Enrico Cesaretti is a Professor of Italian at UVA, and a Mellon Humanities Fellow for 2016-17. He holds a Laurea in Modern Languages and Literatures (English and German) from the University of Pisa (Italy), a M.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Yale University. His articles appeared in Italian Studies, Italica, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Ecozon@ and Symposium, among others. His most recent research has been focused on the fields of the Environmental Humanities and ecocriticism.
He is the author of four books: Castelli di carta: retorica della dimora tra Scapigliatura e Surrealismo (Longo, 2001), Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature (Peter Lang, 2013), Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities (co-edited with Serenella Iovino and Elena Past, University of Virginia Press, Series “Under the Sign of Nature”, 2018), and Elemental Narratives. Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy (Penn State University Press, 2020). This latest book explores the narrative eloquence and agency of some of the materials (i.e. concrete, steel, marble, petroleum, asbestos) that have contributed to make (and, simultaneously, “un-make”) modern Italy.
He is currently working on an article that approaches Italian science fiction through ecocriticism and doing research on “Naturismo futurista.”