Research: Crossing Pain. Metaphor, Body, and Experience in Contemporary Indian Poetics
Curriculum Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia
The research investigates pain and the body as a cognitive threshold in modern and contemporary Indian texts, with a particular focus on Bengali production, using a corpus-driven method: metaphors emerge from the texts and their functions (threshold, testimony, care, revelation) and transformations are mapped along the devotional–modern, sacred–immanent, and private–historical axes. The theoretical framework intertwines hermeneutics of metaphor (Ricoeur, Blumenberg, Black, Lakoff–Johnson) and Indian aesthetics (rasa–bhāva, dhvani, with a focus on karuṇa), reconstructing internal genealogies of bhakti, Baul, Sufi/ghazal, and Buddhist motifs on duḥkha. A selective Western reverse focus (Nancy, Celan, Anedda, Carson) serves to achieve resonance/contrast, bringing postures, specificities, and contexts into focus.
Research interests
metaphor (theory/use); pain (epistemic threshold); contemporary Indian poetics; contemporary Italian poetry; European poetry (20th–21st c.); Creative writing, literary theory & poetics; philosophy of language; hermeneutics; rhetoric & pragmatics; Indian aesthetics; body, voice & testimony; trauma studies; postcolonial studies; comparative literature; poetry translation & mediation; philology of poetry; performance; hybrid essay-poetry writing practices.
Publications (books and edited works)
2025 — Movements, Waters, and Soliloquies. Modern Bengali Poetry, Officina Libraria. Editor and translator (with Giuseppe Flora).
2023 — Land of Returns, Pordenonelegge – Samuele Editore. (Finalist, Strega Poetry Prize 2024; winner, San Vito Giovani).
2019 — Versante d’esilio (CV reads “Versandte”; I suggest correcting it to Versante), Minerva Editore. (Guido Gozzano Award for a First Work; Camaiore Award – Proposal).
2019 — How to Translate Snow, Animamundi (co-author with Calandrone and Mancinelli).
Selected Articles (most recent)
2025 — The Garden and the Knife, Tragic Consciousness in Contemporary Italian Poetry
on Forms of the Tragic, Industry, and Literature.
2025 – “Modernism, Islam, Revolt…”, Words and Things.
2025 – “Dialogue with Alessandro Anil”, Pordenonelegge Poesia.
— RAI Play Books interview on Land of Returns.
2025 – “What is Poetry?”, Ritratti di Poesia;
Jobes
Artistic Director, Theatre House – Sources Research Performative Arts, Santiniketan (IN)
Design and management of residencies and workshops on body/voice/threshold; interdisciplinary research-creation and curation.
Conferences and Seminars (most recent)
November 2025 — Singing Spaces: Metaphors of Sound and Voice in Poetry. A Due Voci, Tra Musica e Filosofia Festival, Como.
October 2025 — Zeugma, a key to reading Pasolini, Faculty of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome.
May 2025 — “Mother Tongue and Other Language,” Malatestiana Library, Cesena.
February 2024 — “On Shakespeare’s New Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre,” Jadavpur University, Department of English.
March 2023 — “Metaphors of Water, River, and Death in Contemporary European Poetry,” Jadavpur University, Department of Bengali.
M.A. in Reasoning, University of Kent
Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy, La Sapienza, University of Rome
Secondary School, Patha Bhavana - Viswa Bharati University, Santiniketan