AISCLI WEBINAR SERIES 2025. Marco Medugno presents his book “Literature of the Somali Diaspora”. Respondent Alice Girotto. June 4, 2025 at 5 p.m.

Biographies: Marco Medugno and Alice Girotto

Marco  Medugno has background in Italian Studies and Modern Philology (BA and MA), Intercultural Studies (MA), and Anglophone Literatures, Diaspora, Comparative and Postcolonial studies (PhD). His research navigates these interdisciplinary areas, with a new additional focus on the Blue Humanities and Ecocriticism from a postcolonial perspective. An integral part of his work involves Literary Geography, particularly the study of urbanscapes. He explores the colonial planning and its enduring legacy in former Italian colonies and how urban spaces/places are represented in novels. His research also engages with Diaspora studies, examining diasporic experiences through a literary lens and investigating the connections and networks that emerge between authors and texts across languages, geographies and cultures.

His book, Literature of the Somali Diaspora (Bloomsbury, 2024), offers a comparative analysis of Somali diasporic novels written in English and Italian by authors such as Nuruddin Farah, Igiaba Scego, Garane Garane and Cristina Ali Farah. It examines the lasting impacts of colonialism and the Somali Civil War, which caused widespread displacement. The book highlights the ways Somali authors use the novel form to explore nationhood, identity and transnational belonging, fostering a multilingual and transnational literary community.

Alice Girotto is a fixed-term researcher in Portuguese/Brazilian Language, Translation and Linguistics at the University of Turin. She previously carried out teaching and research activities in the same field and in the related field of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone literatures at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of Trieste. Her current research interests concern the areas of translation studies, particularly on the Portuguese novel translated into Italian in the first half of the 20^th century, and lexicography of contemporary European Portuguese, particularly with regard to terminological neology. Since her PhD, she has been mainly concerned with the literary and artistic expressions of Portuguese-speaking African countries and the African diaspora in Portugal, as well as with archival research on late 19th-century Portuguese literature. She is the author of Pesadelos, excessos, utopias. A representação do poder em Angola entre literatura e artes visuais (Edições Húmus, 2022) and the Italian translator of Antero de Quental’s Veneza (Edições do Saguão, 2023). She recently edited the volume Camões e altri contemporanei (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2024), which collects the Italian translation of essays by the emeritus Professor of Portuguese Literature at Kings College London Helder Macedo.