Alessandro CABIATI

Dr Alessandro Cabiati is a Researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies. From 2021 to 2024, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca' Foscari and Brown University in Providence, USA (2022-2023). Dr Cabiati’s Marie Curie research project MadLand – Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900 has investigated the connections and mutual knowledge-exchange between literary fairy tales and psychiatry in the nineteenth century. The project has explored how in Britain, France, and the United States medical interpretations of psychological abnormality and deviance influenced fairy-tale imagery, and how in turn fairy-tale representations of monstrosity served as a point of reference for the codification of insanity by early psychiatry.

Research Interests

Dr Cabiati’s research interests include nineteenth-century English, Anglo-American, French and Italian literature; comparative literature; fairy-tale studies and children’s literature; fantastic literature; decadence and modernity; deviance and monstrosity; history of medicine and psychiatry; gender and sexuality studies.

Education, Research Experience, and Awards

In 2020 Dr Cabiati was awarded a Chandis Securities Fellowship at The Huntington Library in California for a project about monomania in nineteenth-century English and French literature and psychiatry. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and a Tutor in Italian and Comparative Literature at The University of Edinburgh. Dr Cabiati holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Edinburgh), a Master of Studies in Modern Languages with English from the University of Oxford, and a Laurea in English and French (Università Statale di Milano).

In 2019, Dr Cabiati was the winner of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a critical essay on the fantastic.
 

Publications 

Forthcoming publications include:

• Ogresses of Crime Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025)
• [with Lewis Seifert] (eds), Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition, a Special Issue of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 39.1 (in print, 2025)
• [with Lewis Seifert]  ‘Introduction: Norms and Limits of Fairy-Tale Transgression’, in Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition, a Special Issue of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 39.1 (in print, 2025)
• 'Dreaming (and) Insanity: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Through the Looking-Glass of Victorian Psychology'

Dr Cabiati's second monograph, Ogresses of Crime Narratives, will be published by Cambridge University Press in the second half of 2025. This book will investigate how, in the British and French press between 1860 and 1910, women suspected to have committed serial murders of babies were deemed ‘ogresses’ and described with the aid of an array of fairy-tale textual and visual references, as if the only way to make sense of the horrors of serial infanticide was through the means of a comparison with the fictional cruelty of the fairy-tale ogress. This study will trace the evolution of the representation of serial murderesses of infants in nineteenth-century crime writing, which employed the devices of storytelling, exaggerating the gore of the crime scenes and the violent aspects of the murders, in its construction of the female deviant type of the fairy-tale ogress. Dr Cabiati’s first book, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857-1912 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in March 2022 as part of the series ‘Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature’.

Conferences

Dr Cabiati has recently organised the following conferences:

• [with Lewis Seifert] Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings, 7-9 June 2023, Brown University, USA. Keynote Speakers: Maria Tatar, Cristina Bacchilega, Anne E. Duggan, Laura Tosi. Reviewed here by the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.
• [with Laura Tosi and Anna Gasperini] Teaching and Researching Children’s Literature in the Digital Age: New Perspectives and Technologies, 24 June 2022, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy.

Recent invitations as Keynote Speaker: 

• 'Marvellous Abnormalities: Fairy Tales, Decadence, and Deviance in the Late Nineteenth Century', Decadence and the Fairy Tale, 24 March 2023, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. (Recording of keynote talk available on the conference website). 

Recent conference papers: 

• 'Magical Maladies: (Dis)Enchanting Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales', Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment, 27-29 March 2023, Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK.
   
• 'Gothic Terror and Female Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Adaptations of "Bluebeard"', Gothic Networks: Webs, Traps, and Global Trends, 24-25 January 2023, Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia.
   
• '"We're all mad here": l’adattamento di Alice nell’ambito medico-psichiatrico a cavallo tra due secoli (1865-1940)', Nello specchio di Alice: il sé e l’altro, 2 December 2022, Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy.
   
• 'Decadent Fairy Tales and Abnormal Consumptions: A Comparative Investigation of Excessive Eating/Drinking in Boito’s Re Orso and Anorexia Nervosa in Mendès’s "Le Mauvais convive"', Food and/in Children’s Culture: National, International and Transnational Perspective, 6-9 April 2021, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy.
   

An interview with Dr Cabiati about MadLand: https://www.unive.it/pag/16584/?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=10527&cHash=7b0de148cbfae2084ffcd42388cb79b0