Valeria Taddei

I completed a DPhil in Italian and Comparative Literature funded by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre through a Maria Ferreras-Willetts Graduate Scholarship at St Anne’s College. I was a postgraduate member of the Organising Committee for 2015–2019, and co-convened the OCCT Discussion Group between 2016–2018.

My research compared epiphanic moments in Italian and Anglophone modernist short stories: I traced a network of cultural influences (including phenomenology, psychology, and mysticism) which created a family resemblance between the works of authors who had not known one another, and proposed a theory of the modernist epiphany as a moment which generates ambiguity in the text, rather than dispelling it. My monograph Epiphanies in the Modernist Short Story: Italian and English Perspectives came out with Routledge in 2024.

I am now working on a new research project on the representation of the self in Anglophone, French, and Italian writers' diaries, which I begun as an IRC-Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin.