Bio

Researcher in the field of motherhood studies and the medical humanities affiliated with the Catholic University of America and the Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical Humanities, Switzerland. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne, a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford, and an M.A. from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. She taught at the universities of Lausanne, Fribourg and Franklin in Switzerland, at George Washington University and at the Catholic University of America in the USA. She is the 2015–2016 recipient of the AAUW International Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. Her current research revolves around representations of pregnancy, birth and postpartum in Western contemporary cultures and societies. She has written a monograph on Lucrezia Marinella in 2010. In the last few years, she has been working extensively on motherhood and taught courses, written articles and
organized interdisciplinary conferences related to this topic. Among her publications is a special volume on “To Be or Not to Be a Mother: Choice, Refusal, Reluctance and Conflict. Motherhood and Female Identity in Italian Literature and Culture” (intervalla 1, 2016) and Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2021). She is currently working on a textbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature for Palgrave Macmillan.

Project

My work during the residency will focus on autobiographical accounts of miscarriage and stillbirth in contemporary literature. My project will highlight how recurrent topics emerge across different languages and cultures, as well as how the authors aim at breaking taboos by acknowledging, validating, and normalizing personal experiences of loss and grief from a feminist standpoint.