Viola Ardeni holds a Ph.D. in Italian (UCLA, 2019) and is Lecturer in Italian and Italian Language Program Coordinator in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis. A dedicated scholar and educator, Viola has conducted research, presented, and published on a variety of topics, including twentieth-century experimental writing, environmental consciousness in children’s literature, community-building and collaborative practices in the Italian language classroom, and gender issues in fairy-tale narratives across media. Viola’s contribution to the study of girlhood in Italian culture mainly revolves around investigating the representations of girls in coming-of-age novels and questioning domestic violence and feminicide portrayals in picture books for children. In particular, Viola has written on the Italian-Swiss writer Alice Ceresa’s two experimental novels in the article “Scrivere dalla parte delle bambine: infanzia e adolescenza femminile nella narrativa di Alice Ceresa,” published in gender/sexuality/Italy in 2016, and has penned Ceresa’s entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. More recently, Viola has spoken about Italian picturebooks that adapt and recast the canonical fairy tale Bluebeard at the Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference in 2019 with a presentation titled “Feeling Blue. Addressing Gender Violence in Italian Illustrated Fairy Tales.” An article inspired by the same issues is currently in the works.
A Girls' Eye ViewA Girls' Eye View
