Dr Valentina Mele

Valentina received her BA in Italian Literature and her MA in Philology from the Università degli Studi di Padova, during which time she spent a year at the University of Warwick as a visiting student. She mainly considered intersections between Italian, English and American literature, working on the reception of Dante in nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-American poetry. She continued her studies at Somerville College, University of Oxford, earning an MSt in Medieval and Modern Languages. Her thesis analysed textual representations of feminine figures in the Italian Duecento love lyric. Valentina holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focusses on the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (c.1258-1300). Valentina is currently IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork, where she is working on her first monograph, based on her PhD research. Valentina’s broader interests mostly lie in the relationship between language and subjectivity.
PUBLICATIONS
(in preparation) Mario Luzi’s Il Purgatorio. La notte lava la mente, Quaderni d'italianistica, Special Issue: Purgatori della letteratura italiana – Purgatories of Italian Literature – Purgatoires de la littérature italienne – Forthcoming 2021.
(in preparation) ‘The interjections of the Vita Nuova’, Quaderni di Gargnano, vol. IV (2021) – Forthcoming 2021.
(forthcoming) ‘Chapter XXXII’, in Rereading Dante’s Vita Nova: A Collaborative Research Project, ed. by Z. G. Baranski, D. Bowe, and H. Webb (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press) – Forthcoming 2021.
(forthcoming) ‘Spatial Deixis and Subjectivity in the Medieval Love lyric’. Paper submitted to The Mediæval Journal – Under consideration for publication.
(forthcoming) ‘La voce dolente degli oggetti. Lettura di Cavalcanti, Rime, XVIII’, «Con Altra Voce». Echi, variazioni e dissonanze nell’espressione letteraria. Atti del Seminario dottorale internazionale (Pisa, 8-9 ottobre 2018), (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale) – Forthcoming January 2021.
‘“I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido”. Il Cavalcanti di Ezra Pound’, L’Ulisse, vol. XXIII (2020), 326-338.