Elisa Cozzi

Thesis Title: 

Italy and the Irish Romantics: Networks, Nations, and Literary Encounters 1798-1848

Supervisor:

Professor Fiona Stafford

Research overview:

My thesis explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic Period. How did Irish Romantic writers respond to Italian literature, politics, language, places, and people, and what role did they play in the rise of Irish cultural nationalism? Is it possible to identify works and genres that emerged as the products of Italo-Hibernian connections? I will attempt to answer these questions by studying the largely neglected literary production of the Irish writers who were travelling and living in Italy in the fifty years that span the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion, the Act of Union, and the ‘Primavera dei Popoli’ of 1848.

My broader interests include Anglo-Italian Studies, the Byron-Shelley circle, Irish Romanticism, the novel, literary coteries in the long eighteenth century, manuscript culture and the digital humanities, and poetics of exile and national identity.

Funding:

Clarendon Scholarship and Baillie Gifford Scholarship, in partnership with the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. 

Select Publications:

Articles

• Elisa Cozzi and Agnese Benedetto. '"Into the court of lost time": Lady Mount Cashell’s North and South or, the Chieftains of Erin, An Historical Romance of the Days of Queen Elizabeth'. (in prep.).
• Elisa Cozzi. 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. Romanticism 'Shelley Conference' Special Issue (forthcoming).

Reviews

• Review: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition with Related Texts, ed. David Wootton. Romanticism, (forthcoming).
• Review: Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823. The Keats-Shelley Review, 36:1, 47-50, 2022. DOI: 10.1080/09524142.2022.2075613.

Conference Papers and Invited Talks:

• 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. The Shelley Conference 2022, Keats House, London. July 2022.
• 'Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin and Anglo-Irish-Italian Romantic Networks'. British Romanticism and Europe International Conference, Ascona, Switzerland. June 2022.
• 'On First Looking into Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin'. ECIS (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society) Conference, University College Cork. June 2022.
• 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. Romantic Research Seminar, Balliol College, University of Oxford, June 2022.
• 'Irish-Italian Literary Networks, 1815-1835'. Romanticism Across Borders Research Seminar, University of Paris (online, May 2022).
• 'Anglo-Irish-Italian Literary Networks from Dublin to Pisa, 1791-1835'. The Queen's College Symposium, University of Oxford, 2021.
• 'Dante among the Irish Romantics: The Case of John Taaffe’s A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1822)'. Distance 2020 International Postgraduate Conference. August 2020, online.
• 'In darkness found a dwelling place’: "The Prisoner of Chillon" and Byron’s turn away from Nature'. The 12th International Student Byron Conference. Messolonghi, Greece, May 2017.

Links to Academia, Linkedin, and Twitter (@_ElisaCozzi)