Chiara Caradonna

Chiara Caradonna is a comparatist and cultural theorist specializing in 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and European poetry. She explores the intersections between literature, philosophy, anthropology, and the visual arts from an ecocritical and decolonial perspective. She earned her PhD in Romance Studies at the University of Heidelberg in 2017, was a Postdoc at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows (2017–2021), and Senior Lecturer (2021–2026) at the Departments of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her book Opaque: Shadows of Knowledge in the ‘Meridian’ and in the poem ‘Schwanengefahr’ (Wallstein, 2020, in German) explores epistemological and anthropological aspects of Paul Celan’s later poetry, on which she has also co-edited a volume (Wallstein, 2023). She has written on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cross-genre practice of notation and on the œuvre of Sicilian author Stefano D’Arrigo. Research on both authors has led her to investigate questions of transculturation and political ecology within larger projects on the modern reception of Sicily’s Arab-Muslim past and the representation of artisanal fishing communities in Italian culture.

Artisanal fishing communities are a challenging figure in modern Italian culture. Their gradual disappearance gives insight into the epistemic and socio-economic violence associated with modernization. Caradonna’s project investigates figurations of these communities in modern Italian art, literature, and cinema from the 19th century to the present. Grounded in critical anthropology, political ecology, and decolonial theory, the study mobilizes concepts such as animism/naturalism, perspectivism, relationality, and the pluriverse to reread these works as sites of epistemic contestation.

Through close readings attentive to their ethnographic traces, she develops the notion of a ‘fisher ontology’ that unsettles the dualisms and extractivist logics of Western modernity. Centring artisanal fishing communities foregrounds the historical and ongoing effects of (neo-)colonial capitalist extraction on human and more-than-human marine ecosystems, while also tracing amphibious forms of resistance and alternative world-making. By reconstructing the modern territorialization of Italy’s coastline, the project offers critical insights into contemporary ecological and political crises.