Nicoletta Pireddu

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Inaugural Director, Georgetown Humanities Initiative, Georgetown University;
Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief, Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism;
Professor, Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University;
Director, Global and Comparative Literature Program, Georgetown University;
American Comparative Literature Association Program Committee Chair; 2020-23;
2019 American Comparative Literature Association annual conference organizer.

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8 Books
6 Journal Issues
49 Journal Articles
36 Book Chapters
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Book Chapters by Nicoletta Pireddu

"'Perhaps so, perhaps not:' Angela Carter's Italian Connections," in _Angela Carter Translator and Translated. In the Workshop of Creation_. Edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Marie Emilie Walz (Routledge, 2025): 129-151.

_Angela Carter Translator and Translated. In the Workshop of Creation_. Edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Marie Emilie Walz (Routledge, 2025), 2025

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"Malcolm Bradbury: Sociology and Satire"

_The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith_. Edited by Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge University Press, 2024): 361-377., 2024

This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted explo... more This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted exploration of the ironies of a value-free society and of literature’s responses to dehumanization, from the 1950’s “Age of Anxiety” to the postmodern vanishing of the author and its much-awaited re-materialization. From the ambivalence of liberal humanism in Eating People Is Wrong to the bitter satire of sociology as a threat to free will and accountability in The History Man, from the caricature of intellectual arrogance in Doctor Criminale and Mensonge to the problematization of anti-foundational epistemologies that legitimize interpretation in To the Hermitage, Bradbury’s novels of ideas dissect the institutional conditions of knowledge in democratic societies. They offer us not only a humorous outlook on postwar England but also a critical lens to examine the role of the humanities and the mission of academic institutions on a broader scale, issues that continue to be timely.

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"Profiling Deviance, Embodying Passions: Facing and Effacing Character Norms in 19th-century Europe," in _Physiognomy at the Crossroad of Magic, Science and the Arts_. Edited by Massimo Ciavolella, Valeria Finucci and Megan Tomlinson (De Gruyter, 2024): 65-94.

_Physiognomy at the Crossroad of Magic, Science and the Arts_. Edited by: Massimo Ciavolella, Valeria Finucci and Megan Tomlinson, 2024

The legacy of Giovan Battista della Porta in the multidisciplinary tradition of character assessm... more The legacy of Giovan Battista della Porta in the multidisciplinary tradition of character assessment from physical features pervades modern European culture, from Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) to Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801). Yet della Porta continues to reap acclaim in the late 19 th-century as well, in the context of that all-encompassing natural science of man that anthropology aims to represent, at the crossroads of multiple disciplines of the body and of the mind. For instance, in his 1881 Fisonomia e mimica [Physiognomy and Expression], Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910)the first holder of a Chair in Anthropology in Europepraises della Porta as "the high priest of physiognomy" for employing "the scientific materials of his time [.. .] with the wise discernment of a positive philosopher". 1 The intriguing choice of the adjective "positive" in this context is symptomatic of the paradoxical relationship between a 19 th-century scientific approach allegedly forward-looking, endorsing rationality and modernity, and its infatuation with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, rooted in the past and feeding on centuries-long mythical thinking. Why does physiognomy not only survive the test of time but even return with a vengeance in the age of progress, logic, and facts, functioning as a reservoir of precious information from which to extract scientific principles? Insistently investigating mankind's place within nature and striving to bring "order to an increasing variety of human types and social classes [through] typological forms of classification", 2 the 19 th-century arguably finds in physiognomy a form of hermeneutics that does to a circumscribed object of studythe facewhat natural and social sciences intend to do more comprehensively, namely, to look for regularities in the human and non-human realms that are detectable through empirical evidence. Yet, if, as Lavater declared, "Physiognomy is reading the handwriting of nature upon the human countenance", 3 with its hubristic attempt to systematize the social universe, positivist science coopts the face as a semiotic device not only to explain what individuals are but also what they should or should not be. Through physiognomyand its companion, phrenology-, 19 th-century scientific discourse evaluates the human subject based on perceived constants and traits, and conceptualizes the body in biopolitical terms, that is, as the locus of normative inscriptions validating

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"'Je meurs, donc j'écris': folie d'Igitur, folie de Mallarmé"

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“Vernon Lee: aesthetic expenditure, noblesse oblige"

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Paolo Mantegazza: ritratto dell'antropologo come esteta

in _Paolo Mantegazza: Medico, Antropologo, Viaggiatore_, ed. by W.Pasini and C. Chiarelli (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2001): 129-145. Republished in C. Chiarelli and W. Pasini, _Paolo Mantegazza e l’evoluzionismo in Italia_ (Firenze UP, 2010): 187-204., Jan 1, 2010

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"Memorie del futuro. Archeologie letterarie d’Europa"

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Poe spoetizzato: l'esotismo tarchettiano

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Satan the Waster: Peace and The Gift

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“Passing for Europe: linguistic transvestism and transnational identities in Diego Marani’s _Nuova Grammatica Finlandese_”

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Paolo Mantegazza; A Scientist and His Ecstasies

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Paolo Mantegazza, Fabulator of the Future

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Viaggi nell’alterità, musei della mente: Paolo Mantegazza tra reperti e ricordi

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“Dono dell’arte, arte del dono: riflessioni dannunziane su estetica e dispendio,” in _Il dono dell’arte_, ed. by Ugo M. Olivieri and Marco Castagna (Diogene, 2017)

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Viaggi nell'alterità, musei della mente: Paolo Mantegazza tra reperti e ricordi

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Habitat and Habitus

The Works of Claudio Magris, 2015

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"Alchemies of the Collective Soul: Scipio Sighele's Crimes and Punishments," in Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society_, ed by Nicoletta Pireddu, Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins; Foreword by Tom Huhn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)

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“Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-,” in _Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories. Thought on the Edge_. Ed. by Nicoletta Pireddu (New York and London: Palgrave McMillan, 2018)

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Physiognomien des Exzesses im neurotischen Zeitalter des Fin de Siècle

Physiognomien des Lebens: Physiognomik im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Biopolitik und Ästhetik. Edited by Vittoria Borsò, Sieglinde Borvitz and Luca Viglialoro (De Gruyter), 2020

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Euroglottogonia, or, Exercises in Continental Cosmopolitanism

Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism. Ed. by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu (forthcoming), 2022

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