Roberto Binetti is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Italian Studies at Yale University and Università degli Studi di Padova. He obtained a PhD from the University of Oxford in 2022, followed by Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of Toronto (2023-2024), Università degli Studi di Padova (2024-2025), and the British School at Rome (2025).
His research investigates how lyric poetry functions as a cultural laboratory for emotions, revealing how individual affects reverberate in collective experience, and how poets register crises, anxieties, and transformations across history. A scholar of modern and contemporary literature, his work engages with lyric theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and environmental humanities, with a focus on women’s writing and minor literature in Italy from the nineteenth century to today.
His current research project, Lyric Weapons: Italian Poetry in the Age of Nuclear Anxiety, is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant Agreement ID 101208098). The project investigates how Italian poets from 1945 to the present have confronted the spectre of nuclear catastrophe. Bringing together environmental humanities and affect studies, it reveals how writers from Montale and Rosselli to Anedda transform nuclear fear into poetic language, linking it to ecological precarity, planetary crisis, and collective memory, and positioning the lyric as a key archive of the nuclear age.
He is the author of two monographs: Poetics of Becoming. Italian Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies (Peter Lang, 2025) and La domanda dell’inconscio: Linguaggio e vita interiore nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli e Andrea Zanzotto (Mimesis, forthcoming 2026). He co-edited The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, 2025) and Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters (Peter Lang, 2025).
Since 2023 he is Review Editor for Italian Studies. He co-founded the research networks Italian Poetry Today and Non solo muse.