Simona Di Martino obtained a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick with a thesis on Italian Gothic poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the reception of Dante.
Currently, she is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing, ILCS, SAS, University of London, working on a project titled “Charming Witches: Role Models for Girls in Children’s Literature and Teen Comics in Contemporary Italy.” She is also a Jeffs Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, where she analyzes unpublished manuscripts by Anglo-Italian author Mary Cowden Clarke intended for young readers. Her project, titled “Exploring Transnational Girlhood in Mary Cowden Clarke’s Children and Young Adults Literary Production,” examines the material held in the Brotherton Special Collections.
Starting from June 2023, Simona will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Book Culture & Publishing, University of Reading, with the project “Girls’ Empowerment in British and Italian Popular Culture: Magazines, Comics, and Strips from the 1950s to Today,” aiming to examine the construction of girlhood and female adolescence through popular culture in a transnational perspective.
Her research interests include Italian and Anglo-American literature for children and young adults, comics and magazines for youth, the construction of female identity, maternity, the figure of the nursemaid, witchcraft, the gothic, women’s writing, and the Italian family novel.
