Person
MARCHESI Maria Serena
Professoressa associata
Course Catalogue:
Communications
Agenda
Description
Maria Serena Marchesi: Curriculum Vitae.
- March 1999. University degree in “Lettere Moderne” (Modern Literatures) from the University of Pisa (Italy) with a 110/110 grade. Supervisor: the W.B. Yeats scholar Professor Anthony L. Johnson. The thesis, “‘A Daughter of Eve’: Christina Rossetti e la Fallen Woman” investigated the literary and religious sources of Christina Rossetti’s poems, with particular reference to the character of the ‘fallen woman’, interpreted from an intertextual and typological perspective.
- June 2004. After a four-year PhD course, under the tutoring of some of the most celebrated scholars in Italy (Francesco Orlando, Luciano Zagari, Anthony Johnson): PhD degree in “Letterature straniere moderne” (European Modern Literatures) from the University of Pisa. Tutor: Professor Anthony L. Johnson. Thesis: “Temi cristiani nell’opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson” (“Christian imagery in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson”), which was later published, with extensive re-elaboration, in book form. The dissertation focused on the literary and visual sources in Alfred Tennyson’s poems, and investigated Tennyson’s position within the Victorian religious debate. The methods acquired during the PhD course are rooted in the Continental tradition of philological intertextual analysis, structuralism and comparative literature studies, with a view to the achievement of an accurate textual analysis of literary texts within their literary and historical contexts.
- 2004. Grade A CPE diploma (Cambridge Proficiency in English).
- June 1st, 2005: grant of a two-year scholarship (“Assegno di Ricerca”) by the Department of Philology, Linguistics and Literature of the University of Salento (Italy). The scholarship was afterwards extended to the maximum limit allowed by the University of Salento statutes (four years, expiring on May 31st 2009). During the University of Salento years: achievement of a wider scope in the fields of research, now extended to studies in cinema, Victorian fiction, and Renaissance and Modernist drama. The outcome of these studies were several essays (listed below), and papers delivered at international conferences on film and literature (listed below). Duties at the University of Salento included also teaching undergraduate students, extensive tutoring, oral exams.
- Besides the magazine articles and conference papers: critical edition of Jessie Allen’s 1816-1827 letters to her husband, the historian Jean-Charles Sismondi, which was published in the volume Giuseppina Rossi (ed.), Toscana cosmopolita del primo Ottocento (Leghorn, Debatte, 2006), published with the collaboration of the Gabinetto Viesseux centre for studies in Romanticism (Florence). The letters, transcribed from the original manuscript, are a first-hand testimony of the life in the English and Swiss colony in early nineteenth-century Tuscany, with extensive references to Byron, John Polidori, Madame de Stäel, Benjamin Constant, and the Wedgwood family, to which Jessie Allen was related.
- July 2007. International Italian Studies Conference, Bangor University. Paper presented: “Once Upon a Time in the West and the De-Victorianization of the Fallen Woman”
- April 2008: International Italian Studies Conference, King’s College, London, April 2008. Paper presented: “The Good, the Bad, and the Zany: Harlequin on Screen Between Italy and America”.
- 2008. Translation, with an introduction and notes, of some of the letters John Ruskin published as Fors Clavigera (John Ruskin, I miti del Progresso: Lettere ai lavoratori d’Inghilterra,2008).
- 2009. Perpetual Struggle: The Language of Evil in Murder in the Cathedral (published in 2009 by Olschki, Florence). The book is an analysis of T.S. Eliot’s play within the context of contemporary European literature, with reference to its literary sources, English Renaissance drama in particular.
- 2012. Critical edition of John Baldwin Buckstone’s Robert Macaire, or, The Exploits of a Gentleman at Large, from a previously unpublished British Library manuscript (hitherto attributed to Charles Selby). The Introduction discussed the myth of Robert Macaire between France and England. focusing on the French play L’auberge des Adrets and its influence on contemporary French literature (Balzac in particular), and focusing also on the first production of Buckstone’s play, with a reconstruction of the historical circumstances of its first London run.
- 2013. International seminar held at Messina: “Testo, Metodo, Elaborazione elettronica”, Messina, 9-May 2013. Paper delivered: ”This tawdry, tinselled thing”: influssi della grafica popolare vittoriana in Only a Dnacing Girl di W.S. Gilbert”, which is about to be published in the conference proceedings volume.
- May 2014. Nominated member of the Advisory Board of the review Italian Americana (editors: Carol Bonomo Albright, John Paul Russo).
