Staff profile

Before coming to Durham University, I spent three years as an IAS and then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. Previously, I studied Philosophy and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where I also completed an M.St. and a D.Phil in Comparative Literature. At Durham, I teach on various courses, including the second-year module ‘Narratives of Fascist and Post-war Italy’ and my research-led final-year module 'Writing the Modern Self'. I currently serve as the Director of Italian Studies and I direct the MA in Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

My first book, Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture (winner of the Gadda First Prize), was published with Legenda's Italian Perspectives Series (2014). It provides an in-depth comparative reading of the two authors’ prose writings, shedding new light on the central notions of textual and linguistic fragmentation and the fractured sense of selfhood. Whilst situating Gadda and Beckett at the heart of the debate of these fundamental aspects of the late modernist European literary context, the study also rethinks some of the plurilingual and macaronic features associated with a particular tendency in the Italian literary tradition. 

Research interests 

My research interests include comparative approaches to twentieth-century and contemporary narrative and cultural products, with a particular focus on European modernism, the theoretical intersections between psychoanalysis and literature, gender studies, feminist theory, visual culture, trauma studies and discourses surrounding subjectivity and space. In recent years my research has mainly focused on post-WWII and contemporary women’s writing from a comparative perspective, including Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Goliarda Sapienza, Elena Ferrante, Toni Morrison and Alice Sebold, and I am currently working on the intersections between visual tropes and traumatic expression.

Current research and collaborations

I have recently co-edited and co-written the introduction for the first volume of critical essays on Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing (Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022, co-edited with Tiziana de Rogatis), which includes a solely authored chapter on traumatic images and multistable visions in Elsa Morante’s La Storia. I am also currently guest-editing two further volumes: a Special Issue on Comparative Approaches to Elena Ferrante: Traumas, Bodies, Languages for the journal Romance Studies (with Stiliana Milkova), which will include an article on transgenerational trauma in Toni Morrison, Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante's works; and a Special Issue (with Franco Baldasso, Ursula Fanning, Mara Josi and Stefania Porcelli) on Fifty Years of La Storia: Elsa Morante Beyond History, Annali d'Italianistica, vol. 42 (forthcoming 2024). I have previously guest edited the Special Journal Issue Elena Ferrante in a Global Context for Modern Language Notes (2021), for which I have contributed an article on sexual violence and the traumatized self in the works of Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante. Together with Tiziana de Rogatis, I have co-authored an article on 'Traumatic Realism and the Poetics of Trauma in Elsa Morante's Works' (Allegoria 83), a discussion of which has been published in the Section 'Spazio aperto' of the same journal. I have also co-edited the first volume of critical essays in English on the Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza (Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Literature, co-edited by Alberica Bazzoni, Emma Bond and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi; Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016).

My current book project, provisionally entitled Spectral (Hi)stories: Women Narrating Trauma in Post-war Italy, seeks to provide new insights into female-authored post-war cultural production through the polifocal lens of trauma studies. Contrary to the long-held belief that trauma is unrepresentable, my study focuses on how female creators - both in the Italian and the transnational context (including authors and filmmakers Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante, Goliarda Sapienza, Igiaba Scego, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Strout, Alice Sebold and Alina Marazzi) - are uniquely placed to intercept and articulate spectral (hi)stories. With Italy distinctively imbricated in the micro and macro traumas of our times, the project will focus on how unruly female bodies and visual/spatial imaginaries provide privileged sites of the synecdochal channelling of suffering. The book will show that the female body not only centres multiple discourses of power, but its exploration as a site of trauma also invites new insights into the co-constitution of material and discursive productions of reality, ultimately defining a new traumascape in post-WWII female-authored cultural production. 

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised PhD students working on a range of topics, including twentieth-century women's writing and cross-cultural, spatial and postcolonial approaches to twentieth-century and contemporary literature, as well as on gender and translation.

I welcome enquiries by prospective PhD students focusing on women’s writing and discourses around female subjectivity and space (20^th – 21^st century); gender studies; trauma studies; motherhood studies and feminist theory; discourses around subjectivity and space in modernist writing, and other fields related to my research specialisms.

Authored book

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2014). Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture. Routledge.

Book review

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2011). "Enciclopedie aperte": Self and World in Joyce’s and Gadda’s Modernist Novels. Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 7.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2007). Gadda e il moderno. Il vortice delle concause e le forme del riso. Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 5.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2007). Federica G. Pedriali, La farmacia degli incurabili: Da Collodi a Calvino. Italian Studies

