Professor Giona Tuccini
MA PGDip PhD Florence PGDip Roma Tor Vergata
Research Interests: Petrarch and Spiritual Petrarchism: Preaching and Christian thought from the Middle Ages to Renaissance; the study of patristics,mediaeval and golden-age mysticism in modern Italian culture; the intersections between mythology and imagology in Italian literature (16th,17th,20th centuries); the rediscovery of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in 20th century Italian culture; Italian cinema, drama and Opera libretti.
Professor Giona Tuccini is an internationally acclaimed scholar and leader in the field of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature. In 2021 he received an A rating from the South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF). He was born in Fucecchio in the district of Florence (Italy) on 23 October 1974. He achieved summa cum laude his Master’s Degree in Italian Studies at the University of Florence in 1999, where he then obtained a postgraduate diploma in Literary Translation from English and Spanish (2002), and was awarded a PhD in Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean with a thesis on the presence of Patristics, Mediaeval and Golden-Age mysticism in Boine and Papini (2005). Furthermore, he pursued a postgraduate diploma in “The Trecento Tradition in Italian Literature” at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. In 2006 he was a Research Fellow at the Fundação Oriente in Goa (India).
He joined the University of Cape Town in 2010 where he serves as Full Professor of Italian Literature and Head of the Italian Section. He is a member of the Committee of Assessors and Supervisors within the Doctoral Degrees Board for the PhD Programme in Italian Studies offered by the University of Pisa (Italy), a member of the International Advisory Board of «Soglie. Rivista quadrimestrale di poesia e critica letteraria», a member of the International Advisory Board of «Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación», a member of the International Advisory Board of the book series “Ardesie” by Lithos Publishing House (Italy), and co-editor of the book series “Novecento Inquieto”, Aracne Publishing House in Rome. Currently he is a sworn translator and interpreter in English and Italian at the High Court of South Africa. He has been filling a number of key advisory roles, including – among many others – serving as Panelist and Research Specialist for the scientific evaluation of Italian research of the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MIUR), as an International Observer for the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492- 1923) and working as an Italian dialogue coach for National Geographic’s documentary Galileo’s Telescope. He is a member of the Permanent Research Group on Pasolini Studies (Estudos aos redor de Pasolini) established by the State University of Campinas (Brazil) at CNP – Centro Nacional de Pesquisa (Brazilian National Research Centre).
Over the course of his career, Professor Tuccini has been invited to participate in more than 40 academic seminars and international conferences at a variety of institutions worldwide, often as a keynote speaker. He has also been appointed as visiting professor at University Sapienza of Rome for starting a research project on early-modern poet Girolamo Benivieni (2019). Apart from dedicating himself to the study of the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini and those of Enrico Pea, his research interests and teaching areas span a variety of fields in mediaeval, early-modern and contemporary Italian literature, including Petrarch and Spiritual Petrarchism; Preaching and Christian thought from the Middle Ages to Renaissance; the study of patristics, mediaeval and golden-age mysticism in modern Italian writings; the intersections between mythology and imagology in Italian literature (16th, 17th, 20th centuries); the rediscovery of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in 20th century Italian culture; Italian cinema, drama and Opera libretti. He has contributed, with articles on mediaeval and early-modern authors, as well as on writers and trends in twentieth-century Italian literature, to the main refereed journals in his field, such as «Studi e problemi di critica testuale», «Forum Italicum», «Critica letteraria», «Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie», «Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate», «Critica del testo» and «The Romanic Review». As a translator of English, Spanish and French texts he has translated into Italian J.R. Ackerley, Sylvia Plath, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, Alberto Olmos, and José Custódio de Faria.
His scholarly production has resulted in about seventy publications, including the monographs Il vespasiano e l’abito da sposa. Fisionomie e compiti della poesia nell’opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini (2003), Spiriti cercanti. Mistica e santità in Boine e Papini (2007), Voce del silenzio, luce sul sentiero. Di altre pagine mistiche tra Italia e Spagna (2008), Bernardino da Siena: Novellette, aneddoti, discorsi volgari (2009), Enrico Pea. Bibliografia completa e nuovi saggi critici (2012), Girolamo Savonarola: Rime (2015), Nostalgia dell’abisso. I romanzi di Enrico Pea degli anni Trenta (2020), Degno del cielo. Umanesimo plebeo e poetica del sacrificio in “Accattone” di Pasolini (2021).
(Last updated in March 2021)
Office: Beattie Building, Room 216