- 2014. First Italian edition of the Stevenson-Henley drama Macaire (ETS, Pisa. Series: Anglica. Series editors: Silvia Bigliazzi, Enrico Giaccherini).
- 2003-2009. Member of the board of editors of the peace studies magazine Quaderni Satyagraha. In connection with the work for the Quaderni Satyagraha magazine: translation into Italian of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographical work, Satyagraha in South Africa (2005: first Italian edition).
- 2011-2018. Researcher in English Literature (University of Messina).
- From February 2018: Managing Editor of the online magazine Skenè: Texts and Studies.
- From March 2018. Associate Professor in English Literature (University of Messina).
Published Works
Volumes
Temi cristiani nell’opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson, Galatina, Congedo Editore, 2007.
John Ruskin, Lettere ai lavoratori d’Inghilterra (seven letters from Fors Clavigera), introduction, translation and notes by Maria Serena Marchesi, Pisa, Gandhi Edizioni, 2008.
Eliot’s Perpetual Struggle: The Language of Evil in Murder in the Cathedral, Florence, Olschki, 2009.
John Baldwin Buckstone, Robert Macaire, or, The Exploits of a Gentleman at Large, edited and with an Introduction by M. Serena Marchesi, Florence, Olschki, 2012.
Robert Louis Stevenson and William Ernest Henley, Macaire: A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts, ed. and with an introduction by M. Serena Marchesi, Pisa, ETS, 2014.
5 November 1866: The Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’s Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh, Skenè (Texts: 1), 2016, 158 pp.
The Uncompromising Victorian: The Law and the Family in the Plays of Dion Boucicault, Pisa, ETS, 2017, 153 pp.
Articles
“An Apple-gathering di Christina Rossetti: la voce di una ‘fallen woman’”, Strumenti Critici, n. 91, September 1999, pp. 421-43.
“‘Golden head by golden head’: retorica della ripetizione e Petrarchismo in Goblin Market”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, n. 8, July 1999, pp. 131-53.
“‘For the lawyer is born but to murder – the Saviour lives but to bless’. Legge degli uomini e legge di Dio in Rizpah di Alfred Tennyson”, Strumenti Critici, n. 97, September 2001, pp. 397-428.
“Mariana e Mariana in the South di Tennyson: un confronto”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, n. 11, January 2001, pp. 59-81.
“Salman’s Rushdie’s Use of the Bible in The Ground Beneath her Feet”, in The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Ground Beneath her Feet’, edited by Elsa Linguanti and Viktoria Tchernichova, Pisa, ETS, 2003, pp. 55-68.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: Christina Rossetti e la desacralizzazione del focolare domestico”, Soglie (Pisa), VI:3, December 2004, pp. 28-41.
“There shall no sign be given: Il soprannaturale cristiano in The Holy Grail di Tennyson”, Anglistica pisana, vol. II, nn. 1-2 (2005), pp. 31-58.
“Il cimitero degli Inglesi in Livorno”, in Giuseppina Rossi (ed.), Toscana Cosmopolita del primo Ottocento, Livorno, Debatte, 2006, pp. 193-201.
“Jonah, Malo, and Victor Hugo: Some Notes on Crossing the Bar”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, XI, n. 21, January 2006, pp. 93-111.
“‘Let us serve God, and then to breakfast’. Retorica cattolica e buonsenso protestante in Westward Ho! di Charles Kingsley”, in Anna Maria Piglionica, Claudia Bacile di Castiglione, Maria Serena Marchesi (eds.), in I Linguaggi dell’Altro: forme dell’alterità nel testo letterario, Firenze, Olschki, 2007, pp. 57-79.
“Go, say this, Pilgrim Dear: Strutture attoriali dantesche in Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli di Robert Browning”, Strumenti Critici XXII, n. 1, January 2007, pp. 49-66.
The Duke's Versace Sunglasses: Catholic Piety and Italian Otherness in Alex Cox's "Revengers Tragedy", In Lucy Bolton, Christina Siggers Manson (eds.), Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary, Osford, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 137-152.
“Decline and Fall of the Italian Villain”, in Hammered Gold and Gold Enamelling. Studi in onore di Anthony L. Johnson, ed. by S. Beccone, C. Dell’Aversano, C. Serani, Rome, Aracne, 2011, pp. 387-402.
“High Notes, by Lois Roma Deeley. Review”, Italian Americana 31.1 (2013), pp. 114-115.
“Bostoniani a Livorno: il console Thomas Appleton e i suoi conterranei by Maria Argiero and Algerina Neri: Review”, Italian Americana 32.1 (2014), pp. 107-108.
