Francesca Southerden Author & Editor

Francesca Southerden is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. She obtained her D.Phil. in Italian Literature from Hertford College, Oxford and afterwards held the post of Mary Ewart Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford (2007-2010). Her research interests include medieval and modern Italian poetry, especially Dante, Petrarch, and their legacy for the twentieth century; critical theory, especially psychoanalysis and the philosophy of language, and notions of space in literature. She has published several articles on the changing constellation of subjectivity, language, and desire in the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Sereni. She is co-editor, with Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, and Elena Lombardi, of Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Legenda, forthcoming 2012).