Marianna Nespoli

Marianna Nespoli received her Ph.D. in Italian from the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA in 2023. Her dissertation, Bitter Rice: A Cultural History of Rice in Modern Italy, examines the cultural, historical, and environmental significance of rice cultivation in modern Italy.

She graduated magna cum laude from Occidental College with a B.A. in English and Comparative Literary Studies with an emphasis in Creative Writing.

Her research interests include the feminine monstrous and the female grotesque in Italian literature and film from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, as well as the representation of environmental issues in contemporary works produced in Emilia-Romagna, particularly the Po Valley region of Italy, where she was born and raised.

Her article, “Folle audacia femminile: metamorfosi entomologiche in Nascita e morte della massaia di Paola Masino,” was recently published in the academic journal The Philological Review.

In addition to her academic work, she is developing a screenplay based on the life of Zdenka Schelingová, a Slovak nun who helped save lives during the communist regime in the 1950s.