I teach English Literature at the University of Parma, where I've been working since 1998, and I've been the Director of the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries since January 2017. I took my PhD at the University of Cardiff (UK) and, before joining Parma, I taught at the University of Cardiff and the University of Bath (UK).
My research focuses on Romantic-period literature and culture, particularly on such themes as exoticism and orientalism, Gothic, national and gender identity, drama and theatre, as well as several central figures including Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans and Walter Scott. I am also interested in international and transcultural relations between Great Britain and other European traditions between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially Anglo-Hispanic relations and constructions of the image of Spain in British Romanticism (Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia, 2000). My essays have appeared in Studies in Romanticism, La questione romantica, The Keats-Shelley Journal, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Textus, ELH, Textual Practice, Studies in the Novel, Gothic Studies, Genre, SEL and other international journals. My volume Byron e il segno plurale: tracce del sé, percorsi di scrittura (2011) was awarded the Elma Dangerfield prize of the International Byron Society in 2012, and the volume Byron and Italy (co-edited with Alan Rawes, University of Manchester, 2017) received it in 2018. In my most recent monograph, European Literatures and British Romanticism, 1815-1832: Romantic Translations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, I develop further my interest in transnational and international issues in Romantic-era British literature and culture.
I am also a member of the advisory committee of the "Byron Museum at Palazzo Guiccioli" (Ravenna), and of the editorial boards of Victoriographies and the series "Romanticismo e dintorni" (Liguori); coordinator of the Parma unit of the Interuniversity Centre for the Study of Romanticism (CISR); and a member of the steering committees of "Anglo-Hispanic Horizons, 1780-1840" (AHH) and "Project Reve" associated with ERA ("European Romanticisms in Association").
