Dr Vera Castiglione

Email:  v.castiglione@bristol.ac.uk  Tel:  0117 95 46867

Room G107, 21 Woodland Road

Born in Sicily, Vera studied Modern Languages (French and Spanish) at Venice Ca’ Foscari University and Paris X, before completing her PhD at the University of Bristol with a dissertation on the poetry of Émile Verhaeren.

She has been teaching at the University of Bristol since 2002 and has also taught at the University of the West of England and the University of Aberystwyth.

Areas of Responsibility

Vera teaches Italian on the Applied Foreign Languages (Level 1 Grade 1) and UG Degree programmes (Y1 and Y2 oral classes).

Research interests

Her principal interests lie in European Comparative Literature and Culture. Within this field, she has a particular interest in the literature and thought of Modernism and the Avant-gardes, as well as in the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies.  Her current project combines literary and sociological research in order to analyse the representation of sentimental love in avant-garde writings. The objective is to assess the extent to which the historiographic and theoretical assumption of the avant-garde as breaking away from societal and literary conventions is supported by its treatment of the theme of love.

Vera has also published on Contemporary Genre Theory, particularly in relation to twentieth-century epics.

Selected Publications

Books

2011 Émile Verhaeren: modernisme et identité générique dans l’œuvre poétique (Paris, L’Harmattan, Critiques Littéraires).

Articles & Chapters

2011 ‘De-historicising the Avant-garde: an “Out-of-Time” Reading of the Anti-Love Polemic in the Writings of Tommaso Marinetti and Valentine de Saint-Point’, 452ºF Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, vol. 5, pp. 99-114.

2009 ‘A Futurist before Futurism: Émile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic’, in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, Günter Berghaus ed. (Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York), pp. 101-124.

Conference Proceedings

2007 ‘¿Quién ha dicho que la epopeya ha muerto? Estudio comparado entre Émile Verhaeren, Saint-John Perse y Louis Aragon’, in Actas del Congreso Internacional de Estudios Francófonos  (Huelva, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva), 93.