Paolo Simonetti teaches Anglo-American Literature at the Department of European, American, and Intercultural Studies of Sapienza Università di Roma, where in 2008 he earned a Ph.D. in Literature in English. In the following years, he worked as an adjunct professor at the Universities of Tor Vergata and Sapienza, where from 2015 to 2019 he was a research fellow on projects dealing with Melville’s legacy between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the postmemory of WWII, wonder and poetry, the fiction of the New Sincerity. In 2017 he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2012 and then again in 2020 he obtained the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor.
His research interests in the field of U.S. literature include the connection between history and fiction in modern and contemporary narrations, the postmodern reconfigurations of the historical novel and the Anglo-American literary tradition, the works of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann; the relationship between Italian publishing houses and Anglo-American writers, the language of comics and its formal relation with non-graphic literature. He is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project on the global rise of post-truth.
He is the author of a book on conspiracy and paranoia in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster (Paranoia blues. Trame del postmodern americano, Aracne 2009) and of about forty critical essays published in books and international journals such as Modern Language Studies, Critique, Leviathan, Ácoma, Fictions, Status Quaestionis, Memoria di Shakespeare.
Between 2014 and 2019 he edited the two-volume Italian edition of Bernard Malamud’s complete works (I Meridiani Mondadori) and two of the three volumes dedicated to Philip Roth’s novels (I Meridiani Mondadori). He collaborates with the Mondadori publishing house as an editor and translator (he edited the Italian editions of A Farewell to Arms and Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway in the Oscar Mondadori series, as well as the correspondence between Hemingway and his son Patrick).
He took part in international conferences delivering papers on diverse authors and topics, and in 2019 he co-organized the eleventh edition of the “International Pynchon Week”. As a reviewer he occasionally collaborates with “Alias”, the Sunday literary supplement of “Il Manifesto”. He is part of the editorial board of the journal RSA (Rivista di Studi Americani) and Costellazioni. He is a member of AISNA, of the Hemingway Society, and of the Melville Society.