About me

I am the author of two poetry collections (see the Poetry section) and currently work at Vilnius University, Lithuania, where I teach courses in linguistics and literature. I was educated at the University of Pavia (Italy, BA and MA in English and Spanish language and literature) and at the University of Nottingham, where I gained a PhD in stylistics in 2016. My research, focusing on the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of difficulty in modernist and postmodernist poetry, has been published on international peer-reviewed journals including The Journal of Literary Semantics and Language and Literature. My thesis-based monograph, Difficulty in Poetry: A Stylistic and Processing Model, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, and it won the Rector’s prize for young researchers at Vilnius University in Dec 2018. I am currently working on a new funded project attempting to develop a taxonomy of poetic imagery.

My academic mission is that of developing the fields of stylistics and poetics by drawing on multiple frameworks. In terms of teaching, I aim at sparking students’ interest and passion in this subject, pushing them out of their comfort zone while remaining approachable and supportive. Occasionally, I also do translating jobs from Italian to English and write about contemporary Italian poetry on my other website.