Oppressive Topographies: Urban Space in Elena Ferrante’s Novel and Roberto Faenza’s Film "The Days of Abandonment"

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Stiliana Milkova is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Oberlin College. She has published extensively on contemporary Italian literature, on 19th-century Russian and Bulgarian literatures, on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and on literary translation. She is the author of the first English-language scholarly book on Elena Ferrante, Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021) and the coeditor of the Modern Language Notes (136:1, 2021) special issue Elena Ferrante in a Global Context. Milkova has translated from Italian works by Italo Calvino, Alessandro Baricco, Antonio Tabucchi, Anita Raja, Adriana Cavarero, Tiziano Scarpa, Dario Voltolini, and others.

At Oberlin, Milkova teaches the introduction to Comparative Literature, as well as courses on literature and the visual arts, on literature and architecture, on the figure of the femme fatale in the literary and visual imagination, on contemporary Italian literature (both in Italian and in translation), and on literary translation. She has curated three teaching exhibitions at the Allen Memorial Art Museum: Italy on Paper (2012); On the Threshold: Doors and Windows Represented (2015); and Women Bound and Unbound (2019).

Milkova is also the editor of the online journal Reading in Translation which publishes reviews of translated literature, interviews with literary translators and publishers, essays on the theory and practice of translation, as well as special issues on modern and contemporary writers in translation such as Natalia Ginzburg and Domenico Starnone.