Laura Colombino

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Profile

 

 

Laura Colombino read humanities at the University of Genoa in 1997 and, after a year abroad as a student at the University of Reading, UK, completed her studies (MA) with a dissertation on the sublime in Thomas Hardy. She received her PhD at the University of Genoa (her supervisors were prof. Sergio Rufini, University of Perugia, and Prof. Gianni Cianci, University of Milan). Since 2003 she has taught English literature at the University of Genoa as research fellow, then lecturer. Since March 2015 she has been Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures of the University of Genoa. In March 2017 she received the Habilitation to Full Professor of English Literature. She has taught seminars at the Universities of Bologna (2006) and Milan (2015).

  

 

Research interests

 

Her major research interests are in post-1900 and contemporary literature and culture, as well as theoretical readings of literature generally. She has a longstanding focus on the inter-art analogy and inter-disciplinary studies. In the early noughties she devoted her analysis mainly to the visual arts and the gaze in Ford Madox Ford’s work. In 2006 she led a team of academics from the Universities of Genoa, Bologna and King's College London, in a successful submission for funds to undertake a project entitled ‘Ford Madox Ford: Beyond Modernism’. In this connection, Colombino organised an international conference hosted at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures in Genoa. 

 

More recently her research interests have included contemporary architectural/urban spaces and their embodiments along with the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city. Within the field of urban studies, she has investigated the contemporary rise of a somatic society, in which major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body.

 

Colombino is the author of the monographs Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) winner of the AIA Book Prize 2015. She has edited two collections of essays (Rodopi) and is co-editing with Sara Haslam and Seamus O’Malley a Research Companion on Ford Madox Ford (Routledge). She has published chapters and articles on a number of Victorian, modernist and contemporary writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, Robert Byron, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Kazuo Ishiguro and Iain Sinclair.

 

She has given papers at a number of national and above all international events.

  

 

 

Fellowships 

 

Fellow of SSASA 11. Fellowship awarded by the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association, 2013. http://www.salzburgglobal.org

 

Visiting Research Fellow, King's College London. May-June 2018.

 

 

Memberships  

 

Society for Artistic Research (SAR) 

 

Member of the Core Group of the Cultural Literacy in Europe Network, http://cleurope.eu (June 2015-November 2016).

 

Member of the Steering Committee of ANDA (Associazione Nazionale Docenti di Anglistica)

 

CERNA — Centro di Ricerca sul Nord America

 

Executive Committee of the Ford Madox Ford Society (2006–2010)

 

The Ford Madox Ford Society (2000––)

 

The Literary London Society (2008––)

 

AIA [Italian Society for the Study of English] 

 

ESSE [European Society for the Study of English]

 

 

Editorial Boards

 

International Ford Madox Ford Studies Series. Rodopi/Brill (2013–16)

 

Ford Madox Ford: Complete Works — Oxford University Press (general editor Prof. Max Saunders, King’s College, London). Forthcoming.

 

 

Peer-reviewing Activity 

 

Literary Geographies. Journal article. 2016. http://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs

 

Journal of Artistic Research. Research artwork. 2010. http://www.jar-online.net/about-jar/

 

Le Simplegadi. Journal article. 2017. http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi/

 

CEUM (Centro Edizioni Università di Macerata). Authored book.  http://eum.unimc.it/it/content/11-ceum

 

Il Tolomeo. Rivista di studi postcoloniali | A Postcolonial Studies Journal | Journal d’études. Postcoloniales. Journal article. 2017. http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/riviste/il-tolomeo/

 

Output Assessor for the VQR (Italian Research Excellence Framework). 2004-2010.

 

The Swiss National Science Foundation. Funding application for a four-year research project. 2018. http://www.snf.ch/en/Pages/default.aspx

 

 

Prizes

 

The AIA Book Prize 2015

Awarded for the monograph Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body, New York and London: Routledge 2013.