Area of Interest
I am a modernist working on cultural and political theory, literature and visual media, with a focus on the critique of the capitalist form of social organization in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. I have worked on French philosophers Jacques Rancière and Deleuze and Guattari, and the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno. I have also translated works by Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi “Bifo” and Swiss political economist Christian Marazzi. My work on the politics of the literary form and of cinematic adaptation has examined the novels of Claire de Duras, Stendhal, Marcel Proust, Elsa Morante, Michel Houellebecq, and the cinema of the directors Raoul Ruiz, Michael Haneke, Paolo Sorrentino and Pietro Marcello. In my writing and course design, the voices of the authors I have studied are also supported by the critical theories of Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as insights from phenomenological gender and affect studies as represented most saliently by Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed.
Currently I am writing on the affective and artistic capitalist critique of 19th century French Restauration writers, such as Claire de Duras and Madame de Genlis. I am also working on the poetry of the Italian experimental poet and activist Nanni Balestrini and the environmental legacy of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres.
Education
- PhD, French, Princeton University
- MA, French, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
- BA, Università degli Studi di Roma, French and German
Teaching
Undergraduate courses
- Green France: Situated Ecologies
- Thinking the Earth: French Theories of the Environment
- Euro Chic: The Invention of Fashion
- French Kiss: Sex Love, France
- Love in the Age of Revolutions: The French Romantics
Recent Graduate courses
- Novel Thinking: La Pensée du Roman (1914-1964)
- La Monnaie Vivante: Affective Investments in the French 19th-Century Novel
- Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory
Recent Awards and Honors
- Tina and David Bellet Award for Best Teachers in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, 2023
National Professional Service
- 2007-2012 Administrative Officer, Cultural Studies Association – US
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Co-edited Journal Issues:
With John Walsh, , special issue of Sites: The Journal of French and Francophone Contemporary Studies. (vol, 2023).
With Tim Murphy, The Futures of Empire, symposium section of Theory and Event, Vol. 18, October 2015 on the legacy of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire volumes.
With Todd Reeser, The Idea of France, special issue of Sites: The Journal of French and Francophone Contemporary Studies. (vol. 17, 2, March 2013).
With Max Henninger and Tim Murphy, Italian Post-Workerist Thought, edited, introduced and translated a special issue of Sub-stance, 112, v. 36, n.1, 2007.
Selected peer-reviewed articles and chapters in volumes
“Sur les aventures de l’enquête militante : les horribles travailleurs de Nanni Balestrini dans I Furiosi et Sandokan », in Enquêter sur le(s) monde(s) du travail, Mariagrazia Cairo-Crocco and Carmela Lettieri eds., Presses Universitaires de Provence (in press)
“Resister aux maitres: Francoise contre tous pendant la Grande Guerre”, Etudes Litteraires, special issue on women in Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (in press).
“The Spiritual Automaton in the Transpersonal Spacetime of Class Struggle: Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden”, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 2025, vol.46, n. 1, pp. 123-141
“Dancing Into the Future: The Practical Aesthetics of a Materialist Sublime in Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy (2014-2018), Canadian Journal of Film Studies, v. 33-2, Fall 2024, pp.23-37.
“Bad Investments? Masculine Affective Economies in the French Restauration Novel”, in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Todd Reeser ed., Routledge, 2023, pp. 484-493.
“Class Struggle: Ascanio Celestini, Nanni Balestrini and the Living Legacy of the Italian 68”, in Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after May ‘68, Martin Munro and Christian Weber eds., Washington: Lexington Books, 2021, pp. 103-117.
“Who’s the Subject of Politics? On Language in Jacques Rancière”, in Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2019, pp. 155-172.
“Time, Sense and the Image in Raoul Ruiz’ La Vocation Suspendue and L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé”, In Theory, Esthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World, Rajeswari Valluri ed., Washington: Rowman and Littefield, 2019, pp. 51-64.
“Rendering the 19th Century: Narrative Time and Hegemonic Struggles in Raúl Ruiz’ The Mysteries of Lisbon’”. diacritics, v.46, n.1, 2018, pp. 80-97.
“Mute Speech: The Silence of Literature in Rancière’s Aesthetic Paradigm”. In Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, Patrick Bray Ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 97-109.
“Michel Houellebecq Between Authorship and Branding”, special issue on auteurs, Ecrans, 2016 - 2, n. 6, pp. 145-157.
« Birds in a Roman Sky: Shooting for the Sublime in La Grande Bellezza”. Forum Italicum, spring 2016, pp. 183-193
“An Underwhelming Apocalypse: The Islamization of France in Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’”, Telos online, in Teloscope, winter 2015.
« Oublier Napoléon: l’économie du travail immatériel et le refus du travail dans les romans de Stendhal», Nottingham French Studies, 55, 1, 2015, pp. 62-78. Special issue, The Politics of Laziness.
“From the Language of Labor to the Labor of Language: On Paolo Virno’s Philosophy of Language”, Annali d’Italianistica 32, 2014, pp. 491-504.
“Elsa Morante at the Biopolitical Turn: Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible”, in Animality In Italian Literature. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2014, pp. 129-144.
“Moro’s Body Between Enlightenment and Postmodernism: Terror, Murder and Meaning in the Writings of Leonardo Sciascia and Jean Baudrillard”, in Remembering Moro: The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping, Giancarlo Lombardi and Ruth Glynn, eds. Oxford: Legenda, MHRA and Maney Publishing, 2012. (pp. 63-78).
Selected Book-length Translations:
When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, New York, Semiotext(e), 2015. (Translation, edition and critical introduction of Paolo Virno, Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri 2003).
The Communism of Capital: Finance, Biopolitics of Labor and Global Crisis. New York, Semiotext(e), forthcoming 2016. (Translation, edition and critical introduction of Christian Marazzi, Il Comunismo del Capitale, Verona, Ombrecorte, 2010).
Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy. New York, Semiotext(e), 2011. (Translation, edition and critical introduction of Christian Marazzi, Il Posto dei Calzini. La svolta linguistica dell’economia e I suoi effetti nella politica, Bellinzona, Casagrande Editore, 2001).
The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Berardi, Franco (Bifo). Translated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA 2009.
Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography. Berardi Franco (Bifo) Felix Guattari. Translated and Edited by Giuseppina Mecchia and Charles J. Stivale, with an interview to "Bifo" by Giuseppina Mecchia, London, Palgrave McMillan 2008.