Amanda Rosso, BA in Communication and Multimedia Studies, University of Pavia MA in Modern Languages and Comparative Literatures, Birkbeck, University of London

Profile

PhD project title: Weaving Lives: Exploring Autotheory as a Collective Form of Life Writing through Intertextuality and Intermediality

Research summary

My project investigates the intersections of intertextuality and intermediality within autotheory, arguing that autobiographical writing, biographical narratives, essays, and novels can all function as autotheoretical works. Bringing together francophone authors such as Annie Ernaux, Leïla Sebbar, Marie Darrieussecq, and Virginie Despentes with English-speaking authors Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Chris Kraus, I explore how their works engage with photographs, archival materials, and visual culture to complicate identity formation and collective memory.

Adopting an intersectional decolonial feminist approach, I examine how gender, race, class, and sexuality are negotiated through autotheory’s hybrid and interdisciplinary forms. By foregrounding intertextual and intermedial practices, my research highlights how autotheory generates collective forms of life writing that resist patriarchal, capitalist, neocolonial, and heteronormative structures, while offering new insights into contemporary debates on identity, power, and representation.

Supervisors: Professor Akane Kawakami (School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication – Birkbeck College) and Dr Rebekah Vince (Languages, Linguistics and Film)

Outside of my PhD, I serve as a board member of the Società Italiana delle Letterate (Italian Society of Women of Letters) and as an editorial assistant and contributing writer for the Italian feminist literary magazine Letterate Magazine.

Research

Research Interests:

• Autotheory and experimental life writing
• Intertextuality and intermediality in contemporary literature
• Photography, archives, and visual culture in autobiographical and biographical writing
• Feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial studies
• Collective and transnational memory in postcolonial and diasporic contexts
• Hybridity and genre-crossing forms
• Intersectionality in representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality
• Comparative literature across Francophone and Anglophone traditions
• The politics of voice and marginalised subjectivities in literature
• Recovering, revaluing, and rediscovering underrepresented writers and literary genealogies
• Literature, affect, and embodied histories

Publications

“Donne che parlano: il ‘possibile realizzato’ dell’autobiografia femminile dalla pagina allo schermo. Il caso Maid, e La Porca Miseria,” Cambiare la prosa del mondo, Iacobelli, forthcoming.

“Diverse forme di alterità: Annie Ernaux e il corpo assente,” xenia TRE, 2025.