“Sordid Particulars: Deixis in the Chorus of Murder in the Cathedral”, Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 1.1 (2015) http://www.skenejournal.it/
Translations
Volumes
M.K. Gandhi, La Forza della Nonviolenza (Satyagraha in South Africa), Firenze, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 2005.
Articles
“Gandhi e il pacifismo” (by Peter Brock), Quaderni Satyagraha, n. 4, dicembre 2003, pp. 15-24.
“Un anabattista polacco in difesa dell’obiezione di coscienza, 1575” (by Peter Brock), Quaderni Satyagraha (forthcoming).
“L’Ebraismo e la costruzione della pace nel contesto del conflitto medio orientale” (di Marc Gopin), Quaderni Satyagraha (forthcoming).
Critical Editions
Jessie Allen’s letters to Jean Charles Sismondi, in G. Rossi (ed.), Toscana Cosmopolita del primo Ottocento, Livorno, Debatte, 2006, pp. 91-192.
Unpublished Conference Papers
“Once Upon a Time in the West and the De-Victorianization of the Fallen Woman” (International Italian Studies Conference, Bangor University, July 2007).
“The Good, the Bad, and the Zany: Harlequin on Screen Between Italy and America” (International Italian Studies Conference, King’s College, London, April 2008).
.
- March 1999. University degree in “Lettere Moderne” (Modern Literatures) from the University of Pisa (Italy) with a 110/110 grade. Supervisor: the W.B. Yeats scholar Professor Anthony L. Johnson. The thesis, “‘A Daughter of Eve’: Christina Rossetti e la Fallen Woman” investigated the literary and religious sources of Christina Rossetti’s poems, with particular reference to the character of the ‘fallen woman’, interpreted from an intertextual and typological perspective.
- June 2004. After a four-year PhD course, under the tutoring of some of the most celebrated scholars in Italy (Francesco Orlando, Luciano Zagari, Anthony Johnson): PhD degree in “Letterature straniere moderne” (European Modern Literatures) from the University of Pisa. Tutor: Professor Anthony L. Johnson. Thesis: “Temi cristiani nell’opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson” (“Christian imagery in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson”), which was later published, with extensive re-elaboration, in book form. The dissertation focused on the literary and visual sources in Alfred Tennyson’s poems, and investigated Tennyson’s position within the Victorian religious debate. The methods acquired during the PhD course are rooted in the Continental tradition of philological intertextual analysis, structuralism and comparative literature studies, with a view to the achievement of an accurate textual analysis of literary texts within their literary and historical contexts.
- 2004. Grade A CPE diploma (Cambridge Proficiency in English).
- June 1st, 2005: grant of a two-year scholarship (“Assegno di Ricerca”) by the Department of Philology, Linguistics and Literature of the University of Salento (Italy). The scholarship was afterwards extended to the maximum limit allowed by the University of Salento statutes (four years, expiring on May 31st 2009). During the University of Salento years: achievement of a wider scope in the fields of research, now extended to studies in cinema, Victorian fiction, and Renaissance and Modernist drama. The outcome of these studies were several essays (listed below), and papers delivered at international conferences on film and literature (listed below). Duties at the University of Salento included also teaching undergraduate students, extensive tutoring, oral exams.
- Besides the magazine articles and conference papers: critical edition of Jessie Allen’s 1816-1827 letters to her husband, the historian Jean-Charles Sismondi, which was published in the volume Giuseppina Rossi (ed.), Toscana cosmopolita del primo Ottocento (Leghorn, Debatte, 2006), published with the collaboration of the Gabinetto Viesseux centre for studies in Romanticism (Florence). The letters, transcribed from the original manuscript, are a first-hand testimony of the life in the English and Swiss colony in early nineteenth-century Tuscany, with extensive references to Byron, John Polidori, Madame de Stäel, Benjamin Constant, and the Wedgwood family, to which Jessie Allen was related.
- July 2007. International Italian Studies Conference, Bangor University. Paper presented: “Once Upon a Time in the West and the De-Victorianization of the Fallen Woman”
- April 2008: International Italian Studies Conference, King’s College, London, April 2008. Paper presented: “The Good, the Bad, and the Zany: Harlequin on Screen Between Italy and America”.
- 2008. Translation, with an introduction and notes, of some of the letters John Ruskin published as Fors Clavigera (John Ruskin, I miti del Progresso: Lettere ai lavoratori d’Inghilterra,2008).
