Adele Bardazzi works on issues of form and interpretation, poetry and poetics, lyric theory, gender and women’s studies, verbal-visual glitches. She joined the University of Utrecht as Assistant Professor in September 2023 and is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford since September 2021. Prior to this, she held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin (2021-2023), an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellowship (2020-2021) and a Laming Junior Research Fellowship (2018-2020) at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and a Lectureship at Christ Church (2019) and at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford (2018). She completed her DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from Christ Church, Oxford, in 2018 and holds a BA in English and Italian from Royal Holloway, University of London. She has also been awarded various visiting fellowships, among which at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Groningen, University of Southern California, New York University, University of Toronto, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.

At present, she is working on A Textile Poetics of Entanglements (under contract with Brill, forthcoming in 2025), her second monograph expanding questions of poetic theory raised in her first book, Eugenio Montale: A Poetics of Mourning (Peter Lang, 2022). Among her recent and forthcoming publications are: the edited volumes The Fabric of Poetry: Intermedial Craft in Poetry and Textiles (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2025), The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, forthcoming 2025), Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana contemporanea, with Roberto Binetti (forthcoming 2025), Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2025), A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry with Francesco Giusti and Emanuela Tandello (Legenda, 2022), Gender and Authority Across Disciplines, Space and Time with Alberica Bazzoni (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); the special issues Weaving Media in Italian Poetry (Italica, 2023) and Elegy Today: Rejections, Re-mappings, Rewritings with Jonathan Culler and Roberto Binetti (Journal of World Literature, 2023); and the co-authored monograph Anne Carson. Letteratura liquida, with Roberto Binetti (Mimesis, forthcoming 2025).

She is the co-founder of the Weaving Media Research Network, Non solo muse , Italian Poetry Today, and the Gender & Authority Network (2016–2019).

«Deeply versed in recent theoretical discussions of the lyric form in general and the elegy in particular, Adele Bardazzi also brings to bear queer thinking on temporality and philosophical treatments of mourning to shift the understanding of Montale’s verse, contesting the division between an early lyrical phase and a later ironic phase. A rich combination of sensitive readings and critical reflection.»
(Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, Author of Theory of the Lyric)

«In a series of carefully wrought readings of poems in which Montale writes of his lost loves, death, mourning, and his own quite particular vision of the afterlife, Adele Bardazzi both challenges traditional interpretations of Montalian poetic beloveds and offers her own convincing overview of the eschatological dimension of one of the twentieth century’s most essential bodies of verse. A surprisingly fresh take on a much-studied poet, this fine book gives new life to the realm of death in which Montale’s poetry of mourning is so tenaciously rooted.»
(Rebecca West, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Italian, University of Chicago)

«Adele Bardazzi’s book offers an original perspective on Montale’s work. The poetics of mourning allows on the one hand to read the text in the light of the theory of the lyric and, on the other hand, to highlight the importance of some figures in Montale’s poetry, through an evocative comparison with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and that of Persephone.» 
(Niccolò Scaffai, Associate Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature, University of Siena)

This book is as much about the living as it is about the dead. It investigates how the dead dwell in the world of the living and how that continuing relationship has inspired particular forms of poetic writing. It analyses how poetry assumes the key responsibility of voicing grief and thus creates a unique space in which the dead’s presence is sustained, in a constant state of potential transformation and renewal. This monograph explores this topic with reference to one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), and his principal collections, from Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) (1925) to Quaderno di Quattro anni (Notebook of Four Years) (1977). These primary texts are enhanced by a critical framework that brings three different areas of enquiry into dialogue: scholarship on mourning, theories of the lyric, and feminist approaches. Questions explored include the following: How does mourning become a crucial creative and ethical force in literature? What kind of poetry draws on, and may even require, the presence of an absent female lyric addressee? How does this affect the nature of poetic discourses on mourning and lyric poetry more broadly? This book offers the first comprehensive study of Montale’s poetics of mourning accessible to both scholars in Italian Studies and scholars interested, more broadly, in modern poetry, discourses of mourning, and lyric theory.

