Professor Emma Bond

Emma joined the sub-faculty as Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies in 2022. She is Tutorial Fellow of Italian at St Hugh’s College, and Lecturer at New College and Oriel College. She studied French and Italian as an undergraduate at Edinburgh before taking her postgraduate degrees at Oxford. Following postdoctoral positions at Oxford and Warwick, Emma taught at the University of St Andrews between 2013 and 2022.

Reasearch Interests

Emma is a scholar of modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture. She is particularly interested in studying Italian cultures from transnational and comparative perspectives, and in interrogating the legacies of empire and colonialism in contemporary literary and visual cultures.

Her first monograph, Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Morandini and Pressburger (2012) used psychoanalytic literary models to examine the unique narrative function of illness in Triestine literature. Her second monograph, Writing Migration through the Body (2018), brought together body studies, mobility studies, memory studies and critical theories of migration and diaspora to shed new theoretical light on corpus of recent migration stories in Italian. Emma has also published five co-edited volumes on Freud and Italian culture (2009), cultural connections between Italy and Albania (2013), representations of migration in contemporary Italian media and narrative (2015), the Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza (2016) and legacies of empire and slavery in the Scottish heritage sector (2022). She is currently working on museums and material culture, and her third monograph, Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature,will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2024.

Publications