University of Pisa

Faculty Member, English Department

About

I teach at the Facoltà di Lettere e filosofia of Pisa University (Italy), at the European Institute of Sistemic Therapy (Milan, Italy) and at the Institute of Constructivist Psychology  (Padua, Italy). I am the national coordinator for Italy of I-CARE (International Centre for Alternatives in Research and Education, http://www.icare-worldwide.org), and have been working for about ten years in the rehabilitation of laboratory animals. My main research interests are literary theory and criticism, rhetorics, animal studies, radical constructivism, personal construct psychology, and the epistemology of the human and social sciences.
The most fundamental driving force in what I do, both as a scholar and as an activist, is the questioning, critiqueing and crossing of boundaries between disciplines, theoretical orientations, and social roles (academic/activist, artist/critic, professor/student...): this has led me to research both the application of methodologies from the social sciences to the interpretation of literary texts, and the ways social and cultural phenomena can be elucidated through concepts drawn from literary theory, and also to design and teach courses on the use of literature, linguistics, semiotics and rhetorics in therapist training for psychotherapy training institutes of several orientations. As a result both of my theoretical interests and of my political activism, I have sought to extend the boundaries of queer theory to consider the plight of humans who do not perform “normal” human identity and instead identify, emotionally, ethically and politically, with non-human animals.

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