Dr Laura Lazzari

Profile

Laura Lazzari is a researcher in the fields of Motherhood Studies and the Medical Humanities. She is a Scientific Collaborator at the Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical Humanities (Switzerland), a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty at the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative (USA). Laura holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Lausanne, an MSt in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Teaching from SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland). She has taught at the Universities of Lausanne, Fribourg, and Franklin in Switzerland, and at George Washington University and the Catholic University of America in the USA. She was the 2015-2016 recipient of the AAUW (American Association of University Women) International Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. Dr Lazzari is an affiliate member of the ‘Motherhood Project’ at Maynooth University in Ireland, and her current research revolves around representations of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum in contemporary Western cultures and societies. In the last few years, she has worked extensively on motherhood and has taught courses, written articles, and organised interdisciplinary conferences related to this topic. Her publications include a monograph on Lucrezia Marinella (Insula, 2010), a special issue of intervalla entitled To Be or Not to Be a Mother: Choice, Refusal, Reluctance and Conflict. Motherhood and Female Identity in Italian Literature and Culture (co-edited with Joy Charnley, 2016), the volume Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture (co-edited with Nathalie Ségeral, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature (co-edited with Beth Widmaier Capo, 2022).