Academic background
Marta Arnaldi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo and a Lecturer in Italian at St Anne's College, University of Oslo. Prior to these, she was a Laming Research Fellow and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow in Italian at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. She held a number of research and visiting fellowships at several institutions, including the Ashmolean Museum (as Ashmolean Teaching Fellow), Columbia University, Yale University, and the University of Oslo.
Marta holds four degrees in Italian and comparative literary studies: BA Turin, MA Pavia, MSt Oxon (AHRC-funded), and DPhil Oxon (AHRC-funded, awarded in 2019). Her interdisciplinary education includes two years of medical training at the Turin Faculty of Medicine and Surgery.
Research interests
Marta has published widely on modern and contemporary Italian literature (nineteenth-century to the present), with a focus on poetry as interdisciplinary discourse, transnational practice, and catalyser of change. Her first monograph, The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015 (2022), explores Italian poetry’s potential for mobility and transformation by tracing its reception in the United States and translation into English as an expression of the culture of Italian migration to North America. Coedited with Luca Paci, Alibi: Prima antologia bilingue di poesia italiana nel Regno Unito (2022) is the first bilingual anthology showcasing the radical and polychromous voices of living poets and translators of Italian origins migrated to the United Kingdom. As the author of three award-winning poetry collections (Itaca 2016, Mare Storto 2022, and Intraducibile 2022), Marta has also approached these topics through creative methods and as a form of lived experience, thus contributing to the understanding of Italian poetry as a transnational presence.
Similarly, Italian poetry's capacity to transcend national and disciplinary boundaries lies at the heart of Translating Illness (2019-present), a medical humanities project founded by Marta in 2020 thanks to a double award from OUP-Oxford John Fell Fund and Wellcome Trust. As the principal investigator of Translating Illness and leader of its literary strand, Marta published in two main areas: epidemic literature, especially Manzoni and Camus (e.g., 'Contagious Otherness: Translating Communicable Diseases in the Modern Italian and Francophone Novel', Open Library of Humanities 2022), and literature and psychiatry, including questions of epistemic injustice, with a focus on poets such as Amelia Rosselli, Margherita Guidacci, Alda Merini, Vivian Lamarque, and Antonella Anedda (e.g., 'Illness as a Foreign Tongue: Therapeutic Translation in Contemporary Italian Women's Poetry', Literature and Medicine 2022). Co-organised with John Ødemark and in collaboration with OCCT and The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the conference Translation and Medical Humanities marked a key moment in the life of the project by bringing into dialogue more than 500 researchers. Marta is currently completing her second monograph on these topics.
A third area of interest, one that has emerged as an expression of the close links between the medical, the technological and the ecological, looks at the writing of nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi as a prism for examining the Anthropocene. Marta's initial findings are included in her book chapter 'Giacomo Leopardi in the Anthropocene: Translating the Non-Human from Animals to AI' (forthcoming with Bloomsbury) and were presented at the Society for Italian Studies SIS Postgraduate Colloquium in a paper titled '"The New Order of Things": Leopardi and AI' (2023).
'Translation and Medical Humanities' – her current postdoctoral research at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages/Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo – is part of, and funded by, the project Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation, led by Prof John Ødemark.
Teaching
Undergraduate teaching
As a lecturer in Italian at the University of Oxford, Marta teaches all aspects of modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture both for Prelims and FHS, from the Enlightenment to the present day. She lectured on Leopardi, Manzoni and Verga, and supervised undergraduate work on novelists and poets such as Pirandello, Svevo, Calvino, Montale, Morante, Ortese, Ferrante, and Anedda.
As Ashmolean Teaching Fellow (2023-24), Marta designed and teaches, by using the Museum's objects, the course 'Translational Ruptures' on the poetic and cultural encounters between Ugo Foscolo and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Postgraduate supervision
Currently, Marta is co-supervising a doctoral thesis analysing self-narratives by damaged dancers. As Co-Director of the Oxford Medical Humanities Summer School at Green Templeton College, she designed and delivers the 'Decolonising Medical Humanities' module. Additionally, she served as Academic Mentor for the MSt students in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation, with whom she closely worked on theoretical, methodological, and stylistic aspects.
Please visit her Oxford webpage for details.
Selected prizes and awards
- Principal investigator (PI), Translating Illness: Translation as a Bridge Concept Between Medicine and the Arts, Wellcome ISSF, University of Oxford (2020–23)
- Principal investigator (PI), Perspectives in Translational Medical Humanities, OUP-Oxford John Fell Fund, University of Oxford (2020–22)
- AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Doctoral Award, University of Oxford (2014–17)
- AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Master's Award, University of Oxford (2013–14)
- Scatcherd European Scholarship, University of Oxford (2014–17)
- Oxford Student Union Teaching Award (2018)
- Elena Violani Landi International Literary Prize, Centre for Contemporary Poetry, University of Bologna, 1st place (Itaca, 2016)
- Jacques Prévert International Literary Prize, 3th prize (Itaca, 2016)
- Jacques Prévert International Literary Prize, Finalist (Mare storto, 2022)
- Inchiostro Literary Prize, 2nd place (Nonò, 2012)
- Ossi di Seppia Literary Prize, special mention (2007)