Isabella Villanova

Isabella Villanova is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her current research project, AFROPEMOTIONS, explores the cultural and political implications of emotions in Afro-European (Afropean) women’s fiction. The project has been awarded both a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). It is funded by the MSCA for the period 2025–2027 and by the FWO for 2027–2028.

Isabella previously held postdoctoral positions at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth and in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, and the University of Leeds. In 2021, she earned her PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua. Her doctoral dissertation was selected as a winner in the “Literature and Culture” category of the 2022 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her first monograph, The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance, was published by Peter Lang in 2026.

Her research interests include Afro-European literature, African and diasporic literature, contemporary women’s writing, postcolonial literature, affect studies, gender and queer studies, and postcolonial and decolonial studies.