Alessandro Giammei

Alessandro Giammei (he/him · lui/tu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies. He specializes in modern and contemporary literature and art, questioning their fantasies of genealogical roots in early modern and classical cultures. Trained as a philologist and a literary historian in Italy, he moved to the US to hybridize his research and pedagogy with Queer theory, speculative realism, trans-historical and trans-national perspectives. He is the author of Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024), a study of how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape magical realism, avant-garde painting, fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy between the birth of Futurism and the end of World War II.

Alessandro’s first monograph, Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (edizioni del verri 2014), won the Harvard Edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2015. He co-wrote Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023, with Ara H. Merjian) and Giulia Niccolai (Quodlibet, 2022, with Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri). He translated Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatise on spirit photography (Fotografare gli spiriti, Marsilio, 2022) and the letters between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (Ti basta l’Atlantico?, nottetempo, 2021, with Chiara Valerio). He authored Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio, 2018), a book of auto-theory and critical fabulation on Fitzgerald and Central New Jersey. His popular essay on gender and objects, Cose da maschi (Einaudi, 2023), was shortlisted for the Bridge Literary Award.

Alessandro is currently working on two short monographs: one about Shakespeare’s ghost in the philology and spiritism of fascist Italy, commissioned by the series Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text, and Il rinascimento è uno zombie, forthcoming with Einaudi. Besides numerous scientific journals and volumes, his essays and translations appeared in The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Nuovi Argomenti, and Flash Art. He regularly writes for national newspapers in Italy, such as Domani and il manifesto.

https://www.giammei.com

tw, ig: @giammei

Books:

Ariosto in the Machine Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024)

Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (London-New York: Verso, 2023, with Ara H. Merjian)

Cose da maschi (Turin: Einaudi, 2023)

Arthur Conan Doyle, Fotografare gli spiriti (Venice: Marsilio, 2022)

Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey, Ti basta l’Atlantico? Lettere 1906-1931, co-edited with Chiara Valerio (Milan: nottetempo, 2021)

Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti: Esercizî su Il grande Gatsby di F. Scott Fitzgerald (Venice: Marsilio, 2018)

Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja: Topi, toponimi, tropi, cronotopi (Milan: edizioni del verri, 2014)