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Silvia Valisa is Associate Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. Her research interests gravitate around the European modernity, from gender theory to the material history of print. She has written on 19th century women writers, the experimental works of 20th century photographer Wanda Wulz, trauma theory in the postcolonial context, and the challenges of Italian print modernity. Her first book Gender, Narrative and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel (University of Toronto Press 2014) discusses the trajectory of gendered narrative models in the Italian novel. Her second monograph, The Periodical Life of Modernity: Sonzogno’s First Century, 1804-1909 (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming in 2025) explores the role that the Sonzogno publishing firm played in the modernization of Italian culture. She is the co-editor, with Morena Corradi, of La carta veloce. Figure, temi e politiche del giornalismo italiano dell’Ottocento (FrancoAngeli, 2021), a collection of essays devoted to 19th century journalism. She is the founder and director of two online projects: a digital catalog of Sonzogno’s publications for the year 1885, and the digitization of the Sonzogno newspaper Il secolo, the most important national daily in the second half of the 19th century in Italy.
