Daniela Fargione is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Turin, where she has been on the faculty since 2000. She has a Laurea (Master’s degree) in Modern Foreign Languages from the University of Torin, and an MA and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, where she also was a Fulbright Fellow. Before returning to Italy, she taught Italian language, literature, and culture for five years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. While she is at the University of Pittsburgh, she is conducting research on and teaching on Italy and climate change based on Italian literature, art, and film. The title of her course is “Pane (bread), amore (love) e fantasia (fantasy): Italy and the Environmental Crisis. Although Italy is acknowledged as the Beautiful Country because of its natural and cultural heritage, over the past decades deep changes have transformed its prevalent rural areas into dynamic but often toxic sites. Embracing the theoretical perspectives on the environmental humanities, she explores these changes through the analysis of literary and artistic texts, which narrate the multiple entanglements of landscapes, human and nonhuman animals, and material hybrids. Their aesthetic and ethical value is proved by their power to evoke what is needed to restore Italy’s body: Pane (jobs, investments, long-term political strategies), Amore (love of nature), Fantasia (the imagination to invent new sustainable scenarios).
She is co-editor with Johnathan Sunley of Merely a Madness? Defining, Treating and Celebrating the Unreasonable (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012); with Serenella Iovino of Cibi, nature e culture (Milano: Led Edizioni, 2015); with Carmen Concilio of Storie, paesaggi, ecologie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2018) and Trees in Literatures and the Arts: Human Arboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (Lexington Books, 2021). Her many publications include: Orthodoxy and Irreverence. A Critical Study with Cynthia Ozick (Roma: Aracne, 2005) and Poesie, sculture, nature with Ambiente Dickinson (Torino: Prinp Editore, 2013). She is one of the two current Italian translators of Julian Barnes’ works (Giulio Einaudi Editore). In addition to her two Fulbrights, Dr. Fargione has had a visiting scholarship at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University in 2016; a visiting research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University Edinburgh, Scotland in 2018; and visiting fellowships at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy in 2018 and 2021.