- 2009. Perpetual Struggle: The Language of Evil in Murder in the Cathedral (published in 2009 by Olschki, Florence). The book is an analysis of T.S. Eliot’s play within the context of contemporary European literature, with reference to its literary sources, English Renaissance drama in particular.
- 2012. Critical edition of John Baldwin Buckstone’s Robert Macaire, or, The Exploits of a Gentleman at Large, from a previously unpublished British Library manuscript (hitherto attributed to Charles Selby). The Introduction discussed the myth of Robert Macaire between France and England. focusing on the French play L’auberge des Adrets and its influence on contemporary French literature (Balzac in particular), and focusing also on the first production of Buckstone’s play, with a reconstruction of the historical circumstances of its first London run.
- 2013. International seminar held at Messina: “Testo, Metodo, Elaborazione elettronica”, Messina, 9-May 2013. Paper delivered: ”This tawdry, tinselled thing”: influssi della grafica popolare vittoriana in Only a Dnacing Girl di W.S. Gilbert”, which is about to be published in the conference proceedings volume.
- May 2014. Nominated member of the Advisory Board of the review Italian Americana (editors: Carol Bonomo Albright, John Paul Russo).
- 2014. First Italian edition of the Stevenson-Henley drama Macaire (ETS, Pisa. Series: Anglica. Series editors: Silvia Bigliazzi, Enrico Giaccherini).
- 2003-2009. Member of the board of editors of the peace studies magazine Quaderni Satyagraha. In connection with the work for the Quaderni Satyagraha magazine: translation into Italian of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographical work, Satyagraha in South Africa (2005: first Italian edition).
- 2011-2018. Researcher in English Literature (University of Messina).
- From February 2018: Managing Editor of the online magazine Skenè: Texts and Studies.
- From March 2018. Associate Professor in English Literature (University of Messina).
Published Works
Volumes
Temi cristiani nell’opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson, Galatina, Congedo Editore, 2007.
John Ruskin, Lettere ai lavoratori d’Inghilterra (seven letters from Fors Clavigera), introduction, translation and notes by Maria Serena Marchesi, Pisa, Gandhi Edizioni, 2008.
Eliot’s Perpetual Struggle: The Language of Evil in Murder in the Cathedral, Florence, Olschki, 2009.
John Baldwin Buckstone, Robert Macaire, or, The Exploits of a Gentleman at Large, edited and with an Introduction by M. Serena Marchesi, Florence, Olschki, 2012.
Robert Louis Stevenson and William Ernest Henley, Macaire: A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts, ed. and with an introduction by M. Serena Marchesi, Pisa, ETS, 2014.
5 November 1866: The Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’s Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh, Skenè (Texts: 1), 2016, 158 pp.
The Uncompromising Victorian: The Law and the Family in the Plays of Dion Boucicault, Pisa, ETS, 2017, 153 pp.
Articles
“An Apple-gathering di Christina Rossetti: la voce di una ‘fallen woman’”, Strumenti Critici, n. 91, September 1999, pp. 421-43.
“‘Golden head by golden head’: retorica della ripetizione e Petrarchismo in Goblin Market”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, n. 8, July 1999, pp. 131-53.
“‘For the lawyer is born but to murder – the Saviour lives but to bless’. Legge degli uomini e legge di Dio in Rizpah di Alfred Tennyson”, Strumenti Critici, n. 97, September 2001, pp. 397-428.
“Mariana e Mariana in the South di Tennyson: un confronto”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, n. 11, January 2001, pp. 59-81.
“Salman’s Rushdie’s Use of the Bible in The Ground Beneath her Feet”, in The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Ground Beneath her Feet’, edited by Elsa Linguanti and Viktoria Tchernichova, Pisa, ETS, 2003, pp. 55-68.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: Christina Rossetti e la desacralizzazione del focolare domestico”, Soglie (Pisa), VI:3, December 2004, pp. 28-41.
“There shall no sign be given: Il soprannaturale cristiano in The Holy Grail di Tennyson”, Anglistica pisana, vol. II, nn. 1-2 (2005), pp. 31-58.
“Il cimitero degli Inglesi in Livorno”, in Giuseppina Rossi (ed.), Toscana Cosmopolita del primo Ottocento, Livorno, Debatte, 2006, pp. 193-201.
“Jonah, Malo, and Victor Hugo: Some Notes on Crossing the Bar”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, XI, n. 21, January 2006, pp. 93-111.
