Dr Marta Arnaldi
I specialise in medical humanities, comparative literature and translation studies.
I am the Laming Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, as well as the principal investigator of the Wellcome-funded projects Translating Illness and Translating COVID-19. Outside academia, I am the author of an award-winning collection of poems and a ballet dancer (Vocational Graded Examination in Ballet Performance, Royal Academy of Dance).
https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-marta-arnaldi
Arnaldi, Marta. The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2021). Forthcoming.
The Diasporic Canon is the first monograph to be dedicated to the history of a national literary canon in another language and country. By exploring Italian poetry’s potential for mobility and transformation, it traces its reception in the U.S. and translation into English as an expression of the culture of Italian migration to North America. The result is the evolution, from the 1940s up to the present, of a radically different canon from the domestic one, i.e. a canon that has been built upon historical anticipations of later developments in Italy, transcontinental influences, but also inversions, distortions, and even errors. In a rigorous yet ground-breaking survey that analyses almost one-hundred anthologies, Marta Arnaldi argues that the theoretical concept of diaspora presents us with a new idea of canonicity, one that puts forward a renewed image of literature in translation and of its significance, whilst also problematising received ideas of nationality, ethnicity, gender, genre, and authorship.
