I am very excited to be joining the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities from mid-March till mid-June 2023. OSEH provides a perfect environment to engage with and get inspired by researchers from different fields within the Environmental Humanities. During these three months, I will keep working on my Ph.D. project while also participating in all the seminars and workshops that the school organises. In particular, I am happy to join the Anthropogenic Soils team and bring the perspective of literary studies into their discussions on soils and soil agency.
I am part of an Italian national Ph.D. programme in Sustainable Development and Climate Change, coordinated by the University School for Advanced Studies of Pavia. Being a national programme, its Ph.D. candidates are spread across Italy and work in different universities, each bringing their own perspective and expertise to tackle the multiple crises we are facing. My work is based at the University of Ferrara, under the supervision of literary and ecocriticism scholar Paola Spinozzi, who also coordinates the Ph.D. programme Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing.
After an M.A. at the University of Turin in Modern Languages and Literatures, I decided to pursue my exploration of environmental narratives during my Ph.D. In particular, my research looks at contemporary environmental literature from the wide geographical area of the Tropics and aims at reading it from the perspective of soils; which means, I look at soil-texts connections, and try to make them emerge from accounts of environmental degradation across genres, geographies and linguistic borders. Thus, my corpus is made of four different texts from different Tropical regions and written by both Anglophone and Francophone authors. Examples of topics that these texts engage with range from single-crop plantations to pollution due to oil spillages, and from nuclear waste to gardening as an act of ecological restoration.
Soils are not just matter or networks of entangled agencies; they are also a productive concept to think with and through when reading a story, be it in a poem or in a novel. They are material and cultural products at the same time, and their layered meanings allow for connections to emerge in the patchy Anthropocene. Thus, reading through soils means gaining perspective on and understanding of ecological damage and repair, as well as of the slow environmental violence that propagates from episodes of pollution and human-driven degradation.
During my time at OSEH, I will keep working on these ideas, specifically focusing on a literature review on soil and literature to contextualise my research aims.