Overview
Nora Siena is a Teaching Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Romance Studies. Her research examines the relationship between exemplarity and short literary forms, tracing formal and intellectual genealogies that connect ancient rhetoric and medieval exempla and novellas to twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and contemporary digital culture. Her book project, Inoperative Brevitas: Suspended Exemplarity in Twentieth-Century Italian Philosophy and Literature, explores how Giorgio Agamben, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Anna Maria Ortese disrupt and reimagine the logic of the example. She argues that their distinct ways of sabotaging exemplarity constitute attempts to renegotiate systems of value in the wake of the twentieth-century collapse of overarching regimes of truth. The project brings questions of literary form into conversation with intellectual history, biopolitics, Jewish and Holocaust studies, feminist criticism, and ecocriticism.
Nora holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies, with a minor in German Studies, from Cornell University. Her scholarship and teaching have been supported by Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. Her work has received the Goethe Prize in German Studies and the Giuseppe Velli Prize from the American Boccaccio Association. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting scholar in the Italian Section at the University of Cambridge and at the Research Training Group Kleine Formen at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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