Giulia Ricca

Giulia Ricca is a PhD candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature. She earned her BA in Classics and MA in Italian Literature, Philology, and Linguistics from the University of Turin.

Her publications include studies on the tradition of the personal essay, 20th-century Italian poetry, Elena Ferrante’s reception, and the trajectories of Alessandro Manzoni and Lev Tolstoy as reformed novelists. Her first book, Epifania italiana. I classici di Joyce (November 2024), examines Joyce’s engagement with Italian and Latin literature—particularly Aquinas, Dante, D’Annunzio, and Cavalcanti—tracing how these influences shaped his theory of epiphany as a modernist yet humanist aesthetic.

Giulia’s dissertation, The Insipid Woman: Speech, Love, Beauty in The Betrothed, examines Alessandro Manzoni’s 1842 novel as a meditation on speech, love, and beauty—elements suppressed through the character of Lucia. The project argues that Manzoni’s eventual disavowal of the novel as an inadequate vehicle for truth is prefigured in The Betrothed. Situating the novel within a broader literary tradition, the dissertation traces its dialogue with Apuleius, Boccaccio, and Fielding, considering how Catholic thought and Enlightenment philosophy inform Manzoni’s conflicted engagement with the genre.

Giulia received the 2020 Garrone Prize for young critics. At Columbia, she has been awarded the Teaching Scholar and Literature Humanities Preceptor fellowships (2023–25). Previously, she has taught Italian language courses. She is a member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) and she serves as rapporteur for the Studies in Modern Italy seminar since Fall 2023.

Her future work will continue to examine the interplay between ethics and literary conventions in the novel. Her broader interests include classical legacies in modernity, the history of literary taste, and contemporary debates in literary criticism.