Dr. Stefano Serafini joins the Georgetown Humanities Initiative as Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Serafini received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literatures and Cultures from Royal Holloway, University of London. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and a Modern Humanities Research Association fellowship in European Languages at the University of Warwick, he has taught as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Università di Padova. 

His research project for the Marie-Sklodowska Curie Action, conducted jointly at Georgetown University, Universität Hamburg, and Università di Padova, is titled Traumatized Subjects: Mental Health, Violence, and the Fabric of Europe Between the Wars (1918-39). It is a comparative and interdisciplinary investigation that examines the transnational and trans-medial circulation of key discourses regarding mental health and violence that emerged in interwar Europe (1918–39). Analyzing various sources, such as medical and legal texts, novels, periodicals, war memoirs, and handbooks for soldiers, the project explores how mentally traumatized World War I (WWI) servicemen committing violence were represented in Britain and Italy. Due to their antithetical nature, nationally, politically, medically, and the opposite roles played by their veterans after WWI, these two contexts offer a unique window into the European experience of war trauma and its effects (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence) and allow us to trace the cultural shifts and historical processes (e.g., the demythization of the soldier and the rejection of the war) that informed the socio-cultural building of Europe in the following decades.

Dr. Serafini has published extensively on the history of deviance and transgression in modern Britain and Italy at the intersection of literature, medicine, and criminal law and is an internationally renowned specialist in Gothic fiction. He received the 2024 American Association for Italian Studies Book Award for his monograph Gothic Italy: Crime, Science, & Literature after Unification (U of Toronto P 2024).

His recent publications also include the monograph Italian Crime Fiction Revisited: Authority, Detection, and the Supernatural, 1861–1941 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and the collection Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, co-edited with Marco Malvestio (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Dr. Serafini will give a public talk on his ongoing research in the Spring 2026 semester.