About

Sabrina Ferri is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame. Her research encompasses Italian literature, philosophy, science and visual arts of the so-called “long eighteenth century,” with a focus on the transition to modernity and Italy’s place in transnational contexts.

Her work on Giacomo Casanova, Lazzaro Spallanzani, the late eighteenth-century Picturesque, Vittorio Alfieri, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book, Ruins Past: Modernity in Italy, 1744-1836, was published in the Voltaire Foundation’s series “Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment” in 2015. Through the analysis of the representation of ruins by Italian writers, scientists, and artists between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Ruins Past explores the culture of the period and traces Italy’s uneasy transition into modernity.

She is currently working on Giacomo Leopardi and on two long-term projects. The first, Fantasy’s Forge. Brain and the Imagination between Enlightenment and Romanticism, focuses on Italian writers and scientists between the mid-18th and the early 19th century, and seeks to tell the interdisciplinary story of a crucial moment in the history of the imagination, when science, poetry, and philosophy converged to reshape the understanding of this faculty. The second, Revolutionary States and the Ends of Fiction. History, Italy, and the Novel (1799-1967), is a study of the representation of historical change and in particular of political revolutions in novels set in Italy during the late 18th and 19th centuries.