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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Katrin Wehling-Giorgi

Professor

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

My research interests lie in comparative approaches to twentieth-century and contemporary Italian literature, with a particular focus on gender studies, visual culture, trauma and cultural memory studies, motherhood studies, and discourses surrounding subjectivity and space. I have a special interest in the medical humanities and I co-lead the Research Strand on Trauma, Memory and Violence at Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities. 

Current research and collaborations 

My current book project (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan), entitled Spectral (Hi)stories: Women Narrating Trauma in Post-war Italy, reflects on what specific insights literature can afford into women’s lived experience of trauma. With female trauma systematically delegitimised and long deemed ‘inexpressible’ by scholarly consensus, the book asks whether stories can grant fresh insights into, and indeed validate, women’s hidden experience. Focusing on a selection of Italian and transnational (Italian-Somali, French, German-Ukrainian and Anglophone) authors, it explores how these narratives foreground new ways of imagining trauma through their distinct aesthetic shapes, including their embodied, relational storytelling and maternal transmissions of traumatic experience. Building on novel findings in the medical humanities, epigenetics, trauma and decolonial studies, the project provides a reappraisal of female-authored narratives as compelling articulations of the lived experience of systemically disenfranchised voices and their transgenerational legacies. 

My existing work around narratives of trauma in female-authored texts includes a specific focus on the authors Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante, viewed from a comparative perspective. I have co-edited the first volume of critical essays on Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing (Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022, with Tiziana de Rogatis; available in open access), which includes a chapter on traumatic images and multistable visions in Elsa Morante’s La Storia. I have guest-edited a Special Issue on Comparative Approaches to Elena Ferrante: Traumas, Bodies, Languages for the journal Romance Studies (with Stiliana Milkova), which includes an article on transgenerational trauma in Toni Morrison, Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante's works (available in open access). On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Elsa Morante’s seminal work La Storia (1974; History: A Novel), I have co-edited two Special Journal Issues for Annali d'Italianistica and Allegoria. My research on sexual violence and trauma in the works of Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante has been published in another co-edited Special Journal Issue on Elena Ferrante in a Global Context for Modern Language Notes (2021). Together with Tiziana de Rogatis, I have co-authored an article on 'Traumatic Realism and the Poetics of Trauma in Elsa Morante's Works' (Allegoria 83). You can listen to a conversation on our work in the Section 'Spazio aperto' of the same journal.  

I have published extensively on constructs of motherhood in post-1960s and contemporary writers, investigating how the maternal body often acts as a site of resistance where broader tensions and conflicts of female subjectivity are enacted and contested. My research in this area has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and published in journals including Allegoria, Women: A Cultural Review, California Italian Studies, Italian Studies and Forum for Modern Language Studies, as well as in the first co-edited volume of critical essays in English on the Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza (Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Literature, co-edited by Alberica Bazzoni, Emma Bond and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi; Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). 

My first book, Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture (awarded the Gadda First Prize), was published with Legenda's Italian Perspectives Series (2014). It provides an in-depth comparative reading of the two authors’ prose writings, shedding new light on the central notions of textual and linguistic fragmentation and the fractured sense of selfhood. Whilst situating Gadda and Beckett at the heart of the debate of these fundamental aspects of the late modernist European literary context, the study also rethinks some of the plurilingual and macaronic features associated with a particular tendency in the Italian literary tradition.  

Before coming to Durham University, I was an IAS Postdoctoral Fellow and then a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. Previously, I studied Philosophy and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where I also completed an M.St. and a D.Phil in Comparative Literature.  

Postgraduate Supervision 

I have supervised PhD students working on a range of topics, including twentieth-century women's writing and cross-cultural, spatial and postcolonial approaches to twentieth-century and contemporary literature, as well as on gender, translation, and transnational motherhood studies. 

I welcome enquiries by prospective PhD students focusing on gender studies; trauma studies; cultural memory studies; motherhood studies and feminist theory; women’s writing and discourses around female subjectivity and space (20th – 21st century); modernist writing, and other fields related to my research specialisms. 

http://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/profiles/12937/CopertinaTNPrimaCopGrigioJPG1.pdf

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Manual

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Other (Print)

Supervision students

Giuseppina Tinuzzo

Lecturer / Italian Language Programme Coordinator (Centre for Foreign Language Study)

Roberta Passaghe

PhD Research

Yasaman Taheri

Postgraduate Fellow