Francesco Giusti

Francesco Giusti is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in Italian literature at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. After completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014–2015), and the ICI Berlin (2016–2018). He taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin from 2019 to 2021. From 2021 to 2024 he was Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church and College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John’s College at the University of Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

His main areas of research include lyric theory and poetic practices from transnational and intersectional perspectives, particularly in relation to community formation and social conflict; theories of gesture and gestural community; the intermedial poetics and politics of mourning and elegy; and queer and postcolonial approaches to Italian literature and culture. Since 2022, he has coordinated the international research project Rethinking Lyric Communities, which explores the relationships between lyric poetry and community formation in both premodern and modern times from a global perspective. He is a member of the Executive Board of the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) and the Associate Director of Leopardi and Post-Enlightenment Studies at Oxford.

He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to cognitive desire in lyric poetry, Canzonieri in morte: Per un’etica poetica del lutto (Textus Edizioni, 2015) and Il desiderio della lirica: Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (Carocci, 2016). He co-edited, with Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, the volume Poesia e nuovi media (Cesati, 2018); with Benjamin Lewis Robinson, The Work of World Literature (ICI Berlin Press, 2021); with Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello, A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry (Legenda, 2022); with Irene Fantappiè and Laura Scuriatti, Rethinking Lyric Communities (ICI Berlin Press, 2024); with Laura Banella, Invention, Re-enactment, Exchange: Lyric Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, a special issue of Italian Studies, 80.2 (2025); and with Laura Banella and Nicolas Longinotti, Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds, a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 56.1 (2026). His work has appeared in Modern Language Notes, The Italianist, Italian Studies, Italica, Dante Studies, Intersezioni, Strumenti critici, Between, Critica letteraria, California Italian Studies, Exemplaria, and in many other international journals.

How can two cultural artefacts – two poems in this case – connect with each other across time and space without dismissing their respective historicity? How can two events associated with the same cultural artefact – two readings of a poem – connect with each other across time and space without losing their respective singularity? Keeping these questions in mind, I intend to explore the following hypothesis: trans-historical continuity, trans-contextual (maybe even trans-national) exchanges, and trans-individual contacts intersect with historical individuality in every single poem.

Can a historical discourse re-trace and re-shape its own history? In considering selected pairs of poems, I will look at a specific verbal gesture that could provide the ground for transhistorical re-enactment in the lyric. My aim is not to propose a meta-historical account of poetry as such, but to investigate the inner workings of the lyric as a specific and, to a certain extent, alternative discursive mode, inasmuch as those inner workings can be detected in actual poems within the European tradition.

According to the Biblical model, prophecy is the verbal or symbolic anticipation of future events. I want to focus instead on a different kind of prophecy that originates from a procrastination of truth and assumes the form of retrospective interpretation as it appears in Dante’s Vita nova. As psychoanalysis affirms, sense-making happens après-coup or nachträglich: the Vita nova is such an attempt to rearrange memory fragments into a teleological narrative.

This retroactive prediction compels Dante to cope with the problem of free will to define his poetic and ethical agency in time: a major issue not only in medieval theology but also in contemporary theory. Even cognitive science and neuroscience are now paying close attention to postdiction. The lyric can offer a model of subjectivity in performance which is relevant well beyond the literary genre: facing practical failures, the speaker gains an always provisional sense of self that is not constructed by a projection into an imaginary future but is recognized by looking back at her individual past.