The “Cattedra Emile Lorand di linguistica e letteratura italiana” at the VUB Faculty of Linguistics and Humanities welcomes Gianluigi Simonetti for a series of lectures in the period of 18-21 March 2024, in collaboration with Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Bruxelles. This year’s programme focuses on narrative prose and its evolution, viewed from the “observatory” of Italy’s most important literary prize: the Premio Strega.
The full programme can be found here.
Gianluigi Simonetti
Gianluigi Simonetti was educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa. After several research stays abroad and a year at the American Academy in Rome as an affiliated fellow, he was appointed researcher and subsequently associate professor in Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of L’Aquila. During his career, he has carried out research and teaching activities as a visiting professor and fellow at several international institutions, in particular at the University of Chicago (“Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italian Studies”) and at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de l’EHESS-CNRS in Paris, where he was a resident researcher.
His research focuses on twentieth-century Italian poetry and the stylistic genealogies that run through it, as well as on ultra-contemporary literature, which he investigates from a formal and comparative perspective.
Member of the editorial board of the journal “Contemporanea. Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione” he was, together with Guido Mazzoni and Massimo Gezzi, founder and coordinator of the literary website “Le parole e le cose”; he is currently editor of the cultural magazine “Snaporaz”. He regularly contributes to the cultural supplement of the daily newspaper “Il Sole-24 ore”. His latest books are La letteratura circostante. Narrativa e poesia nell’Italia contemporanea, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2018 and Caccia allo Strega. Anatomia di un premio letterario, Milano, nottetempo, 2023.
