Achille CastaldoAssistant ProfessorItalian
Education
PhD Romance Studies, Duke University 2019
Biography
Achille Castaldo (PhD Romance Studies, Duke University 2019). Research Interests: 19th – 21st Century Literature. Aesthetics. Film Studies. Mediterranean Studies. Narratology. Semiotics. Associated faculty in Film and Media Studies.
My research investigates the relationships between ideology, literature, and visual arts, with a particular focus on the impact of social conflicts on narrative forms. My first monograph – Ascetic Images: Anna Maria Ortese and Roberto Rossellini in the Underworld (SUNY Press, 2026, series: “Literature… in Theory”) – examines the narrative articulation of social invisibility in works by two of the most influential Italian cultural producers of the twentieth century, using a methodology rooted in Critical Theory, Phenomenology, and Semiotics. Works in progress include a study of Rossellini’s biographical films for television in the context of the social movements of the 1970s, and an analysis of Furio Jesi’s work.
Recent publications
2021 “Salvezza privata e crisi del cinema politico: Fosca e l’adattamento cinematografico di Ettore Scola,” La Questione Romantica - Rivista interdisciplinare di studi romantici, Vol.13, n.1-2, 2021, pp. 91-112.
2021 “Neither Utopia nor Juvenile Transgression: Retracing the Link between the ’77 Movement, Autonomy, and Literature” (co-authored), Italian studies, 76:1, 2021, 96-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2020.1851516
2020 “The novel and the myth of the epic: Balestrini, Lukács, and the cathartic experience,” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies. 2020; 54(3): 785-805. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014585820925476
2020 “La comunità oscena: Stile adolescenziale e politica del movimento nel primo Tondelli,” in De Dante a Camilleri. Estudios de literatura y cultura italiana. eds. S. Longhitano, F. Ibarra, Ciudad de México, UNAM y Cátedra Extraordinaria Italo Calvino, 2020, pp. 197 - 212. http://ru.atheneadigital.filos.unam.mx/jspui/handle/FFYL_UNAM/2527
2019 “Ideological figuration in Rohmer’s first two Moral Tales: ‘voice of memory’, clinamen of the image, and colonial fantasies,” Studies in French Cinema. 19:2, 2019, 85-102. https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2018.1511031
2019 “The ‘Essence of things’ and their decomposition: The use of montage in Dino Terra’s Metamorfosi,” in Literature as Document. Series: Textxet: studies in comparative literature, 90, 2019. Brill-Rodopi, Amsterdam, 121-132. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004384255_008
Books
