Laura Lucia Rossi
- Position: Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature
- Areas of expertise: literary theory; Wolfgang Iser; reception theory; the role of the reader and literary indeterminacy; self-narratives and adoption literature; 20th century Italian literature; comparative literature
- Email: L.L.Rossi@leeds.ac.uk
Profile
My research is primarily concerned with the central idea that indeterminacy, i.e., the incompleteness of narratives and literary texts, offers both readers and narrators the possibility to perform acts of self-interpretation.
I have been investigating this notion since my MA dissertation in Modern Literary Studies (University of Milan, 2012) and in my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Indeterminacy in the Italian Novel’ (University of Leeds, 2018). Expanding Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the act of reading, I here analysed five twentieth-century Italian novels (by authors Federigo Tozzi, Tommaso Landolfi, Elio Vittorini, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Anna Maria Orterse) commonly considered ‘anti-narrative’ and ‘indeterminate’, and I demonstrated how their indeterminacy encourages the reader’s interaction as an active process of meaning-making. More recently, I have been exploring the connection between narrative and the construction of the self in experiences of adoption (such as in the autobiographical works of English writer Jeanette Winterson and Italian poet Maria Grazia Calandrone).
After finishing my PhD at the University of Leeds, I spent two years teaching Italian Studies at the University of Manchester.
In 2020, I returned to the University of Leeds as Teaching Fellow and in 2023 I was appointend to my current position.
Responsibilities
- Director of Admissions (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies)
Research interests
My research in Italian and comparative literature is characterised by four main and interconnected strands of research, with a focus on narrative studies:
- Reader-response and reception theory;
- The role of indeterminacy in narratives of the self;
- Adoption narratives in connection to trauma frameworks
- The cultural history of adoption
Qualifications
- 2018 PhD in Italian, University of Leeds.
- 2012 DITALS I, certification for the teaching of Italian L2/LS (Università per Stranieri di Siena)
- 2012 MA in Modern Literary Studies, University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano)
- 2009 BA in Literary Studies, University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano)
Research groups and institutes
- Literary studies
- Centre for World Literatures