Alessandra Capperdoni

Areas of interest

Studies in 20th/21th century literature and culture (North America and Europe); modernist and avant-garde studies; poetics, theatre, and performance art; literary theory (Bakhtin, Russian formalism, semiotics, narratology); Continental philosophy and critical theory (Feminism, Marxism, Phenomenology, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis); post-colonial cultural studies (esp. Canada and Africa); violence and trauma; space, nation, and globalization; gender and sexuality; animal studies and environmental Humanities; and translation studies.

Actively accepting MA students interested in:
Twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and cultural forms in Britain and North America (Canada and the US); international modernism (including linguistic areas other than English); modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; literary philosophy, narratology, and the Bakhtin circle; the linguistic turn in critical theory and the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms; relationship to feminism, race, and postcolonial conditions; feminism and literary experimentation; psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and 'the letter' (Freud and Lacan); psychoanalysis and the natural world (including animal studies); memory and trauma; theatre and politics (especially in relation to gender); modern adaptations of ancient Greek and Latin texts in theatre and film; migration, subjectivity, and representation; poetics of space; politics of affect in discourse and culture; translation, gender, and culture; the politics of writing in continental philosophy (especially poststructuralism, phenomenology, feminism and Marxism).
In addition to English, I am fluent and have worked in the areas of German, French, and Italian studies. I also welcome students interested in working at the intersection of these linguistic and cultural zones.

Education

• PhD, English, Simon Fraser University
• MA (Summa Cum Laude), Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Università degli Studi di Bologna
• BA (honours / Summa Cum Laude), Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Università degli Studi di Bologna

Biography

Alessandra Capperdoni was born in Italy, where she studied Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (English, German, French, and Italian Studies). She came to SFU in 1999 with a Government of Canada Award for Foreign Nationals to work on a one-year research project on North American “open poetics.” Her PhD in English focused on experimental writing in Canada in the long poem genre and the politics of form in relation to space, nation, and global capital. She has taught a wide range of courses in the departments of English and Women’s Studies at SFU, where She was Ruth Wynn Woodward Lecturer in 2009–2010, before joining the Department of Humanities. She is currently working on a manuscript on post-1960s Canadian poetics in the context of the social imaginaries that emerged at the intersection of nationalism and globalization and a second manuscript on women’s avant-garde writing and feminist phenomenology in Canada. A third project on culture and violence is at the early stages, fostered by the research cluster on Memory and Trauma with Eirini Kotsovili and James Horncastle.