Our Team

Email: raul.calzoni@unibg.it

Raul Calzoni is a full professor of German literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bergamo, where he is serving as Director for the 2024/2027 academic term. His research has explored the literature of the Classical-Romantic period (J. W. von Goethe, F. Schiller, Novalis, E.T.A. literary culture of Modernism (Benjamin, Bloch, Döblin). His research also focuses on the strategies of rewriting and transmission of European cultural memory in German-language literature, as well as the relationship between memory, history, and testimony in literature concerning World War II and the Holocaust after the rupture of Nazism (G. de Bruyn, G. Grass, G. Roth, W. Kempowski, W.G. Sebald). Recently, his studies have shifted towards analyzing the relationship between science and literature, with particular attention to the Frühromantik period and the aesthetic experimentation of the late 20th century (G. Benn, H. Heißenbüttel).

Email: federica.lamanna@iulm.it

Federica La Manna is Associate Professor of German Literature at IULM University in Milan, where she also coordinates the MA program in Translation, Interpreting and Digital Communication. Her research explores the intersections between literature and science, visual culture, anthropology, medicine with particular interest in literary genres and disability studies. She is also an expert on twentieth-century German literature, particularly expressionism and its connections to science and the arts. Her researched on the journal “Der Sturm” and the broader literary and artistic currents of the twentieth century. She serves on the editorial boards of Prospero and PoliFemo and co-leads several international research projects, including “Narrative psychischer Krisen” (IVG, Graz) and “Die Rezension als Medium der Weltliteratur” (Villa Vigoni/DFG). She has authored and edited numerous volumes and essays, with recent publications on Winckelmann, Ludwig Tieck, physiognomics, and cultural exchanges between Italy and Germany.

Email: alessandramaria.goggio@unibg.it

Alessandra Goggio is Ricercatrice a tempo determinato (research associate and assistant professor) for Modern German Literature at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests and specialisations include contemporary German literature, the sociology of literature (Bourdieu), the literary industry and its representation in fictional narrative texts, and the relationship between literature and other media. Her study Der Der Verleger als literarische Figur. Narrative Konstruktionen in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur was published by transcript in 2021.

Anna De Biasio is associate professor of American literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the University of Bergamo. Her research has explored nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature in relation to cultural phenomena and categories of social analysis (tourism, violence, translation, the Bildungsroman, and the experience of inhabiting space), with particular attention to gender dynamics. Her research in the field of translation has focused on the trajectories of two little-known Italian translators, Ada Prospero and Alessandra Scalero. Recently, her studies have engaged the theme of home and dwelling in American literature, with particular attention to the trajectories and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott.

Donata Bulotta is Assistant Professor of Germanic Philology at the Department of Humanities, University of Calabria. Her research has focused on the lexicographic traditions of Old and Middle English, Old and High German, and Gothic, with particular attention to semantic changes in Old English vocabulary, especially those associated with the cultural transformation following Christianization. Her ongoing research explores the condition of socially vulnerable groups in medieval England, with a particular focus on the social, economic, and political roles of women in Anglo-Norman society, as well as on literary representations of femininity between the 12th and 15th centuries. In recent years, her work has concentrated on medieval English alchemy and the intellectual contributions of Franciscan thinkers (Roger Bacon and John of Rupescissa). She is also currently conducting research in English lexicography, examining the development of hate speech from a diachronic perspective, from the earliest stages of the English language to the present day.

Flaminia Nicora, PhD in English literature, is full professor of English and Postcolonial literature at Bergamo State University (Italy). Her interests include the English novel, Shakespeare and Postcolonial anglophone literature, with special regard to identity construction, multiculturalism and the historical novel. She has written on the theoretical debate on the British novel in the Sixties and Seventies (Il dibattito sul romanzo in Gran Bretagna:gli anni sessanta e settanta, 1993), on the relationship between literature and national identity (Englishness, A.Marzola ed., Roma, Carocci, 1999) and on English and anglophone novelists, among others D.Lodge, S.Rushdie, H.Kureishi, P.Scott, A Levy, J.M.Coetzee. Her monograph on the Anglo-indian historical novels on the Sepoys Rebellion from 1857 to present day (Eroi britannici, Sepoy ribelli: l’'Indian Mutiny nel romanzo anglo-indiano dal 1857 alla fine del ventesimo secolo, 2005) appeared in English in 2009 (The Mutiny Novel. Literary Responses to the Indian sepoy Rebellion 1857-2007 Delhi: Prestige Books). She is editor of After Writing Back. Perspectives in Postcolonial Studies, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015.

Email: francesca.guidotti@unibg.it

Francesca Guidotti is an Associate Professor of English literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bergamo. She has written quite extensively on English and American science fiction, especially on the post-apocalyptic imagination (Catastrofi. Disastri nucleari e incidenti spaziali nell’immaginario britannico, 2020), on the cyborg and robot themes and on the British New Wave (Cyborg e dintorni. Le formule della fantascienza, 2003). Her research interests also include the reworking, remediation, and dissemination of literary classics and cultural icons (Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien, Frankenstein), the theories and practices of translation, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, Romantic poetry, as well as the didactics of literature.

Email: gabriele.cocco@unibg.it

Gabriele Cocco is Associate Professor of Germanic Philology at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bergamo. Within medieval Germanic traditions, his main research interests include gnomic poetry and the Christian literature of Early Medieval England, with a particular focus on the influence of Benedictine monasticism, liturgy, and patristic thought. He has also explored the cultural reception of the term Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century English culture, examining its ideological and identity-related implications. In addition, he has worked on courtly poetry in Middle High German, especially on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Tagelieder, studying their stylistic and thematic dimensions. His interests further extend to the field of literary rewritings, which he investigates as forms of intertextual dialogue and creative re-elaboration of literary models.

Email: giuseppe.previtali@unibg.it

Giuseppe Previtali is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bergamo. His research interests include the extreme forms of contemporary visuality, the intersections between aesthetics and politics in conflict zones and the analysis of low-genres (such as horror and shockumentary). He published extensively on these topics and he is the author of L’ultimo tabù. Filmare la morte fra spettacolarizzazione e politica dello sguardo, Postmedia Education, and Che cos’è il trash.

Paola Paumgardhen is Professor of German Literature at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples. She is President of the Goethe Gesellschaft Italien, co-editor of 'Kritik. Rivista di Letteratura e critica culturale', director of the series “Cultura tedesca” and editor-in-chief and member of the scientific committee of the journal “Cultura tedesca”. She is coordinator of the master's degree course in “Didactics of German as LS and L2”. Her main research interests include German-language travel literature, the Goethezeit, war literature, the Wiener Moderne, and German-Jewish culture.

Email: valentina.serra@unica.it

Valentina Serra is Associate Professor of German Literature at the University of Cagliari. Her research has focused on the literature of the Weimar Republic (L. Feuchtwanger, B. Brecht), on exile literature (H. Mann, B. Frank), and the cultural debate and function of intellectuals in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe (First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, Paris 1935). She studies the forms of engagement in contemporary Austrian literature (R. Menasse, E. Jelinek) and, more generally, the role of writers in realisation of the European Union project (H. Böll, R. Menasse). She works on the island motif and especially on the image of Sardinia in German-language literature (E. Jünger, M. L. Wagner, Th. Münster, A. Steinitzer), on exotism and on the representation of the Other (A. v. Humboldt, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Th. Fontane), also in relation to the role played by travel literature in German colonialism (e.g. in the works by G. Schweinfurth).