Graduate Student Profile

Roberto Bacci

Roberto Bacci received his laurea summa cum laude in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (Scandinavian and English) from the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Università di Bologna (Italy) in 1997. Part of his dissertation on the poetics of Arnulf Øverland has been published in Norway. He translated from Norwegian and Swedish into Italian novels by Jostein Gaarder and Marianne Fredriksson for the publisher house Longanesi & C. in Milan. He has also translated into Norwegian poems by contemporary Italian authors for the volume Poetisk modernisme (Oslo: Det norske Samlaget, 1995; with Eva Jensen and Guri Vesaas). He was an instructor in Italian at the University of Georgia from 1999 to 2001. In 2003 he enrolled in the PhD program in Italian Studies at Brown University, where he has taught intermediate and advanced Italian courses. He his now writing his PhD dissertation on “Esotericism and Self-Transmutation during the Fascist Period in Italy.” His research interests include: Western esotericism in the 20th century; esotericism and politics during the interwar/fascist period; individual self-transmutation, self-consciousness and altered states of consciousness in literature, art and philosophy; modernism and anti-modernism in Scandinavian literatures.