Professor of Italian
Chair of Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
University of Virginia
Enrico Cesaretti’s current research is located at the juncture of Italian Studies and ecocriticism. With Serenella Iovino and Elena Past he co-edited Italy and the Environmental Humanities (2018). His book project Telling Matters: Narratives of Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy sketches an alternative aesthetic and topographic map of this country by investigating together a number of imaginative landscapes and physical terrains where the places, the human bodies, and the substances that have marked Italy’s path towards modernity come to “meet” and interact. Mostly heeding an eco-materialist conceptual framework, he explores the narrative eloquence and agency of (some of) the organic and inorganic substances (i.e. sulfur, concrete, steel, asbestos, marble, petroleum) that, in their interaction with human beings’ own selves, corporality, agency and stories, have contributed to make (but, simultaneously, also “un-make”) the so-called Belpaese.