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Staff Profile

Dr Marco Medugno

Associate Lecturer 2022/23

Background
  • PhD in English Literature - '“Building Multilocal Belongings: A Comparative Study of Somali Postcolonial Novels in English and Italian” (Newcastle University).
  • MA in Intercultural Studies (Università di Padova)
  • MA in Modern Philology (Università di Padova)
  • BA in Modern Literature (Università di Padova)
Research


Research interests: Italian Postcolonial Literature; Postcolonial and World Literature; Comparative Studies; Global South; Italian Studies; Somali/African Studies/Literature; Anglophone Postcolonial Literature; Geocriticism; Literary Urban Studies.


My PhD thesis, currently being developed into a monograph (Bloomsbury, 2023), offers a comparative study of transnational Somali literary production in English and Italian. Building on the recent emerging body of scholarship in other multilingual contexts, such as India and the rapidly expanding field of Italian Postcolonial Studies, it examines Somali novels by major writers, including Nuruddin Farah, Igiaba Scego, and Cristina Ali Farah. The decades-long Somali Civil War, which started in 1991, caused a diaspora of Somali people around the globe. Somali authors, then, write from outside Somalia and in different languages (Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic) to make sense of this dispersion. In doing so, they’ve created a transnational and multilingual space beyond national borders that can be called an ‘interliterary community’. My thesis then focuses on the strategies of belonging and identity-making at work in literary texts by diasporic authors of Somali origins who write in English and Italian to show how their novels question the concepts of nationhood through specific representations of space (especially urbanscapes), particular use of language (beyond the colonial vs native divide) and the employment of different strategies of re-writing the colonial past. 


Other Activities


European Connections at NCL (NUHRI-funded Project)

NPRG: Reading Group

Editorial board: Il Tolomeo




Teaching

Current Teaching


SEL1023. Transformations

SEL3362. Dissertation



Prior Teaching


Newcastle


SEL1030. Close Reading (2021–23)

SEL2233. Literatures of Decolonisation (2022–23)

SEL3362. Dissertation (2021—23)

SEL2205. Fiction of Migrations (2020–2022)

SEL1003. Introduction to Literary Studies I (2018—20)


Glasgow


ENGLIT4099 (Honours): Postcolonialism Writing & Theory

ENGLIT 4117: Dissertations

Publications

  • Articles

    • Medugno M, Bertolin M. Literary Map of I quindicimila passi. Trasparenze 2020, 6, 130.
    • Medugno M. Dante in Mogadishu: The role of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah’s Links. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 2020, 5(1), 45-55.
    • Medugno M. The Distinctive Use of the Italian Language in Nuruddin Farah’s Late Production”. From the European South 2018, 3(1), 71-84.
    • Medugno M. A Contested Spatiality: The Representation of Mogadishu in Somali Anglophone and Italian Literature. Italian Studies in Southern Africa 2018, 32(1), 110-134.

  • Authored Book

    • Medugno M. Transnational Somali Literature: Space, Language and Resistance in Somali Anglophone and Italian Novels. Bloomsbury, 2023. In Preparation.

  • Book Chapters

    • Medugno M. “Experience that Generates Experience”: The Influence of the Comedy in three South African Writings. In: S. Fanucchi, A. Virga, ed. A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia. Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2021, pp.131-143.
    • Medugno M. “Influenze della tradizione orale somala nel romanzo Il latte è buono di Garane: una nuova possibile prospettiva di analisi”. In: T. Cancro, C. De Paoli, F. Roncen, V. Russo, ed. Oralità e scrittura: i due volti delle parole. Padova University Press, 2019, pp.119-211.

  • Online Publication

  • Reviews

    • Medugno M. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings by Elleke Bohemer. Interventions 2020, 22(2), 296-299.
    • Medugno M. Italy and the Literatures from the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti. Beyond the Language and the Territory, by Daniele Comberiati & Xavier Luffin (eds). Studi di Anglistica nell’Africa Australe 2019, 32(1), 127-132.