About Us

Italian Poetry Today is a seminar series co-founded by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti in 2020 and has been generously funded by The Queen’s College at the University of Oxford.
IPT aims to discuss, appreciate, and problematise issues of contemporary Italian poetry, in continuous dialogue with living poets, writers, translators, and scholars.
You can find more information about IPT on the Italian Poetry Today Facebook page.
Co-Founders and Co-Conveners
IPT aims to discuss, appreciate, and problematise issues of contemporary Italian poetry, in continuous dialogue with living poets, writers, translators, and scholars.
You can find more information about IPT on the Italian Poetry Today Facebook page.
Co-Founders and Co-Conveners
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 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, 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 Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, forthcoming 2023), Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana contemporanea, with Roberto Binetti (Perrone, forthcoming 2023), Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2023), 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 2024)
She is the co-founder of «Non solo muse» (www.nonsolomuse.com), «Italian Poetry Today» (www.italianpoetrytoday.com) and the «Gender & Authority» Network (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/gender-and-authority).
At present, she is working on A Textile Poetics of Entanglements, 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 Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, forthcoming 2023), Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana contemporanea, with Roberto Binetti (Perrone, forthcoming 2023), Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2023), 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 2024)
She is the co-founder of «Non solo muse» (www.nonsolomuse.com), «Italian Poetry Today» (www.italianpoetrytoday.com) and the «Gender & Authority» Network (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/gender-and-authority).
Roberto Binetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, where he is working on his fourth monograph Italian Poetry in the Age of Nuclear Anxiety. He earned his DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford in 2022 with a thesis on representations of gender, history, and politics in Italian lyric poetry. Building on and extending Gilles Deleuze’s work, he developed a methodological approach that adopts a ‘minoritarian’ perspective to problematize questions of canonicity and representation in Italian women’s poetry. During his time at Oxford, he was awarded the Graduate Development Scholarship at St Anne’s College and served as a Tutor in Italian and Graduate Lecturer.His area of expertise is modern and contemporary poetry, with an emphasis on lyric poetry. Binetti’s interests span a diverse range of fields and result from his commitment to interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, including literary theory, gender and women’s studies, psychoanalysis, cultural history, ecology, and eco-criticism. His work explores the interconnections between literature, cultural history, and the environment, showcasing the cross-fertilization and interplay within these realms.
Binetti’s research has been featured in leading journals such as Italica, Studi Novecenteschi, Ticontre, and the Journal of World Literature. His publications include the monographs Poetics of Becoming: On Italian Women’s Poetry (Peter Lang, 2023), La domanda dell’inconscio: Linguaggio e vita interiore nella poesia di Andrea Zanzotto e Amelia Rosselli (Mimesis, 2024), and Anne Carson. Letteratura liquida (Mimesis, 2024). In addition, he co-edited the edited volumes Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana contemporanea (Perrone, forthcoming 2023), Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2024), the special issue Elegy Today: Rejections, Re-mappings, Rewritings (Journal of World Literature, 2023) alongside Jonathan Culler and Adele Bardazzi, as well as the volume The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, 2024).
Binetti’s scholarly contributions and active involvement in fostering a broader cultural engagement make him a dedicated scholar shaping the field of Italian Studies and contributing to the understanding of poetry and literary theory. His commitment to promoting Italian poetry outside its national borders as well as disseminating research beyond academia led him to co-found “Non solo muse” (www.nonsolomuse.com) and “Italian Poetry Today” (www.italianpoetrytoday.com), platforms that promote and engage the broader public with Italian culture and literature.
Olmo Calzolari (Co-Convener 2020–2024) holds a DPhil in Italian from Keble College, Oxford. His thesis explored Leopardi’s and Svevo’s works from the perspective of the medical humanities, taking into consideration interdisciplinary themes such as ineptitude, life prolongation, and the apocalypse. His research interests include modern Italian literature, the history of medicine, and contemporary poetry. He coordinates, together with Professor Emanuela Tandello, the research centre Leopardi Studies at Oxford (founded in 2018), organising events and running the Leopardi reading group.