Giovanni Miglianti is a scholar of modern Italian culture, with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first century Italian literature, cultural history, and affect theory. His doctoral dissertation, written between Yale University and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, analyzes the notion of pudore (a sense of modesty, decency, and privacy) in Primo Levi’s work. Expanding on this research, his current book project – Affect and the Holocaust: Rethinking Representation in Italian Culture (1944-2022) – rethinks Holocaust memory through the lenses of emotion and sexuality, providing the first affective history of cultural representations of the Holocaust in Italy.

A native of Bologna, Giovanni studied at the universities of Udine (Laurea in Lettere), Leiden (Erasmus studentship), and Cambridge (MPhil in Comparative Literature), prior to moving to the States to earn his PhD in Italian Studies from Yale University. At Yale, he was the co-founder of the Memory Studies in Modern Europe working group and of the Understanding Italian Studies lecture series, as well as a member of the organizing committee for the Annual Festival of New Italian Cinema. He taught language and culture courses at Yale and Wesleyan, and he was invited to present his research and teach as guest lecturer at several colleges and universities, including Cornell University and the New Sorbonne University (Paris 3), where he was Visiting Scholar at the Medical Humanities in Context Lab. His publications on contemporary Italian poetry and representations of the Holocaust include peer reviewed articles in the Journal of War and Culture Studies and California Italian Studies.