About

Danila Cannamela is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work explores literary genres and sociocultural movements that have remained at the periphery of dominant culture, including avant-garde poetics, niche genres, 1970s counterculture, and gender liberation movements. She authored the book "The Quiet Avant-Garde: Crepuscular Poetry and the Twilight of Modern Humanism" (University of Toronto Press, 2019), which examines the role of crepuscular poetics in relation to futurism. Her current projects include a book titled "Radical Trans/Locations: U.S. Trans Activism in Italy," which traces overlooked connections between Italian and American trans activists and explores how their convergence generated "creative misalignments." This work was inspired by the coedited collection "Italian Trans Geographies" (SUNY Press, 2023), which offers a counter-mapping of Italian culture through testimonies of gender-diverse individuals along migration and diasporic routes. Cannamela believes that scholarly work can be highly creative, fostering unexpected connections between theory, pop culture, and everyday life. Her future book project rethinks the pastoral genre as a "comfort food recipe," using culinary metaphors to explore contemporary reinventions of traditional themes.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Political Science
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics
• History
• Social psychology
• Literature
• Anthropology
• Law
• Geography
• Economic geography
• Philosophy
• Regional science
• Psychology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Narratives of a ‘City Under Siege’: Bodies and Discourses of the 1977 Movement in Bologna

  2025-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Bologna is one of the most iconic locations of the 1977 Movement. In 1977, the city became a creative laboratory where a number of collective agents emerged: students, artists, feminists, and (proto-) LGBT activists. “Red Bologna” was also an arena of violence and tragic events. This essay examines a wide range of documents that have medi- ated—and “re-mediated”—the Movement, including narrative fiction, documentaries, comics, and memoirs. Ultimately, our goal is to discuss these materials as testimonies of an experimental form of sociality that has been generally assimilated with 1970s terrorism or dismissed as a generational rebellion for the sake of rebellion.

  PublisherDOI

• Inhabiting Everyday Utopias: Trespassing Gender and Species Binaries at the Time of the Anthropocene

  Italian Studies · 2025-01-02

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Review: <i>Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy</i>, by Lorenzo Fabbri

  Film Quarterly · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Paths for Future Exploration: Language, Situatedness, and Glocal Movements

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2023-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lina Pallotta’s Portrait of Porpora

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2023-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lina Pallotta’s Portrait of Porpora:

  State University of New York Press eBooks · 2023-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Italian Trans Geographies: Retracing Trans/Cultural Narratives of People and Places

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2023-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ‘All We Need Is Love’?:

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2023-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Sociology

  Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy

  DOI

• Travelling Through Memory: Transgender Road Narratives in Contemporary Italian Documentaries

  The Italianist · 2023-05-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The narrative of the journey has become a dominant visual trope in the representation of transgender identities. This article examines three Italian documentaries that engage with the trans road narrative, beyond the metaphor of gender transition: C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), Una nobile rivoluzione (2014), and Porpora (2021). By focusing on the use of cinematic transitions as moments of dis-connection that simultaneously elicit processes of transformation and memorialization, the article explores how Italian trans documentaries have redeployed travel narratives as occasions for pinpointing individual stories and mending collective history. In these films, the visual motif of the journey dissolves the binary between moving and staying in place, to become a fitting metaphor for a shared memory that, like any identity and like cinematic images, is enduring precisely because it is in motion.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Achille Castaldo

  13 shared

• Giuseppe Gazzola

  Stony Brook University

  9 shared

• Lorenzo Mari

  University of St Andrews

  9 shared

• Daria Biagi

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  9 shared

• Stefano Ercolino

  9 shared

• Francesco Frisari

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  9 shared

• Vincenzo Salvatore

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  9 shared

• Stephen Extend

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Major Grant, Maine Humanities Council, Project: “Italian Tra…