Professor Charlotte Ross

I hold a BA in English and Italian (Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 1998), an MSt in Italian Studies (Balliol College, University of Oxford, 2000), and a PhD in Italian Studies (University of Warwick, 2004). I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Having begun my academic teaching career at Warwick, I was then based in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, first as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian, and most recently as Reader in Sexuality, Gender and Cultural Studies. I have held visiting professorships at the University of Palermo (2015) and the University of Toronto (Goggio Visiting Professor, 2023).

Teaching

I teach across many areas of Italian literature for both Prelims papers and the Final Honours School, from Dante to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I’ve supervised postgraduate research on many aspects of Italian and British literature, culture, and society, and would be interested in hearing from prospective students with an interest in gender and sexuality.

My research analyses cultural discourses of gender, sexuality and embodiment; the ways in which our gendered, sexed and sexual selves are constructed, represented, and de/re-constructed through counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. I have focused on LGBTQ+ individuals, communities, cultures and practices, predominantly in Italian culture, from the 19th century to the present day. Recently, I have begun to work more comparatively, tracing cross-cultural dialogues and resonances between Italian, French and British texts, exploring queer kinship across cultures. My work is interdisciplinary, ranging across literary study, critical approaches to cultural discourses more broadly, and ethnographic analysis of lived experience. I am the author of two monographs, co-editor of several edited collections of essays and my articles have been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals, such as Italian Studies, Modern Language Review, Modern Italy. My work has been funded by grants from the British Academy, the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.

Recent Publications

Monographs

• Ross, C. (2015), Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism and Desire between Women in Italy, 1860s-1930s. Bern, Oxford and New York: Peter Lang.

Edited books and journal special issues

• Heim, J., C. Ross and Smythe, SA, eds (2019), special issue of gender/sexuality/Italy: Italian Queer Cultures (6). Available at <https://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/journal/issues/g-s-i-6-2019>.

Articles in journals

• Ross, C. (2023) ‘Locked in or locked out, or “la vita della cose”. Gender, agency and (dis)embodiment in Primo Levi and Nicoletta Vallorani’s Speculative Fiction’. Enthymema XXXIII: 91-105. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/enthymema/issue/view/2055
• Antosa, S., & Ross, C. (2022), ‘Backward Modernism and Queerly Desiring Women in Early 20th- Century British and French Fiction: Rosamond Lehmann and Jeanne Galzy’. Ticontre. Teoria Testo Traduzione, (17). Available at https://teseo.unitn.it/ticontre/article/view/2280>.
• Ross C. (2020), ‘Surviving Melancholy and Mourning: a Queer Politics of Damage in Italian Literary Representations of Same-sex Parenting’. Phenomenology of Mind, 19: 54-70. https://philpapers.org/rec/ROSSMA-10
• Heim J., C. Ross and Smythe, SA (2019), ‘Queer Italian Studies: Critical Reflections from the Field’. Italian Studies, 74 (4): 397-412.