Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Chiara Sbordoni

Post-doctoral Fellow

I received both my BA (2001) and my PhD (2006) in Italian literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, with a doctoral thesis on fictional love letters in Medieval and Renaissance Italian poetry, drama and narrative. I was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Notre Dame (2006-2011), where I taught Italian language and literature, with a particular focus on the period between the 13th and 16th centuries, as well as a course on second language acquisition and foreign language teaching methods. I moved to Leeds in August 2011.

I study epistolography from the classical world through the Renaissance, from collections of real letters to fictional letters, and treatises on letter writing, with particular attention to intertextuality between authors. I am specifically interested in how letters are rhetorically constructed as discourses, how letters are, or are presented as, dialogues between two correspondents, and how epistolary conversations differ from, or reflect oral conversations in terms of language/s employed, choice of vocabulary, syntax, and imagery. I concentrate on the way authors such as Ovid, Boccaccio, and Piccolomini recast the love discourse within the rhetorical structure provided by letters, and how this changes the dynamics between authors, characters and readers.

Within the Italian Voices project I am working on linguistic variety in oral culture. I am studying the languages of written literary, religious and political texts and the functions of these languages in the oral performances of the same texts between the late fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. I am also investigating the relationship between different versions of the same texts (from manuscript(s) to print) that were influenced by their being performed.

Publications

"Amatoria turpis in amatoria honesta: l'Historia de duobus amantibus di Enea Silvio Piccolomini." The Italianist 30 (2010): 321-347.

"L'Apocalisse nella Commedia di Dante," in Atti del Convegno DORIS 2004 Apocalissi e letteratura, ed. Ida De Michelis, publication n. 15 of the Dipartimento di Italianistica e Spettacolo, Università di Roma, La Sapienza, Rome, 2005, pp. 31-54.