Chapter in book

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2022). «Come un fotogramma spezzato» Traumatic Images and Multistable Visions in Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel. In Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing. de Rogatis, Tiziana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin Sapienza Università Editrice.
• Tiziana de Rogatis & Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (2022). Introduction: A Theoretical Framework on Trauma. In Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing. Tiziana de Rogatis & Katrin Wehling-Giorgi Sapienza Università Editrice.
• Wehling-Giorgi, K (2020). Rethinking Constructs of Maternity in the Novels of Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold. In Imagining Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century. Heffernan, Valerie & Wilgus, Gay Routledge.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2020). Ripensare gli spazi femminili: una lettura dell’Università di Rebibbia di Goliarda Sapienza. In La pratica del commento 3. Il canone: Esclusioni e inclusioni. Brogi, Daniela, de Rogatis, Tiziana & Marrani, Giuseppe Pisa: Pacini Editore. 33: 215-230.
• Wehling-Giorgi, K. (2017). Violence, Language and the Maternal Body: Negotiating Resistance in Goliarda Sapienza’s and Elena Ferrante’s Works. In Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy. Essays for Sharon Wood. Spunta, M. & Storchi, S. Leicester: Troubadour.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2017). ‘Dislocazioni materne: memoria, linguaggio e identità femminile nelle opere di Goliarda Sapienza’. In Nel nome della madre. Ripensare le figure della maternità. Brogi, D., de Rogatis, Tiziana, Franco, Cristiana & Spera, Lucinda Rome: Del Vecchio Editore. 143-156.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2016). '"Ero separata da me": Memory, Selfhood and Mother-Tongue in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante'. In Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture. Bazzoni, Alberica, Bond, Emma & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 215-230.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2014). "Tuo scandalo tuo splendore": The Split Mother in Morante's Works from Diario 1938 to Aracoeli. In Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing: Rethinking Subjectivity, History and the Power of Art. Lucamante, Stefania Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 193-203.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2014). "Il mondo delle madri": Pre-Oedipal Desire and the Decentred Self in Elsa Morante's La Storia and Aracoeli. In The Fire Within: Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature. Borelli, Elena Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 190-210.

Edited book

• de Rogatis, Tiziana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2022). Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing. Intercultural Series. Sapienza Università Editrice.
• Bazzoni, Alberica, Bond, Emma & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2016). Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture. Italian Studies. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Edited Journal

• Milkova, Stiliana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2023). Comparative Approaches to Elena Ferrante: Traumas, Bodies, Languages. Romance Studies, 40.3
• de Rogatis, Tiziana, Milkova, Stiliana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2021). Elena Ferrante in a Global Context. Modern Language Notes, 136 (1): Johns Hopkins University Press.

Journal Article

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2023). Unspeakable Things Spoken: Legacies of Transgenerational Trauma in Toni Morrison, Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante’s Works. Romance Studies
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2021). Unclaimed Stories: Narrating Sexual Violence and the Traumatized Self in Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold’s Writings. Modern Language Notes 136(1): 118-142.
• de Rogatis, Tiziana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2021). Il realismo traumatico e la poetica del trauma nell’opera di Elsa Morante. Allegoria XXXIII(83): 169-183.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin & de Rogatis, Tiziana (2021). Traumatic Realism and the Poetics of Trauma in Elsa Morante's Works. Allegoria 83: 169-183.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2019). Rethinking Constructs of Maternity in the Novels of Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold. Women: A Cultural Review 30(1): 66-83.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2017). 'Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation,and the Emergence of the Female Subject in Ferrante’s Novels'. California Italian Studies 7(1): 1-15.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2016). ‘Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels: Writing Liminality’. Allegoria (73).
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2013). ‘Totetaco’ the Mother–Child Dyad and the Pre-Conceptual Self in Elsa Morante's La Storia and Aracoeli. Forum for Modern Languages Studies 49(2): 192-200.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2011). Abjection and the Fear of Alterity: Matricide and the Element of the Maternal in the Works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Samuel Beckett. Italian Studies 66(1): 76-92.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2011). Defilement, War and the Corpse: On Abjection in Gadda and Céline. Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 7.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2010). "Splendid little pictures": Leibnizian Terminology in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Carlo Emilio Gadda. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui [Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies] 22: 341-354.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2007). The Leibnizian Monad and the Self through the Lens of Carlo Emilio Gadda's and Samuel Beckett's Writings. MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 2: 57-68.

Manual

• Italia, Paola (ed.) & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2022). 'Sarta-sibilla', in Gaddabolario: Duecentodiciannove parole dell'Ingegnere.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2023). The Lost Daughter: Elena Ferrante's Haunting Mothers on the Big Screen. Arcade: The Humanities in the World (Stanford Humanities Centre)
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2022). The Lost Daughter: portraying the darker sides of motherhood on the page and the screen. The Conversation/ The Independent
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2021). 'Forging the Female Voice Out of the Ruins of History: Reading Natalia Ginzburg'. Reading in Translation
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2013). Naples into Words. Public Books

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• de Rogatis, Tiziana & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2022). Il realismo traumatico della Storia di Elsa Morante dalla prospettiva del trauma del covid. Allegoria, Spazio Aperto .

Other (Print)

• Lagani, Chiara & Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (2023). ‘Generative Traumatic Wounds’ Notes of a Female Artist – A Conversation with Chiara Lagani (translated by Maria Massucco).

Translated Chapter in Book

• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (trans.) (2012). Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid, 'Bingo! The Spiritual Automaton in Lars von Trier's Dogville '. In Dekalog 05. On Dogville. Fortuna, Sara & Scuriatti, Laura (ed.). London/New York: Wallflower Press. 51-67
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (trans.) (2012). Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid, 'Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini's Medea '. In The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies. Di Blasi, Luca, Gragnolati, Manuele & Holzhey, Christoph E. H. (ed.). Berlin: Turia + Kant.
• Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin (trans.) (2009). 'Baubo - Another and Additional Name for Aracoeli: Morante's Queer Feminism '. In The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli. Fortuna, Sara & Gragnolati, Manuele (ed.). Oxford: Legenda.