Professor Francesca Calamita

Profile

Francesca Calamita is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Virginia (UVa), where she is based in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, affiliated to the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality, and is also a College of Arts and Sciences Fellow in the Engagements. She is the Programme Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian at UVa and the Programme Director of UVa in Siena and Florence. She obtained her PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2013 and conducted postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing of the ILCS, University of London, as a Visiting Fellow in 2014. Her research interests centre on transnational feminist issues in women’s writing, cinema, and pop culture, with a particular focus on food disorders. She is the author of the monographs Linguaggi dell’esperienza femminile. Disturbi alimentari, donne e scrittura dall’Unità al miracolo economico (Il Poligrafo, 2015) and Visibili e influenti (Biblion, 2023) and co-editor of Starvation, Food Obsession and Identity: Eating Disorders in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2017) and Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society: Eve’s Sinful Bite (Bloomsbury, 2020). She has also published extensively in the area of gender equality in second-language acquisition. She is the ideator and co-author of DiversItaly (Kendall, 2022), the first textbook to learn Italian with gender equality and inclusive language.