Stefano Ercolino - Local Principal Investigator

Stefano Ercolino is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is a scholar of literary theory and comparative literature, with a focus on European and American literatures of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. His areas of expertise are the history and theory of the novel, philosophy of literature, European and American modernisms and postmodernisms, and critical theory. His work has appeared in Comparative Literature, Novel, Historical Materialism, Orbis Litterarum, Neohelicon, and b2o, among others. He is the author of The Maximalist Novel (Bloomsbury 2014 [paperback ed. 2015]; Italian ed. Bompiani 2015), The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 (Palgrave Macmillan 2014 [paperback ed. 2016]; Italian trans. Bompiani 2017) and, with Massimo Fusillo, of Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts (Routledge 2026, forthcoming; itialian ed. Bompiani 2022). Along with Francesco de Cristofaro, he edited the volume Experimental Criticism: Franco Moretti and Literature (Verso 2025, forthcoming; Italian ed. Carocci 2021). He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of L’Aquila. He taught at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester, DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. He is a member of the board of directors and treasurer of the Association for the Study of Theory and Comparative History of Literature (Compalit).

E-Mail: stefano.ercolino@unive.it 

Cecilia Rofena

Cecilia Rofena is currently Associate Professor at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage and the Department of Humanities. She holds degrees in Philosophy and a PhD in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Pisa, and she received a degree in Cultural Sciences from the International School for Advanced Study in Modena (Italy). She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago (2007-2008). Her teaching is articulated into four courses that reflect her main fields of research: Philosophy of Language; Art, Mind, Language; Poetics and Rhetoric; Philosophy of Literature. Rofena's major interests are the philosophy of poetry, the theory of art, and Wittgenstein. She is the author of Wittgenstein and Frazer's Error: Morphological Ethics and Anthropological Aesthetics (in Italian, 2011); Error and Fiction: Poetic Logics and Philosophical Poetics (in Italian, 2015); In the Open: The Emotion of Language (in Italian, 2016); At First Glance: Logics of Narrative and Drawing (in Italian, 2022). Her books of poetry are Agogiche. Sette variazioni su semplici mosse interiori; Mosaico. Tempi in tempesta. Her interests include epistemology, intellectual history, and ethics.

E-Mail: cecilia.rofena@unive.it