Rebecca Walker

My personal research is focused on twentieth and twenty-first century women's writing across languages, with a particular concentration on Italian. My doctoral research examined the motif of fragmentation in the novels of Elena Ferrante and Goliarda Sapienza, arguing that the contributions of women writers are central to a broader canon of male-authored fragmentated narratives in Italy which includes modernist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern texts. I have published in Italianist and comparatist contexts on subjectivity in the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Sally Rooney and am presently preparing my doctoral thesis for publication.

Most recently, I am interested in how scholarship in Italian Studies can better account for the theological dimensions of modern Italian literature and am undertaking new research on responses to Roman Catholicism among Italian women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

IT1001: Introduction to Italian Language

IT1002: Italian Language (Elementary)

IT1004: Italian Language Intermediate II

IT2002: Second Level Italian (Advanced)

IT1013: Italian Geographies

IT1014: Italian Histories

IT4033: Elena Ferrante

CO1002: Drama in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

ML5010: Problems of Culture and Identity 1

ML5020: Literary and Cultural Theory 1

I am currently a Research Associate with the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology in the School of Divinity and a Modern Humanities Research Association Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Modern Languages. 

I received my MA in French and Italian and MLitt in Italian Studies from the University of St Andrews, respectively in 2016 and 2017. In 2021 I was awarded a PhD in Italian from St Andrews, the research for which was funded by the Carnegie Trust.