
Iovino, Serenella, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past, editors. Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
Cesaretti, Enrico. “Nutty Logic: Listening to the Hazelnuts in Pavese and Fenoglio”. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 30, no. 1, 2021, pp. 121-39, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa203.
Cesaretti, Enrico. “A Life of Metal: an Ecocritical Reading of Silvia Avallone’s Acciaio”. Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014, pp. 107-22, https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2014.5.2.616.
Book Chapters:
Cesaretti, Enrico. “The Power of the Plant: Unruly Flora, Unnatural Assemblages, and More-than-human Phyto-politics in Giorgio Scerbanenco’s and Primo Levi’s Sci-fi Tales”. Thinking Italian Plants. Vegetal Lives in a More-Than-Animal Italy, edited by Elena Past and Deborah Amberson, Brill, Forthcoming.
Enrico, Cesaretti. “Green Traces: Vegetal Imagination in Italian Science Fiction from Gilda Musa to Solarpunk”. Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities, edited by Emiliano Guaraldo et al., Liverpool University Press, 2023, pp. 201-18.
Cesaretti, Enrico. “Spectral Tales and Real Disasters: (Re-)visiting the Trauma(s) of Modernization in Daniele Atzeni’s I morti di Alos”. Italian Experiences of Trauma Through Film and Media, edited by Alberto Baracco and Rosario Pollicino, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2022.
Cesaretti, Enrico. “Eco Futurism? Some Thoughts on Nature, Matter, and Body in F. T. Marinetti”. Modernism and the Avant-Garde Body in Spain and Italy, edited by Maria Rosa Truglio and Nicolás Fernandez-Medina, Routledge, 2016, pp. 232-47.
Other Publications:
Cesaretti, Enrico, Damiano Benvegnú, and Roberta Biasillo. Entry “Environmental Humanities and Italy: Landscapes, Ecologies”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (ORE) http://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience, Oxford University Press, 2023.