I graduated with a Master’s degree in Arabic language and literature from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at La Sapienza - University of Rome. My thesis was on the Contemporary Yemeni theatre of absurd with a specific focus on Samir 'Abd al-Fattah’s works.Feeling that I needed more fluency in the Arabic language, after my postgraduate degree, in 2009, I moved to Tunis to attend a 500-hour course in Modern Standard Arabic at the Bourguiba School of Living Languages, University of Tunis, Al-Manar. I completed the 6th level, which is the highest level awarded by this institution. In 2016, I also enrolled on a two-year course on Arabic-Italian-Arabic interpreting at the University of International Study of Rome. Over the past few years, I have been researching on the concept of otherness, as represented in the frame story of the Arabian Nights through the usage of fairy tale imagery. I am focusing on the reception of the idea of otherness in the wide amount of academic literature that has analyzed the tale on a thematic and narrative level, especially over the past 40 years. Many factors have intervened in the construction of the literary criticism of the frame story of the collection, and in the interpretation of the love relationship of its protagonists: the edition-translation chosen to undertake the study, the field of research involved and the theoretical framework of reference. Given the considerable mass of works devoted to it, tracing a map of the most important and original contributions will help not to get lost in the ocean of interpretations available, in an attempt to sew all of them together. My aim is to pose theoretical questions about the process of reception of the frame story in contemporary scholarship, in order to contextualize the reception of imaginative tales. Images and symbols circulate among different literary cultures and cross beyond the borders of language and literature to enter the wider realm of humanities and social sciences. As a Sufi poem by Rabi'a al-Adawiyya states, "a double love" contradistinguishes my work/study activity and research. That is, apart from my engagement with Arabic language, my second field of action is migration studies. I took a Master’s in Cultural Mediation and Immigration to give my skills a legal framework, as I have been working in Italian refugee camps since 2012 as a cultural mediator and teacher of Italian L2.

Literature

Arab Studies

Arab States

Medieval Arabic Literature

Fairy Tale And Prose In Medieval Arabic Literature

Literary Criticism; Otherness And Diversity

Arabic (advanced)

English (advanced)

Italian (native)