Federico Italiano is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of European, American, and Intercultural Studies at Sapienza University of Rome. From 2016 to 2024, he served as a Researcher and Group Leader at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he directed the international "Translation" project cluster. He has held positions as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Innsbruck and Munich and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Graz and Vienna. In 2022, he was a Senior Fellow at the IFK (International Research Center for Cultural Studies).
He earned his German Habilitation at Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich in 2016, achieving dual venia legendi in Comparative Literature and Romance Philology with his thesis "Translation and Geography" (Routledge, 2016). A prolific scholar, he has published widely on contemporary poetry, translation studies, and the intersection of literature and space. Notable works include "The Dark Side of Translation" (Routledge, 2020) and the anthology "Grand Tour: Reisen durch die junge Lyrik Europas" (Hanser, 2019), co-edited with Jan Wagner.
Federico Italiano is also a poet, literary critic, and translator. His poetry collections, including "Habitat" (2020) and "La grande nevicata" (2023), have received prestigious awards, and his poems have been translated into several languages. A selection of his works, translated into German by Jan Wagner and Raoul Schrott, "Sieben Arten von Weiß", was published by Hanser in 2022. He lives in Rome.