Jennifer Scappettone

Affiliated Civitella Fellow - Summer 2019

Jennifer Scappettone is an Associate Professor of English, Romance languages and literatures, creative writing, and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Chicago, who works at the juncture of scholarly research, translation, and the literary arts, on the page and off. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014), a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and her translations of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which won the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Prize. Scappettone curates PennSound Italiana, a sector of the audiovisual archive hosted by the University of Pennsylvania devoted to marginalized and experimental voices in Italian contemporary poetry. 

Scappettone’s recent writings can be found in journals such as alfabeta2, Asymptote, Boston Review, boundary2, Critical Inquiry, e-flux, Jacket2, Moderna, Modern Philology, Nuovi argomenti, and PMLA; in the collections Reading Experimental Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Geopoetics in Practice (Routledge, 2019), Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Poetics and Precarity (SUNY Press, 2018), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time (Northwestern University Press, 2017), Terrain Vague: The Interstitial as Site, Concept, Intervention (Routledge, 2013), and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 2012); and in the catalog for the US Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Dimensions of Citizenship. She has also published several chapbooks and two full-length books of poetry: From Dame Quickly: Poems (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2016). Her work has been recognized by fellowships, residencies, and grants from foundations such as the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Getty Research Institute, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Huntington Library, and she was a 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies.

For her Affiliated CIMA – Civitella fellowship she will be working on a book manuscript devoted to the visual, spatial, and sonic transformations of verse by modernist and postwar poets such as Emilio Villa and Amelia Rosselli, whose expansions of poetic form in two and three dimensions carve out a space between national languages—reoccupying the utopian ideals of globality manifest in the futurist “wireless imagination” while deterritorializing both the poetry and the ideology of the patria.