Nicoletta Asciuto

Profile

Biography

Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature. She has been part of York’s English department since 2016 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022. She is a Comparative Modernist scholar and a passionate linguist with knowledge of ten languages.

Prior to York, Nicoletta was the recipient of a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) in 2015-16. She has also tutored and lectured extensively at Durham University for both the English and Italian departments, as well as for the MA in Translation Studies. She completed her PhD in English Literature also at Durham University in 2015 with a thesis on T. S. Eliot’s poetry and drama. In the summer of 2014, she was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.

Research

Overview

Nicoletta is an active member of York’s Modern School. Her first monograph, Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry, is forthcoming in 2025 with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book discusses the impact of early twentieth-century cultures of light on the birth of new avant-garde and modernist poetics, which took place in the period of technological transition from gaslight to electric light. This is the first monograph to consider the impact of this technological change on a range of British, American, and European poets. She was recently talking about her book on the BBC programme "Arts and Ideas: New Thinking". Nicoletta has published extensively on T. S. Eliot and on modernist poetry. She has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary special issue for journal Space & Culture with Dr Nina Engelhardt and Dr Susanne Schregel (Universität zu Köln), and a cluster for Modernism/modernity Print Plus on Transnational Modernist Periodicals Networks with Dr Francesca Bratton (Maynooth University) and Dr Camilla Sutherland (University of Groningen). In 2018-19, she co-convened the CModS research strand “Modernist Peripheries: Fringes and Frontiers” with Dr Hannah Roche. 

Nicoletta’s other major research interest is literary translation. At York she has organized various events on literature in translation for “Writers at York” and her next planned research project will involve the role of translation work in modernist magazines. She routinely has translations published, mostly from Italian, Spanish, and Slovenian into English. She was the Italian-English translator for Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, edited by Emilie Morin and published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees' Paris. A Poem (1920) is forthcoming in 2025 with Interno Poesia. This will be the first translation of Hope Mirrlees into Italian. 

Supervision

Nicoletta would welcome enquiries from prospective postgraduate students interested in one or more of the following research areas: Poetry and Poetics; Modernism; History of Technology (incl. Cinema); Literary Translation. She is supervising five doctoral theses. Topics include:

• Amy Clampitt’s poetry
• Multilingual modernist couples
• T. S. Eliot’s poetry and animal studies
• Clarice Lispector and Kabbalah Modernism
• Contemporary transmediterranean literature

Teaching

Undergraduate

Nicoletta is committed to excellence in teaching. In 2020-21, she was the recipient of a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award “in recognition of her excellent and inspiring teaching and extraordinary work as the Chair of the Department’s Board of Examiners”. She also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from Durham University and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.  At York she has taught widely across the undergraduate degree, and she has offered and offers seminars on a number of core MA modules. She teaches two Advanced Option Modules, “Modernism and Technology”, and “Found in Translation: The Practice of Translating Literature” The former looks at familiar and unfamiliar modernist texts from a cultural-technological perspective, while the latter introduces students to the nuts and bolts of literary translation and practice. In both modules, Nicoletta works with local museums and independent publishing houses to enrich the student experience. She has also offered or is offering the second-year World Literature Module “Post-War Italian Cinema”. 

External activities

Overview

During her time at York, Nicoletta has been involved in several external activities. In 2016, she was guest lecturer in Modernism at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic). In 2017, she co-organized a workshop on technology and imagination at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (University of Toronto). In 2019-20, Nicoletta was the Co-Investigator of a new project on modernism, technology, and translation, “Radio Pioneers and Forgotten Voices, 1924-1939”, with Professor Emilie Morin and funded by a British Academy Small Grant. She subsequently was the recipient of a British Academy UK-China Seed Funding Grant for a project entitled “Cities of Modernism”, with Professor Nan Zhang (Fudan University, Shanghai).  From 2022, she is Co-Investigator for York, with PI Dr Boriana Alexandrova (Centre for Women’s Studies) for the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action “EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender in Transnational Perspective”, funded by the European Commission and UKRI. The network’s principal investigator is Professor Jasmina Lukić (Central European University) and the project involves Central European University and the Universities of York, Coventry, Oviedo, Granada, Bologna, Łódź, and Utrecht, as well as several non-academic partners. 

From 2021, Nicoletta is Contributing Editor for Translated Literature at the Fortnightly Review. Nicoletta has acted as peer-reviewer for national and international academic journals, academic presses, as well as research councils. She has given various invited talks nationally and internationally, both on the topic of modernism and on translation.