Lucia Aiello is a Senior Lecturer in Italian language and culture. She joined the department in December 2011 as Deputy Director of Languages for All.
After graduating in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, she completed her PhD in Literary Theory at the Humanities Research Institute (Bakhtin Centre), University of Sheffield, in 2001. She has taught Italian language and culture and comparative literature since 2000, both in British universities (University of Strathclyde, Institute for Applied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh) and in American universities based in Italy (John Cabot University, Rome).
In March 2019, Lucia became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Italian Degree Programme:
Departmental roles:
My research and publishing strengths are on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature and culture, Anglophone women's writing and literary and cultural theory.
My research work, publications, and conference contributions pivot around two aspects:
a) Feminist critique of women’s writings with particular emphasis on narratives of rupture and reaffirmation and the relationship between language, gender and trauma. I have produced a number of articles and international conference papers examining the works of Grazia Deledda, Anna Banti, Emily Dickinson, Fernanda Romagnoli, and Amelia Rosselli.
a) Close investigation of mediatory factors in the reception process (such as significant shifts in notions of the aesthetic, reader-response theories, and Rezeptionästhetik). This area of work has culminated in the publication of a book-length study, After Reception Theory: Dostoevskii in Britain 1875-1935.
I am interested in the works of women writers who have moved from one culture to another and have as a result adopted for their creative work a language other than their ‘mother tongue’. In particular, I am examining how women have transposed their experience of multilingualism onto their works, be these works of fiction, poetry, diaries and memoirs, pamphlets, and so on and so forth. This ‘condition’ of multilingualism carries with it implications that are worth exploring. First, it compels us to rethink the notions of ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker’ and raises philosophical questions about linguistic ownership (in other words, whether a language is owned, appropriated, imposed, rejected, etc.) and the possibility of ‘translating’ multiple identities. This project includes a study of the multilingual works of the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the original and in translation, and, more broadly, of concepts of linguistic displacement.
This project aims at creating a window through which we are given access to these memories and stories summed up in a few words. These can be words of wisdom, which refugees take as a way of life, poems they wrote, brief reflections on their experiences, as well as works of art like calligraphy and drawings. The main objective of this project is to create a bridge between refugees and the community in which they live and to fight racism and hate with knowledge, dialogue and understanding.
For the Edinburgh International Festival, translation into English of:
Co-founder (with David Miller) and co-editor of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies (www.jlts.stir.ac.uk).
Contact details
Dr Lucia Aiello
Lecturer in Italian
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
V/C/024
Vanbrugh College C Block
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
Tel: 01904 322463
lucia.aiello@york.ac.uk