Poetry has always maintained a particular relationship with mourning and its rituals, but what is it that lyric discourse has to offer in coping with death, grief, and bereavement? On the other hand, how does mourning become a central creative force in lyric poetry? How does this affect the nature of its discourse and the desires it performs? Focusing on poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Giorgio Caproni, Giorgio Bassani, Amelia Rosselli, Antonella Anedda, and Vivian Lamarque, the essays collected in this volume explore how poetry dwells on the boundaries between high lyric and vernacular forms, the personal and the political, the local and the national, the individual and the collective, one’s own story and public history, the masculine and the feminine, individual expression and shared language. The Italian poetic tradition finds two crucial milestones in two collections of poems devoted to the lost beloved, Dante’s Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and its modern and contemporary ramifications have much to offer for reflection on the ethics and poetics of mourning.

More info can be found at this link: http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54

“A book that strikes a blow at the heart of cis-hetero-patriarchal ideology. Challenging the view that outside the Law of the Father (who is always white, Western, and owner) there would be only chaos, authoritative voices in the feminist international debate respond not only through critique, but also by displaying alternative principles of authority. A subversive, empowering, necessary text.” — Lorenzo Bernini, Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, and Director of the Research Centre PoliTeSse, University of Verona, Italy

“An important and wide-ranging study of one the most pressing issues of our time and of all time – the systematic exclusion of female bodies and voices from structures of authority across cultures. The book issues a powerful call for us to resist and reframe authority, exploring the transformative potential offered by intersectional politics, knowledge-sharing, rewriting of history, resistant reading, and art.” — Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, and Director of the Oxford Life Writing Centre, University of Oxford, UK

“This book uses interdisciplinary approaches to a highly innovative set of discussions of gender and authority, most creatively and imaginatively. The book is effectively organised thematically, around politics, law and religion, and is truly diverse and multi-ethnic in its content, authorship and theoretical and methodological perspectives. This collection of essays provides an engaging, thought-provoking and genuinely innovative perspective of the ways in which gender and sexual politics intersect with and inform authority.” — Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK

This edited collection investigates the relationship between gender and authority across geographical contexts, periods and fields. Who is recognized as a legitimate voice in debate and decision-making, and how is that legitimization produced? Through a variety of methodological approaches, the chapters address some of the most pressing and controversial themes under scrutiny in current feminist scholarship and activism, such as pornography, political representation, LGBTI struggles, female genital mutilation, the #MeToo movement, abortion, divorce and consent. Organized into three sections, “Politics,” “Law and Religion,” and “Imaginaries,” the contributors highlight formal and informal aspects of authority, its gendered and racialized configurations, and practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion by traditionally disempowered subjects. In dialogue with feminist scholarship on power and agency, the notion of authority as elaborated here offers a distinctive lens to critique political and epistemic foundations of inequality and oppression, and will be of use to scholars and students across gender studies, sociology, politics, linguistics, theology, history, law, film, and literature. 

“Is there more to elegy than consolation or its refusal? The essays that animate this exciting and timely collection invite us to think beyond the familiar binary of elegy and anti-elegy, revealing the many other types of labor mourning poems assume in our increasingly global world: embodiments of social justice, expressions of international solidarity, vehicles of democratization, exercises in shared empathy. An important and field-changing book.” - Diana Fuss, Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, Princeton University. 

"Situated at the threshold of life and death, the elegy maintains a universal pertinence across cultures. Its histories in many ways represent the histories of humanity. This volume offers invaluable insights into the history of the contemporary elegy in its diverse forms of expression. Its broad-ranging essays leave no doubt that there does indeed exist an ‘elegiac solidarity’ (Jahan Ramazani) among the manifold of elegiac genres in contemporary world literature." - Robert Harrison, Emeritus Rosina-Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Stanford University.

This volume navigates the entangled expressions of mourning across languages, cultures, and traditions, shedding light on the evolving shapes and discourses of contemporary elegy in world literature. By adopting a transnational approach, this collection offers a much needed conceptualization of what elegy has become today.