College: St Edmund’s

Email: as3277@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Helena Sanson

About

Aurora is pursuing a PhD in Italian Studies, and has a particular interest in women writers and the history of women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. After a first degree in Romance Philology, she graduated in 2021 at the University of Bologna with a final dissertation on the depiction of female characters’ guilt in Grazia Deledda’s works. In 2019, she was a visiting student at Durham University as part of the Erasmus programme. Aurora also has experience in teaching Italian to non-native speakers, gained after an internship with the Italian Cultural Centre in Izmir.

She is the recipient of a Pigott studentship.

Research interests

Aurora specializes in women writers in in Post-Unification Italy. Her research aims to establish the influence of marginalization in the shaping of texts, ideas and literary topoi in Italian female authors. Her research adopts a comparative approach and aims to shed light on the process and context of textual composition, as well as on women’s status in society.  

By analysing how some women writers were able to emerge from their forced intellectual and social marginalisation, and how and if in time their work fell into oblivion because of societal norms, biased critical reviews, and exclusion from the canon and the catalogues of publishing houses, she intends to assess which factors contributed to the long-standing success or neglect of the women writers under consideration. 

For her PhD thesis, Aurora is focusing in particular on the well-known Neapolitan journalist and novelist Matilde Serao (1856-1927), and on Grazia Pierantoni Mancini (1843- 1916), a popular writer in her own time who later fell into oblivion and who lived between Turin, Florence, Rome and Caserta; Maria Antonietta Torriani (La Marchesa Colombi) (1840-1920) from Novara, whose work has been rediscovered in recent years but is still in need of further study, and Anna Vertua Gentile (1845-1926), whose prescriptive works and educational books were widely published at the time but have been neglected by scholars.

Her approach wishes to highlight the difficulties female authors have been subjected to, both during their time and in their later reception, also assessing which editorial strategies they enacted in order to emerge as established authors, and their positions in the cultural and literary network which characterised post-Unification Italy's lively intellectual environment. 

Published works

Sturli, Aurora (2020). ‘Ricerche sul Libellus Augustalis di Benvenuto da Imola’, Filologicamente. Studi e testi romanzi, V, 65-78

Teaching

Supervisor for ITA3: Texts and Contexts (2024-25)

Conference papers

• 'Maria Maddalena in Deledda's novel La Madre: The Healing Crone', AAIS Conference, Bologna, 1 June 2022
• 'The (Little) Hero's Journey: The Fairy between Bildungsroman and Marketing in Matilde Serao's L'ultima fata, Online Symposium Good or Evil? Transmedial Perspectives on the Fairy/Witch Paradigm in Italian Popular Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, 4 December 2023
• 'Anxieties and Excitements of Archival Work: Some Considerations', Behind-the-Scenes: Conversations on Fieldwork Seminar Series, ILCS, 6 December 2023
• 'Creating the Self. Diaries and Girlhood in Post-Unification Italy: Grazia Pierantoni Mancini's Impressioni e ricordi (1907)', Diaries in the 20th Century: Testimony, Memory, Self-Construction, UCD, Dublin, 8-9 December 2023
• 'La lettura come percorso di emancipazione nella narrativa di Maria Antonietta Torriani (La Marchesa Colombi; 1840-1920)', CAIS, online, 13 June 2024
• 'Sopra/Sotto: Shifting Perspectives and Mobility in Matilde Serao's Naples', Cambridge University Italian Section Graduate Conference', Cambridge, 24 June 2024
• 'Pellegrina del cuore: Matilde Serao e il suo itinerario spirituale nel Mediterraneo', ADI, Palermo, 12-14 September 2024

Other activities or roles

Co-organiser of the Online Symposium Good or Evil? Transmedial Perspectives on the Fairy/Witch Paradigm in Italian Popular Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, organised by Dr Elena Emma Sottilotta (4-5 December 2023).