Alessia PirroTeaching Fellow

Email: pirroa@tcd.ie

Alessia Pirro holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading and a dottorato di ricerca in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Prior to joining Trinity College as a Teaching Fellow, she lectured in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian literature, history and cinema at Trinity College and delivered language modules in the Italian undergraduate programmes at University College Dublin. In 2020 she gave a course on German identity in relation to cinema as part of a Master in European Cinema and Identity at Trinity College.

Research Profile
After her BA and MA from the University of Naples “Federico II” in 2008, she worked on the Italian “terza pagina” for the “Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca su Letteratura e Giornalismo” of that university and published a monograph on twentieth-century writer Michele Prisco’s journalistic output in 2012. The monograph focused on the relationship between journalism and literature in the author’s work between the early 1940s and the end of the last century.
Her doctoral thesis Il ‘mito di Napoli’ nell’epistolario di Michele Prisco 1939-1962 linked archival research and cultural studies and showed their interconnections and mutual enhancements in cases of literary investigations. It spanned different disciplines, including literature, film studies and social history, and benefited from a huge amount of immensely valuable manuscripts from Prisco’s private archive and other famous Italian institutions like Marino Moretti’s house-museum, the Leonardo Sciascia Foundation and Alessandro Bonsanti Contemporary Archives. Prisco’s case and his network of contacts with leading figures of writers, editors, critics, journalists, directors were used to examine the hidden and prejudicial political and cultural strategies employed by the left parties in the making of Italian culture in the 1940s-1960.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Nello spazio d’un mattino. Un’analisi della produzione giornalistica di Michele Prisco, Napoli, Loffredo, 2012.

Articles in refereed journals and chapters in edited books

• “Un ‘Gattopardo napoletano’: il progetto di romanzo storico di Michele Prisco nei carteggi con Marino Moretti, Gino Montesanto e Leonardo Sciascia”, in Michele Prisco: tra radici e memoria, edited by C. Vecce and L. Cannavacciuolo, Napoli, Unior, 2021, pp. 111-124.
• “Criteri di selezione dei brani letterari”, in Michele Prisco tra letteratura e cinema, edited by P. A. Toma, Napoli, Compagnia dei trovatori, 2020, pp. 22-34.
• “Il ‘secondo mestiere’ di Michele Prisco”, Critica letteraria, 148, 2010, pp. 548-573.

Dictionary entries

• “Michele Prisco”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 2016.