Sara Boezio

Assistant Professor of Italian

Education

• Ph.D. in Italian Studies, University of Warwick
• M.A. and B.A. Honours Degree in Modern Languages and Linguistics, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa 
• M.A. in Italian Literature and Philology, University of Pisa 
• B.A. in Humanities, University of Pisa

Research and Teaching Interests

Modern Italian literature; Risorgimento and 19th-century nation-building; Post-Unification and Fin-de-siècle Italy; End-of-the-century lyric poetry, novel, and theatre; Gothic narrative; Decadentism; Modernist literature; 19th-century history of literary periodical press; Comparative literature; Cultural history; Cognitive literary studies; Cognitive poetics and narratology; Literary criticism and theory

Biography

Sara Boezio is an Assistant Professor of Italian specializing in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. Her research focuses on modern Italian literature and her expertise spans the long nineteenth century with a comparative interest in francophone and anglophone cultures, alongside an interdisciplinary focus on art, history, philosophy, and medical humanities.

Her current book project, Century’s Turn: Italy and the European Fin de Siècle, investigates the cultural circumstances that led to the emergence of a new perception of time at the turn of the twentieth century. By combining archival research and close textual readings, the volume ascertains the key features that transformed the fin-de-siècle rhetoric into an active agent of historical thought. Through literary analysis and historical inquiry, it proposes a novel mapping of the circulation of tropes that permeated cultural conversations in cross- border dialogues between Italy and other countries from the 1880s to the 1910s, while showing how these transnational exchanges shaped new modes of literary, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical representations of modernity, nation-building, and identity in Italian culture.

Professor Boezio is a co-founder of the European Society for Periodical Research aimed at exploring the intersection of literature and Media Studies. She has devoted particular attention to Italian-French literary connections emerging from cultural periodicals pivoting around the novelist and literary critic Federico De Roberto from the 1890s to 1920s; her work on this subject has been awarded the Galilei-Carducci prize.

On an interdisciplinary level, Professor Boezio has published on the relationship between literary representations of the unconscious and pre-Freudian history of psychology.

A separate strand of her scholarly work concerns Cognitive Humanities and the applications of Cognitive Poetics and Narratology methods to the study of lyric poetry and narrative prose.

Before coming to Notre Dame, she was MHRA-Modern Humanities Research Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick and pursued her research in Italy, France, the US, and the UK.

Professor Boezio obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Warwick. Prior to her doctoral studies, she completed her M.A. and B.A. Honors Degree at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, alongside graduating from the University of Pisa in Italian Literature and Philology. Subsequently, she developed her comparative literature interests thanks to fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in Lyon, at the University of Toronto, at CUNY - New York, and at Harvard.

In parallel to her research activities, Professor Boezio is animated by a strong teaching commitment, which has been recognized by teaching excellence awards and the approbation as an Associate Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now Advance HE’), the most prominent training institution for university teaching of the United Kingdom.