Enrico Cesaretti is an Associate Professor of Italian at UVA, and a Mellon Humanities Fellow for 2016-17. He holds a Laurea in Modern Languages and Literatures (English and German) from the University of Pisa (Italy), a M.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Yale University. His research so far has been dealing primarily with nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature and focused, in particular, on Italian Modernism and the Avant-garde. His articles appeared in Italian Studies, Italica, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Ecozon@ and Symposium, among others. 

He is the author of three books: Castelli di carta: retorica della dimora tra Scapigliatura e Surrealismo (Longo, 2001),  Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature (Peter Lang, 2013), Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities (co-edited with Serenella Iovino and Elena Past, University of Virginia Press, Series “Under the Sign of Nature”, 2018).Enrico is currently interested in the fields of the Environmental Humanities and ecocriticism. In particular, in the light of recent theoretical “turns” in the humanities (i.e. nonhuman, material), he is exploring the narrative eloquence and agency of (some of) the organic and inorganic materials (i.e. concrete, steel, marble, petroleum, wood, food, trash) that, in their interaction with human beings’ own selves, corporality, agency and imaginative stories, have contributed to make (but, simultaneously, also “un-make”) the country that is Italy today. 

He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Telling Matters: Narratives of Human and Nonhuman Entanglements in Modern Italy."