Overview
Nora Siena is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies with a Minor in German Studies. She received her BA and MA in Philosophy from the University of Pavia while pursuing a double degree in Human Sciences at the IUSS School of Advanced Studies in Pavia.
In the academic year 2022/2023 Nora was a visiting student at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and in 2023/2024 a DAAD Fellow at the research training group Kleine Formen, affiliated with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Nora’s dissertation combines philosophical analysis, literary criticism, and history of literary forms and genres to analyze the renewed (mis)use of exemplary short forms across twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Relying on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of inoperativity, she defines as “inoperative brevitas” a category of twentieth-century literary and philosophical forms that exhibit the genre constants of narratio brevis while withdrawing from its exemplifying function, in this way opening new possibilities for rethinking the entanglement of language, ethics, and politics.
Classes:
ITAL1201
ITAL1202
ITAL2240 - As a Grader
ROMS 1102
Publications
Peer-reviewed Publication and Contributions:
“The Invisibility of Rape in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Heliotropia
“La donna, gli altri, e la trasgressione. Una lettura di Veronica, i gaspi e Monsignore di Marcello Barlocco,” Lavoro Culturale
“Walter Benjamin e il valore filosofico dell’inutile,” Lavoro Culturale
“Kafka e l’invisibilità dell’osceno,” Lavoro Culturale