Alessandro CABIATI

Current Research

Dr Alessandro Cabiati is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies and a Visiting Scholar at Brown University in Providence, USA (2022-2023). Working under the supervision of Professors Laura Tosi and Lewis Seifert, Dr Cabiati’s transnational and interdisciplinary research project MadLand – Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900 investigates the connections and mutual knowledge-exchange between literary fairy tales and psychiatry in the nineteenth century. The project explores 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:

• [with Laura Tosi] 'Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors', Literature (in print)
• [with Lewis Seifert] (Eds), Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition (provisional title), a Special Issue of Marvels & Tales, 39.1 (2025)
• 'Dreaming (and) Insanity: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Through the Lens of Victorian Psychology'

Together with Prof Laura Tosi, Dr Cabiati is currently editing Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, a special issue of Literature (ISSN 2410-9789). 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’. This book establishes that, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, poets such as Charles Baudelaire, the Scapigliatura, and the Futurists similarly employed a medical and scientific vocabulary to experiment with unpoetic language and expand the range of subjects and themes used in poetry, presenting detailed scenes of anatomical dissection, mental illness, bodily decomposition, and technological change.

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