Elisa Cozzi
Thesis Title:
Italy and the Irish Romantics: Irish-Italian Literary Networks, 1798-1848
Supervisor:
Professor Fiona Stafford
Doctoral project
My thesis explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the fifty years spanning the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion and the European risings of 1848. It hinges on the recuperation of previously unexamined manuscript material that circulated across a series of interconnected literary networks in Ireland and Italy, with a focus on the neglected Irish members of the Shelley circle in Pisa: Lady Mount Cashell, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe. Funded by a Clarendon Scholarship and a Baillie Gifford Scholarship, in partnership with the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership.
Research interests:
The Byron-Shelley circle; Irish Romanticism and cosmopolitan poetics; Anglo-Italian literature; manuscript culture and the digital humanities; theories of influence; literary coteries in the long eighteenth century.
Teaching:
I taught a variety of undergraduate classes and tutorials for FHS Paper 4 (1660-1760), FHS Paper 5 (1760-1830), and Study Skills in English at Mansfield College and The Queen’s College, Oxford; I was also a guest lecturer and tutor on ‘Irish Romanticism’ and ‘Irish Women’s Writing’ at the Department of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.
Other projects:
I have a secondary interest in the digital and environmental humanities. In 2022, I was the Programme Coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Programme at TORCH and the co-convenor, with Fiona Stafford, of the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminar. I am a contributor to Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s digital database of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s illustrated editions, soon to be turned into a website hosted by the University of Oxford.
Public engagement:
I was the organiser and curator of a public symposium & exhibition on the cultural history of air ballooning, held at The Queen’s College in February 2024. In October 2022, I co-organised the interdisciplinary Vesuvius22 Conference, accompanied by a public lecture and an exhibition at the Weston Library and funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and The Wellcome Trust.
Select Publications:
Articles:
- Elisa Cozzi and Agnese Benedetto. '"Into the court of lost time": Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin’, in prep.
- Elisa Cozzi. ‘P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of “The Sensitive-Plant”’. Romanticism 30.1 (forthcoming, 2024).
Book Chapters:
- ‘Leopardi’s Pisan Circle: The Accademia dei Lunatici, The Ausonian, and The First English Translation from the Operette Morali’. In Giacomo Leopardi: Reading, Reception and Legacy in Europe. Edited by Paul Hamilton and Francesco Marchionni, in prep.
Reviews:
- Review: Valentina Varinelli, Italian Impromptus: A Study of P.B. Shelley's Writings in Italian with an Annotated Edition. European Romantic Review, 35.1 (2024), 187-191. DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2024.2307169.
- Review: Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823. The Keats-Shelley Review, 36.1 (2022), 47-50. DOI: 10.1080/09524142.2022.2075613.
Reference Entries:
- Co-authored. ‘Taaffe, John’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in prep.
- ‘The Poetical Works of Percy B. Shelley. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1865’. Digital Gallery of Illustrated Editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1851-1922, edited by Bysshe Inigo Coffey. Oxford (forthcoming).
Conference Papers and Invited Talks:
- ‘Shelley, Éire, and Air Balloons’. Oxford Balloons, Enlightenment Science, and the Poetry of Flight. Symposium. The Queen’s College, Oxford, February 2024.
- 'History and Nationhood in the Shelley Circle: Margaret Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin'. The 16th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Rome, July 2023.
- 'The Taaffe Papers: Dispersal and Recovery'. Editing Romantic Letters Colloquium. University of Birmingham, May 2023.
- 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. The Shelley Conference 2022. Keats House, London, July 2022.
- 'Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin and Anglo-Irish-Italian Romantic Networks'. British Romanticism and Europe International Conference. Ascona, Switzerland, June 2022.
- 'On First Looking into Lady Mount Cashell’s Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin'. ECIS (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society) Conference. University College Cork, June 2022.
- 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. Romantic Research Seminar. Balliol College, University of Oxford, June 2022.
- 'Irish-Italian Literary Networks, 1815-1835'. Romanticism Across Borders Research Seminar. University of Paris, May 2022.
- 'Anglo-Irish-Italian Literary Networks from Dublin to Pisa, 1791-1835'. The Queen's College Symposium. University of Oxford, May 2021.
- 'Dante among the Irish Romantics: The Case of John Taaffe’s A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1822)'. Distance 2020 International Postgraduate Conference. August 2020, online.
- 'In darkness found a dwelling place’: "The Prisoner of Chillon" and Byron’s turn away from Nature'. The 12th International Student Byron Conference. Messolonghi, Greece, May 2017.
Twitter (@_ElisaCozzi)