Costanza Barchiesi, Ph.D. Student
Costanza’s dissertation is a transhistorical venture on the myth of the siren Parthenope in the medieval, Renaissance and modern periods of Italian and Latin literature. Through sustained engagement with Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice, she focuses on reworkings of the myth such as The Cronaca di Partenope (c. 1340), Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and Laura Pugno’s Sirene. Reading classical reception in a feminist, postcolonial and posthumanist sense, she is making an attempt at explaining how this myth can lead to a re-thinking and re-founding of a space which should not coincide with the merely monolithic understanding of western canonic cities.
During the last academic year, (2022-2023), she has been conducting research towards her dissertation project at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and she is now excited to be back at Yale to be Associate in Teaching with her adviser, professor Jane Tylus for the course they have designed together, Dangerous Women: Sirens, Sibyls, Poets and Singers from Sappho to Elena Ferrante. Her main interests and passions are classical reception and feminist theory, and she aspires to contribute to a gray area at the intersection of the two fields.
Costanza earned her B.A. from the University of Bologna (March 2016) with a thesis titled “Swinburne’s Phaedra: A Classical Genealogy.” During her senior year at Bologna, she has been a T.A. for Italian Language and Literature at Wellesley College. She has then collaborated to the restyling of Robert Hollander’s commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy for high-school audiences. (Dante, La Commedia, a cura di Robert Hollander e Simone Marchesi. Loescher. Torino, 2016.)
Costanza then earned her M.A. in Italian Studies from Georgetown University (May 2018) with a thesis entitled “Donna Ferrante’s Library: Classical Resonance in the Neapolitan Novels.” She is currently a PhD candidate in the Italian Studies Department at Yale University and is pursuing the Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate, consolidating her interests in feminist and queer theory. Her article “The ‘Genius Friend’ and the Genius (Loci): Classical Meaning of the Neapolitan Novels” came out in Italian Quarterly in 2020.
With Roberta Cauchi-Santoro, she co-edited a volume entitled Ferrante Unframed. Authorship, Reception and Feminist Praxis in the Works of Elena Ferrante (2021.) Costanza’s article “The Dolls and the Penates: Narrative Symbolism and Classical Myth in the Neapolitan Novels” came out in the same book.