Valentina Mele
Externally Funded Postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellowship
Biography
Valentina received her BA in Italian Literature and her MA in Philology from the Università degli Studi di Padova, during which time she spent a year at the University of Warwick as a visiting student. She continued her studies at Somerville College, University of Oxford, where she earned an MSt in Medieval and Modern Languages. Valentina holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. From 2020 to 2022, Valentina was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. In 2022-2025 Valentina was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, where she investigated the reception of Dante among the poets of the “Berkeley Renaissance” and co-directed the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies. She is the co- director of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland and collaborates with the Research Network L’Ombra SuA Torna.
Research Interests
Valentina is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Università di Pavia and the University of Notre Dame (IND), investigating the influence of modernist Dante on American avant-garde poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century through a project titled AvantDante –The Reception of Dante in 1945–2001 U.S. Avant-Garde Poetic Communities. Valentina is the editor of Cavalcanti dopo Cavalcanti. La ricezione di Guido Cavalcanti in Italia (special monographic issue of Italianistica, 2024/3) and author of “A me stesso di me pietate vène”. Forme della soggettività lirica nelle Rime di Guido Cavalcanti (Franco Cesati, July 2025). Her research explores intersections between Italian, English and American literature and culture, focusing on Dante’s reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry.