Simona Adinolfi

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Biography

Simona Adinolfi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the MeDiMi sub-project “Dehumanizing, Victimizing, or Universalizing? How Images of Migration Interact with Human Rights Discourse”. Closely collaborating with Prof. Greta Olson, she is researching the affective responses to images of migration in legacy and digital media.

She obtained her PhD in Literary Studies with a thesis titled “Narrating Migration in the 21st Century. A Posthumanist Approach to Anglophone Novels” at Ghent University, in Belgium. During her PhD, she took part in the Horizon 2020 project “OPPORTUNITIES: For a Fair Narrative on Migration”, in which she analyzed migration narratives in Italian public media.

Before her PhD, Simona worked as lecturer at the University of Wuppertal teaching English literature and Culture at a BA level. She studied German and English language and literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at Otto-Friederich University in Bamberg. Simona’s research interests include narrative theory, critical posthumanism, migration studies, and media studies.

 CV

2024 – 2026

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Postdoctoral research associate in the MeDiMi sub-project “Dehumanizing, Victimizing, or Universalizing? How Images of Migration Interact with Human Rights Discourse”. PI: Prof. Dr. Greta Olson.

PREVIOUS ACADEMIC POSITION

2021 – 2024

PhD in Literary Studies at Ghent University Title: Narrating Migration in the 21st century. A Posthumanist Approach to Anglophone Novels    

2020 – 2021

Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiterin) at the University of Wuppertal

EDUCATION

2018 – 2019

Specialization Course in Editorial Translation

2015 –2017 

MA in European American and Postcolonial Languages and Literature

Joint Degree in English and American Literature

Home University: Ca’ Foscari University – Venice

Mobility University: Otto Friederich Universität – Bamberg

Research and dissertation at the Otto-Friederich-Universität – Bamberg

Dissertation title: Mind the Gap: an Analysis of the Narrative Strategies in Alzheimer’s Novels 

2012 – 2015

BA in Languages Civilization and Language Sciences

English and German languages, cultures and literatures at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

From September 2014 to January 2015, I have taken part into the Erasmus+ exchange at the University of Nottingham (UK).

Dissertation Title: Playing with Theatre: Parody and Meta-Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

•  2025-2026 – Justus Liebig University Giessen: BA third year course. Posthumanism and Migration(s).
• 2022 Ghent University: BA first year seminar – Introduction to Literary Studies
• 2020-21 University of Wuppertal: BA first year course – Introduction to Literary Studies
• 2020 – University of Wuppertal: BA third year course – Representations of Old Age in Fiction and Films

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

• In 2025, I obtained the PCMO Travel Fund to take part in the ISSN Narrative Conference in Miami. (2000 euros).
• My postdoctoral position is funded by the DFG project MeDiMi https://www.medimi.de/en
• My PhD was funded by the Horizon2020 project OPPORTUNITIES. https://www.opportunitiesproject.eu/
• In 2023, I won the Graduate Student International Travel Award assigned by the International Society for the Study of Narrative to the best abstract by a graduate student to be submitted at the Narrative Conference, with the paper “Narrating Refugees at Sea: the Ethics of Tellability in the Italian Media”. (500 US dollars).

ORGANISATION OF SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS

• 2023 – Ghent University, Academic Workshop “Narratives of Mobility in the Anthropocene” hosted by Prof. Marco Caracciolo, Dr. Carolin Gebauer, and myself.
• 2023 – Ghent University, Meet the author event “EFACIS Irish Itinerary”. I was in charge of organizing and coordinating the event with Northern-Irish author Jan Carson at Ghent University on March, 23. I also interviewed the author at the event.

REVIEWING ACTIVITIES

• 2023 – peer reviewer for the European Journal of English Studies (EJES).
• 2021-2024 – Master and BA thesis reader at the English Section of the Department of Literary Studies of Ghent University

MEMBERSHIP OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES

• DiML – Centre for Diversity Media and Law (JLU Giessen)
• EUPeace Research Hub – Migration and Human Rights
• ISSN – International Society for the Study of Narrative – member of the Sustainability Committee
• ENS – European Narrative Society
• CNR – Centre for Narrative Research (University of Wuppertal)
• PostMESH Lab (Ghent University)

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

• 2025 June – The Migration Conference, Greenwich London, UK, Paper Title: “The Effects of Humanitarian Tropes on Representation of Migrants in Legacy and Digital Media”
• 2025 April – Narrative Conference, Miami, FL, USA, Paper title: Trust and Digital Media in Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" in the organized panel Narrative Form, Ideology, and the Digital Sphere, co-organized with Marco Caracciolo, Torsa Ghosal, and Brian McAllister. Chair, Virginia Pignagnoli.
• 2025 February – SPARC Delhi Symposium on Narrative and Media (online) – Paper Title: “Narratives of Migration in Legacy and Digital Media”.

Publications

Adinolfi, Simona. 2025a. “Migration.” Genealogy of the Posthuman, February. https://criticalposthumanism.net/migration/.

———. 2025b. “Narrating Refugees at Sea: Undermining the Implicit Collective Memory with Narrative Journalism in the Italian Media.” In special collection “Navigating Migration, Memory and Media,” Memory, Mind & Media 4: e5 (under review).https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2025.10001.

———. 2024a. “Reading for Distance: Form, Memory, and Space in Contemporary Novels of Migration.” ON_CULTURE, no. 16. https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2024.1407.

———. 2024b. “Reconsidering Identity Formation Processes in Fictions of Migration: Narrative Subjectivity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine.” In Agency, Community, Kinship, edited by Lea Espinoza Garrido and Carolin Gebauer, 33–55. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2024c. “Colliding Forms in Postapocalyptic Novels of Migration.” Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (CLW) 15 (November).

———. 2024d. “Chapter 7 Altered Narration: Unreliability in Narrators with Alzheimer’s Disease.” In Poetics of Disturbances, edited by Deborah de Muijnck, Jessica Jumpertz, Ralf Schneider, and Teresa Turnbull, 142–58. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519886_009.

———. 2024e. Narrating Migration in the 21st Century: A Posthumanist Approach to Anglophone Novels. Doctoral dissertation, Ghent University.

Adinolfi, Simona, and Marco Caracciolo. 2023. “Narrative, Scale, and Two Refugee Crises in Comparison in the Italian Media.” DIEGESIS (Wuppertal) 12 (2): 18–33. https://doi.org/10.25926/wrn0-8n40.