University of Oxford

Faculty Member, Medieval and Modern Languages

Somerville College

About

Manuele Gragnolati studied Classical Philology, Medieval Studies and Italian Literature at the Universities of Pavia (BA and MA), Paris (MA) and Columbia in NYC (PhD). Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2003, he taught Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. A significant part of his research focuses on Dante and medieval literature and culture, especially on the relationship between identity and corporeality in eschatological representations, on understandings of physical pain and on concepts of desire. He is also interested in the intersections between language and subjectivity from Dante's "Vita Nuova" to the present and in modern appropriations of Dante.

He is the author of "Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture" (2005) and the co-editor of "The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante's ‘Aracoeli'" (2009), "Aspects of the Performative in the Middle Ages" (2009), "Dante's Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity" (2010), "Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries" (2011),  "Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages" (2012). He collaborated with Teodolinda Barolini on an edition of Dante's Rime (2009) and published essays on medieval and modern authors from Bonvesin da la Riva and Guido Cavalcanti to Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante and Giorgio Pressburger. He is currently co-editing the volume "The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies" (forthcoming in 2012) and working on a book tentatively entitled "Identità dantesche. Desiderio, linguaggio, corpo in Dante, Pier Paolo Pasolini ed Elsa Morante" (expected 2013).

Manuele Gragnolati enjoys studying and teaching literature for its critical potential to challenge traditional ways of thinking and is particularly interested in texts that propose different figurations of reality, whether in the past or in the present. He believes in an interdisciplinary approach to culture and in collaborating with colleagues with different intellectual histories and backgrounds. He serves as Advisor to the Director at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry: http://www.ici-berlin.org.

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