The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to announce that Dr. Valentina Mele has won a prestigious Global Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions 2024 (MSCA-PF 2024) which will bring her to the University of Notre Dame in fall 2025. Dr. Mele is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds where her research is funded by the British Academy.
While in residence at Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies, Dr. Mele will study the impact of modernist Dante on the American poetic avant-garde in the latter half of the twentieth century, with a project entitled, "AvantDante – The Reception of Dante in 1945-2001 U.S. avantgarde poetic communities." The fellowship will commence in the fall of 2025, lasting three years, sponsored by the Department of Humanities at the Università di Pavia.
Dr. Mele will spend the first two years of the fellowship at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Professor Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Pizzo Family Professor of Dante Studies in the College of Arts and Letters.
The Global program, which represents one of the most competitive funding programs for young researchers in Europe, supports and extends international mobility beyond the borders of Europe. Her project, which encompasses a total budget of €420,751.08, will finance two years of research in various archives in the United States (including Notre Dame, Berkeley, Yale, Buffalo, Boston), as well as her subsequent research at the Università di Pavia. Here the corpus of appropriations, recycling and translations of Dante's work will be systematically mapped through the use of digital tools to create an accessible archive and to offer an organic reconstruction of the post-modernist Dante.
The aim of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships programme is to support the careers of young scholars for the promotion of research excellence, through international agreements that allow the recipients to develop their projects at the most suitable and qualified institutions according to their field of study.
In the 2024 call for applications, 10,360 applicants submitted proposals. 1,696 projects were selected across Europe, with a total funding budget of €417 million. Overall, only 168 applicants were winners of Global projects.
Congratulations on your achievement Dr. Mele! We look forward to welcoming you to the University of Notre Dame this fall.
Originally published by at italianstudies.nd.edu on April 07, 2025.