Anna Borgarello

Anna Borgarello

Anna Borgarello is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, where she obtained her M.A. and M.Phil. in Italian literature. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled Bifocal Narratives. The Self and the Other in Contemporary Literature, which addresses the relationship between the self and the other in twenty-first-century Italian, French and Anglo-American literatures. The project shows how many contemporary texts avoid a clear-cut division between autobiographical (or autofictional) and biographical (or biofictional) writing, and rather display a two-foci structure and focus on the relation between a first-person narrator and another individual. Her thesis combines formal and thematic interests (e.g. the ways in which voices and identities are structured in the texts) with a historical and comparative approach (e.g. which tensions and trends of contemporary culture and society bifocal narratives manifest).

She previously studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa, where she obtained her B.A. summa cum laude in Humanities (Lettere) and her M.A. summa cum laude in Italian Language and Literature (Lingua e letteratura italiana). As a student at the SNS, she spent several periods abroad: as a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and as an Erasmus trainee at the University of Edinburgh and at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Beyond twenty-first-century non-fictional, (auto)biographical and (auto)biofictional writing, her research interests include: twentieth-century literature with a particular focus on the Italian and French contexts (e.g. Gruppo 63 and Nouveau Roman, Alberto Arbasino, and Beppe Fenoglio), modernism and postmodernism, theory of the novel, narratology and literary theory. She is the author of two articles: “Hemingway e Fenoglio, oltre il dopoguerra” (Italianistica, 2014) and “Un romanzo lungo trent’anni. Fratelli d’Italia di Alberto Arbasino tra modernismo e postmoderno” (Allegoria, 2018). At Columbia, she has taught Elementary and Intermediate Italian language classes for three years.