Filippo Trentin

Senior Lecturer in Italian

My research focuses on 19th and 20th-century Italian literature and cinema, with specific interests in theories of modernity, psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality, and materialist theories of history. My first book project, Rome and the Margins of Modernism, explores 19th and 20th-century Rome as a site of modernity and modernism, focusing on the relationship between aesthetics and space. While Rome's ancient cityscape has long provided the semantics for political narratives of European history, the book examines Rome’s transformation into a site of modernity, showing how philosophers, writers, and filmmakers such as Gramsci, Pasolini, Fellini, and Carlo Levi expanded Rome’s imagery to account for the city’s expanding subaltern margins. My second book project takes up the role of the gaze in Italian cinema, reading art films from the 1950s to the 1970s through the lens of feminist film theory and psychoanalysis.

My work has appeared in journals such as Screen, Psychoanalysis & History, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Modern Language Review, and The Journal of Romance Studies, among others. I also served as an editor for a special issue of GLQ titled “The Ontology of the Couple,” co-edited with S. Pearl Brilmyer and Zairong Xiang. With Dom Holdaway, I am the editor of the book Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape (Routledge, 2016).

Before joining the faculty of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in at the ICI Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry (2013-15), as a visiting assistant professor of Italian at the Ohio State University (2015-16), and as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Penn (2016-17). I received my Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick in 2013.

Research Interests

20th-century Italian literature and cinema, film studies, critical theory, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis.