Chiara Caradonna is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Romances Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A literary scholar and translator and Member of the Research Group “Cantiere Umanistico dell’Antropocene” at the University of Pisa and Member of the Association for European Jewish Literature Studies (EJLS). she focuses mainly on poetry and prose at their intersection with modern European philosophical discourses and visual art. She completed her Ph.D. in Romance Literature at the University of Heidelberg in 2017 with a thesis on the philosophical dimension of Paul Celan’s later work, published in German under the title Opak. Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans “Meridian” und im Gedicht “Schwanengefahr” (Göttingen: Wallstein 2020). Between 2017 and 2021 she was a Postdoc-Fellow at the Martin Buber Society at the Hebrew University.
Currently, she is interested in the relation between literature and anthropology in the Italian and French pre-and post-war context. In particular, she is working on a book – tentatively titled Ethnography in the Strait – which will address the different conceptualizations of Nature in the novel Horcynus Orca by Italian writer Stefano D’Arrigo. Recent publications, which combine manuscript-analysis with close readings and epistemological considerations, are devoted to various aspects of Celan’s and D’Arrigo’s body of work, as well as to the “chimeric language of desire” in Paul Valéry and Edmund Husserl, to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reception of the Russian poet Osip Mandel’štam, and to the poetry of contemporary writers such as Rainer René Mueller and Daniel Sada. At the Department of Romance Studies, she teaches introductory courses on Italian and French Literature and Culture, as well as a variety of courses on key figures and movements in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Film.