Dr Stefania Ciocia

Stefania has been the Head of Humanities and Educational Studies since the School’s inception in August 2020.

She is the author of Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling (Liverpool UP, 2012; paperback 2014) and the co-editor of The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

She has curated Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (2021) and Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Selected Stories (2015) for Wordsworth. The latter edition is the first paperback to bring out in one volume Chopin's extraordinary novella The Awakening (1899), along with the complete text of her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and twelve uncollected tales.

Her latest research project concerns contemporary American short-story cycles; see, for example, 'Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her', Journal of Modern Literature, 41:2, 2018, 129-46. More broadly, she is interested in marginalised perspectives, the experience of migration (especially in an American context), and intertextuality (see her article on Derek Walcott’s Omeros). She has also written on crime fiction and film noir, and on crossover literature, including a piece on Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Stefania would be interested in supervising research in any of the above-mentioned areas.

Stefania has taught a range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including specialist options on women in American literature, contemporary ethnic American literature, and introduction to literary theory modules.

For a flavour of Stefania's interests, see her list of short publications:

Articles in refereed journals

‘Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Dìaz’s This is How You Lose Her’, Journal of Modern Literature, 41:2, 2018, 129-46.

‘“The World Loves an Underdog”, or the Continuing Appeal of the Adolescent Narrative: A Comparative Reading of Vernon God Little, The Catcher in the Rye, and Huckleberry Finn”, Children's Literature in Education, 2018, 49:2, 196-215. Pub. online in 2016 [DOI 10.1007/s10583-016-9287-1].

‘Lost in Cinematic Translation: The “Soft-Boiled” Housewife in The Blank Wall and American Gender Politics after WWII’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 43:3, 2015, 170-87.

‘From the Trilogy to Invisible: The Politics of Auster’s “Metaphysical” Thrillers’, Critical Engagements (Special Issue: The New York Trilogy at 25) 7:1, 2013, 107-21.

‘The Career and Critical Reception of Paul Auster’, Literature Compass, 9:10, 2012, 642-53.

‘Postmodern Investigations: The Case of Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’, Children’s Literature in Education, 40:4, 2009, 320-32.

‘“Queer and Verdant”: The Textual Politics of Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Novels’, Literary London Journal, 5:2, 2007, www.literarylondon.org.

‘The Boy Who Mustn’t Grow Up: Geraldine McCaughrean’s Twenty-First Century Peter Pan’, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 13:1, 2007, 13-30.

‘Conradian Echoes in Vietnam War Literature: Tim O’Brien’s Rewriting of Heart of Darkness in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”’, Symbiosis. A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 11:1, 2007, 3-30.

‘“Journeying against the Current”: A Carnivalesque Theatrical Apprenticeship in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, Literary London Journal, 3:1, 2005, www.literarylondon.org.

‘To Hell and Back: The Katabasis and the Impossibility of Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 35:2, 2000, 87-103.

‘The Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger: The Othello Figure in Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood’, Confronto Letterario, 16:31, 1999, 215-30.

Book chapters

‘Hollywood and the Trailblazers of Domestic Noir: The Case of Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943)’, for Domestic Noir, Laura Joyce and Henry Sutton (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 27-49.

‘The Things They Carried in the Short-Story Cycle Tradition’, for Critical Insights: Tim O’Brien, Robert C. Evans (Ed.), Amenia (NY): Salem Press, 2015, 82-102.

‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: 20th and 21st Century Crime Writing’, for Introduction to Popular Fiction, Christine Berberich (Ed.), London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 108-28.

‘The Last of the Romantics? The Accidental Investigator in Postmodern Detective Fiction’, for Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Aesthetics, Landscape, Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (Eds.), London: Routledge, 2012, 198-210.

‘“Nobody Out of Context”: Representations of Child Corruption in Robert Cormier’s Crime Novels’, for Robert Cormier. A New Casebook, A. Gavin (Ed.), Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, 64-79.

‘Vernon God Little: A Future Crossover Classic?’, for Brave New Worlds. Old and New Classics of Children’s Literature, Elena Paruolo (Ed.), Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2011, 105-20.

Core member of The Paul Auster Library at the University of Copenhagen. Keynote lecture at the ‘Paul Auster and Literature in the Twenty-First Century’ conference, University of Copenhagen, 23-25 August 2017.

‘Celebrate the Sisterhood: 150 Years of Little Women’, part of the America Day at Folkestone Book Festival, 25 November 2018.

‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, conversation with Vanessa Tait, writer and Alice Liddell’s great-granddaughter, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland, Folkestone Book Festival, 28 November 2015.

In her free time, Stefania continues to write the occasional guest blog for Wordsworth Editions (see here: https://wordsworth-editions.com/contributor/stefania/)