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 women’s literature. The project has been awarded both a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders. It is therefore funded by the MSCA for the first two years and the FWO for the third year.

Isabella has 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. In 2023–24, she served as an Adjunct Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and, prior to that, was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds. She earned her PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua in 2021. 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, is forthcoming with Peter Lang in 2025.

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