Luca Naponiello
I am a scholar of literature interested in storytelling, fabulation, and the ways narratives travel across languages and places. I received my PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and previously studied at the University of Bologna. My work draws inspiration from writers such as Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati, who approached literature as a field of wandering stories and errant frontiers across languages and traditions.
Working across several European languages—including Italian, French, and German—I am interested in how narratives circulate between cultures, from folktales and fables to modern literary experiments. My research explores the relationship between narrative and landscape, and the ways writers learn to observe, describe, and imagine places. I am also interested in the dialogue between literature and photography, and in how visual forms shape literary ways of seeing. My current book project, Wandering Roots: Italo Calvino, the Grimms, and Fairy-Tale Ecologies, examines Calvino’s engagement with European folktale traditions and the movement of stories across languages, regions, and landscapes.
I have taught literature and Italian language courses at Columbia University, UMass Lowell, and Villanova University. At Columbia I taught in the Core Curriculum, leading seminars on major works of European literature, and I have designed courses on modern Italian literature and culture, including a course on Elena Ferrante and the literary imagination of Naples.