BA, MA, MSt, DPhil
Dr Frances (Fanny) Clemente completed her doctorate in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She holds a double degree in Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of Pisa and a MSt in Modern Languages (Italian) at the University of Oxford. She was visiting student at the Sorbonne University and Warwick University and visiting scholar at Columbia University. She was MHRA postdoctoral scholar at the University of Oxford.
Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian cultural and literary production, often looking at notions of alterity and otherness and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving.
Her first monograph, entitled Ecstasy in the Culture and Literature of Post-Unification Italy (1861-1915) and forthcoming with Oxford University Press, deals with the investigation of the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature between 1861 and 1915, looking at phenomena such as mystical raptures, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hysterical extases, hypnotic trances, orgasms, and the way they were represented by authors like Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is underpinned by the theoretical framing of an ‘ecstatic dis-order’, unveiling a dialectical tension between ecstatic, disorderly drives and normative, orderly ones, against the backdrop of the development of modern Italy.
Her new project, entitled The Woman Is a Beast: Animalising Female Characters from Post-Unification to Fascist Italy (1861-1943), will investigate in-depth the association of women with animals in Italian literature and culture from their scientific debasement during the post-unification years to their othering/exoticisation under colonialist and fascist rule. Drawing on ecofeminist and psychoanalytic thought, it will offer innovative attention to the theme and to the way it explores questions of animality, gender, and race in the years under study, ultimately tracing a genealogy of the subalternisation of women as beasts, and foregrounding it as a timely trope for the present day.
She has recently been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2025-2027) to co-lead an interdisciplinary project entitled ‘Mapping Italian Literary Cafés (1720-present)’, seeking to investigate the historical, cultural, artistic, and literary heritage of café culture in Italy from 1720 to today. She has a distinctive interest in Southern Italian and, specifically, Neapolitan culture, history, and literature, which she pursues both at an academic and public engagement level.