DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Alessia Ricciardi is the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature and a Professor in the Department of French and Italian who is affiliated with the German Department. She has a BA in philosophy from the University of Pisa, a DEA (master's degree) from Paris VII in psychoanalysis, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University. Her main interests are French and Italian contemporary literature, cinema, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender studies.

Her first book, The Ends of Mourning, was published by Stanford University Press in 2003 and won the MLA's 2004 Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature. Her second book, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi's Italy, was published by Stanford in 2012 and won the MLA’s 2013 Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.

Her third book, Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2021, assesses the questions of pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante’s identity and authorship in the context of contemporary world literature, with particular emphasis on the rarely noticed importance of German literary and cultural influences (e.g. Goethe, Christa Wolf, and Walter Benjamin). It was awarded the 2021 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize in the category of Literary Studies.

She is now completing her next book, Psychoanalysis After Climate Change, which asks, as climate change has become the prevailing condition of our lives, in what ways psychoanalysis has been affected by the crisis and in what ways the discipline has responded to the emergency. This book explores the recent vicissitudes of four major concepts — the death drive, disavowal, the uncanny, and reparation — in order to assess their transformation and resonance within the cultural sphere.

Ricciardi is a co-organizer with Isabelle Alfandary of the Summer Institute of Psychoanalysis, a cooperative effort between the Sorbonne-Nouvelle and Northwestern University that annually unites an international cluster of universities to explore the impact of psychoanalytic thought on culture as expressed by other branches of knowledge as well as media in the broadest sense of the word from literature, cinema, and performance arts to social media.

In 2024, she co-edited with Isabelle Alfandary and Michael Levine a special issue of the journal Humanities entitled Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis, which brought together an international assembly of scholars to address the question of whether it is still possible today to triangulate between philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis in ways that are productive and also unexpected.

Her essays have appeared in, among other publications, PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Notes, The Romanic Review, and diacritics. Her most recent articles are about works by Pasolini, Antonioni, Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben.

At Northwestern, she has taught courses such as “Environmental Melancholia,” “Reading Elena Ferrante,” and “The Italian Short Story” at the undergraduate level and “Resonances of Trauma,” “From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe,” and “Federici: For a Feminist Politics of the Commons” at the graduate level.