“‘Let us serve God, and then to breakfast’. Retorica cattolica e buonsenso protestante in Westward Ho! di Charles Kingsley”, in Anna Maria Piglionica, Claudia Bacile di Castiglione, Maria Serena Marchesi (eds.), in I Linguaggi dell’Altro: forme dell’alterità nel testo letterario, Firenze, Olschki, 2007, pp. 57-79.
“Go, say this, Pilgrim Dear: Strutture attoriali dantesche in Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli di Robert Browning”, Strumenti Critici XXII, n. 1, January 2007, pp. 49-66.
The Duke's Versace Sunglasses: Catholic Piety and Italian Otherness in Alex Cox's "Revengers Tragedy", In Lucy Bolton, Christina Siggers Manson (eds.), Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary, Osford, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 137-152.
“Decline and Fall of the Italian Villain”, in Hammered Gold and Gold Enamelling. Studi in onore di Anthony L. Johnson, ed. by S. Beccone, C. Dell’Aversano, C. Serani, Rome, Aracne, 2011, pp. 387-402.
“High Notes, by Lois Roma Deeley. Review”, Italian Americana 31.1 (2013), pp. 114-115.
“Bostoniani a Livorno: il console Thomas Appleton e i suoi conterranei by Maria Argiero and Algerina Neri: Review”, Italian Americana 32.1 (2014), pp. 107-108.
“Sordid Particulars: Deixis in the Chorus of Murder in the Cathedral”, Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 1.1 (2015) http://www.skenejournal.it/
Translations
Volumes
M.K. Gandhi, La Forza della Nonviolenza (Satyagraha in South Africa), Firenze, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 2005.
Articles
“Gandhi e il pacifismo” (by Peter Brock), Quaderni Satyagraha, n. 4, dicembre 2003, pp. 15-24.
“Un anabattista polacco in difesa dell’obiezione di coscienza, 1575” (by Peter Brock), Quaderni Satyagraha (forthcoming).
“L’Ebraismo e la costruzione della pace nel contesto del conflitto medio orientale” (di Marc Gopin), Quaderni Satyagraha (forthcoming).
Critical Editions
Jessie Allen’s letters to Jean Charles Sismondi, in G. Rossi (ed.), Toscana Cosmopolita del primo Ottocento, Livorno, Debatte, 2006, pp. 91-192.
Unpublished Conference Papers
“Once Upon a Time in the West and the De-Victorianization of the Fallen Woman” (International Italian Studies Conference, Bangor University, July 2007).
“The Good, the Bad, and the Zany: Harlequin on Screen Between Italy and America” (International Italian Studies Conference, King’s College, London, April 2008).
.
Publications (41)
Third Mission (7)
Attività di coinvolgimento e interazione con il mondo della scuola (Altro)
- Progetto ConsapevolMente. Seminario per studenti scuole superiori sul movimento dei Preraffaelliti.
Dicam (05/12/2025 - 05/12/2025) 20251205
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Partecipazioni attive a incontri pubblici organizzati da altri soggetti (Altro, Relatore)
- CLASTEA VIII: Sulla scena. Mito e rito tra passato e presente.
Rettorato Università Messina (04/11/2025 - ) 20251104
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Partecipazioni attive a incontri pubblici organizzati da altri soggetti (Altro)
- E sarai meco sanza fine cive. Settimana di Studi Danteschi 2025. Partecipazione con intervento sulla figura di Gabriele Rossetti.
Palermo, chiesa del SS Salvatore (14/10/2025 - ) 20251014
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Attività di coinvolgimento e interazione con il mondo della scuola (Organizzatore)
- Orientamento Presso Istituto Bisazza
Istituto Bisazza Messina (04/04/2025 - 04/04/2025) 20250404
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Attività di coinvolgimento e interazione con il mondo della scuola (Altro)
- Presentazione del CdS triennale in Lingue e introduzione alla letteratura inglese presso il liceo linguistico di Reggio Calabria
Liceo Linguistico Reggio Calabria (13/02/2025 - 13/02/2025) 20250213
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Attività di coinvolgimento e interazione con il mondo della scuola (Altro)
- Orientamento presso istituto superiore Impallomeni di Milazzo
Istituto Impallomeni, Milazzo (21/01/2025 - 21/01/2025) 20250121
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
Attività di coinvolgimento e interazione con il mondo della scuola (Relatore)
- Open Day DICAM 2019
Dipartimento Civiltà Antiche e Moderne, Università di Messina (13/02/2019 - 13/02/2019) 20190213
Dipartimento di Civiltà antiche e moderne
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54 hours
12 CFU
72 hours
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