Dr Marta Arnaldi

I specialise in Italian literature and comparative literature, with a focus on discourses of translation and migration, human health and disease, and planetary wellbeing.

My research has actively contributed to the emergence and shaping of the translational medical humanities, or medical humanities third wave. From 2019 to 2022, I served as principal investigator of Translating Illness, a medical humanities project that I initiated thanks to the award of several streams of funding, including a double award from OUP-Oxford John Fell Fund and Wellcome Trust (University of Oxford), and the Research Council of Norway.

Research Interests

I have published widely on modern and contemporary Italian literature (nineteenth-century to the present), with a focus on poetry as interdisciplinary discourse, transnational practice, and catalyser of change. My first monograph, The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015 (2022), explores Italian poetry’s potential for mobility and transformation by tracing its reception in the United States and translation into English as an expression of the culture of Italian migration to North America.

As the author of three award-winning poetry collections (Itaca 2016, Mare Storto 2022, and Intraducibile 2022), I have also approached these topics through creative methods and as a form of lived experience, thus contributing to the understanding of Italian poetry as a transnational presence. 

Similarly, Italian poetry's capacity to transcend national and disciplinary boundaries lies at the heart of Translating Illness. My programme enjoyed an international expansion as part of the Oslo project Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge, and Sustainability in Cultural Translation (2022-2024, The Research Council of Norway). As principal investigator of Translating Illness and leader of its literary strand, I published in two main areas: epidemic literature, especially Manzoni and Camus (e.g., 'Contagious Otherness: Translating Communicable Diseases in the Modern Italian and Francophone Novel', Open Library of Humanities 2022), and literature and psychiatry, including questions of epistemic injustice, with a focus on poets such as Amelia Rosselli, Margherita Guidacci, Alda Merini, Vivian Lamarque, and Antonella Anedda (e.g., 'Illness as a Foreign Tongue: Therapeutic Translation in Contemporary Italian Women's Poetry', Literature and Medicine 2022), and on Dante (‘Terapia della traduzione nel Purgatorio di Dante’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 2021).

Co-organised with John Ødemark and in collaboration with OCCT and The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the conference Translation and Medical Humanities marked a key moment in the life of the project by bringing into dialogue more than 500 researchers (2023). I am currently completing two book projects on these topics. 

A third area of interest, one that has emerged as an expression of the close links between the medical, the technological and the ecological, has looked at the writing of nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi as a prism for examining questions of planetary health and wellbeing in the Anthropocene – e.g., 'Giacomo Leopardi in the Anthropocene: Translating the Non-Human from Animals to AI' (forthcoming with Bloomsbury), and '"The New Order of Things": Leopardi and AI' (forthcoming with The Italianist). By current book project expands on these themes by taking into consideration a broader range of authors and artistic forms.

See page on Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Research Project: Translating Illness

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