College: St John's College                       

Email: rem72@cam.ac.uk              

Supervisor: Prof Robert Gordon      

Research Topic: From experience to ethics: Primo Levi's 'grey zone' and Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'.

About

Ruth is a European Studies graduate of Trinity College Dublin, with French and Italian as her chosen languages. She spent a year at the Università degli Studi di Siena as part of her degree. Ruth went on to study classical singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and then returned to academia, taking an MPhil in Comparative Literature and Culture (ELAC) at Cambridge. After this, she worked for a year at University College Dublin, before coming back to Cambridge to begin her PhD in Italian. She is passionate about languages, literature, philosophy, music and dance.

Research

Ruth's PhD research reflects on Primo Levi’s writing, but also considers how a wider group of European intellectuals – figures such as Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas - responded to the ethical questions posed by the Holocaust. Her work encompasses both literary criticism and moral philosophy. She is particularly interested in how the kind of writing found in these writers/thinkers (a combination of the testimonial, historical, literary and philosophical) is a powerful vehicle for the formulation of ethical concepts.

Scholarships/Prizes

Full PhD scholarship from The Cambridge Trust and St John’s College (2019-2022)

St John’s College Scholarship Award, based on her MPhil results (2018)

Global Undergraduate Awards Gold Medal (2015). This award was given to Ruth's final-year paper entitled ‘Revelations of an anti-Genesis: the Muselmann, Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’, which was then published in their annual journal.

Italian Cultural Institute of Dublin Award for Italian (2015)

Teaching

Ruth teaches on the following courses: ITA3: Introduction to Italian: Texts and Contexts , ITB2: Translation from Italian , and IT4: Autobiography and Self-Representation in Italian Culture.

She has also taught on a new HML class on Race and Translation in collaboration with Dr Alexis Litvine and Dr Luke Warde. This was based on their English translation of the French writer Blaise Cendrars’ 1938 novella J’ai saigné, which was shortlisted for the 2021 John Dryden Translation Prize.

Conference papers

'La Sapienza's Aula Magna and Memory in Restoration', for 'Excesses of Memory?', International workshop held at the University of Cambridge (September 2022)

The Cultural Heritage and Memory of Totalitarianism, a two-week summer school and seminar series at La Sapienza, Rome, on the legacy of fascism in Italy (June 2022)

'Mixing metaphors: Primo Levi's "grey zone" and Maria Lugones' "mestizaje"', for 'Cultural Memory of Past Dictatorships: Narratives of Implication in a Global Perspective', online conference (May 2022)

‘Primo Levi's zona grigia: Colours of a concept’, for Primo Levi. Transnational Perspectives, July 2021)

‘Do we need a new category between moral philosophy and literature? Primo Levi’s testimony as a case study’, for the Italian Graduate Conference (June 2020)

Publications

‘Philosophers of the Intimate in a Time of Confinement: Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum’, Studies, Vol. 110, No. 438 (Summer 2021): https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.35939/studiesirishrev.110.438.0241

Forthcoming:

Review of Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoah: Advancing the Debate, for Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2024)

'The Child in Adult Fiction. Useppe and the ethical vision of Elsa Morante's La Storia', forthcoming subject to peer review, in 2024, for a special issue of Annali d’italianistica, ‘Fifty Years of La Storia: Elsa Morante Beyond History’.

Other activities and roles

Ruth sings with St John’s Voices and has performed with the Latin American group Classico Latino.