Dr Goffredo Polizzi

Dr Goffredo Polizzi is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, where he works on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Ageing LGBTQ+ Lives in the UK and Italy: Criminalisations and Migrations (2025–2027). His research engages with questions of mobility, identity, and social change, with a particular focus on how sexuality and ageing intersect within contemporary migration processes and their cultural representations. He has over ten years of experience teaching Italian language and culture at various levels, from secondary school to university. He studied Italian Studies in Bologna and Gender Studies in Utrecht, and holds a PhD in Translation and Cultural Studies from the University of Warwick. His work is informed by an interdisciplinary approach that brings together literary analysis, cultural theory, and translation studies. In addition to numerous academic articles, he is the author of Reimagining the Italian South: Migration, Translation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema (Liverpool University Press, 2022), a study of contemporary representations of Southern Italy as a destination for migration, explored through a queer and postcolonial lens. His broader research interests include contemporary Italian literature and cinema, migration studies, queer theory, and postcolonial critique. He has translated, among others, Teresa de Lauretis, Jack Halberstam and Samuel R. Delany, contributing to the circulation of key texts in queer and critical theory. He is also among the founders of CRAAAZI – Centro di ricerca e Archivio Autonomo transfemministaqueer “Alessandro Zijno” (Bologna), an independent space dedicated to the production and dissemination of transfeminist critical knowledge.

Books

• Teresa de Lauretis, Soggetti eccentrici, con il saggio ‘Teoria queer: sessualità lesbiche e gay’, ed. by Elia Arfini, Olivia Fiorilli, Goffredo Polizzi, Asterisco edizioni, Milan, 2025
• Reimagining the Italian South: Migration, Translation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2022 Articles in Peer Reviewed Journals
• ‘A Queer Perspective on the Italian South? Some Methodological Notes: Or, How to Read as a Southern Queer’, gender/sexuality/italy, 11, (December 2025)
• ‘Translating Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism and The Queer Art of Failure into Italian: A Conversation’ (with Michela Baldo and Elisa Virgili), Comparative Critical Studies, vol.21, I (2024), 100-118
• “An infectious example”: Early Italian HIV Activism’, (with Elia Arfini et al.) Socioscapes. International Journal of Societies, Politics and Cultures, vol.2 No.1 (2020 – [2022]), 3-14
• “Nei paesi del Sud le stelle sembrano più vicine”: Culture, Sexuality and Self-Translation in Ornela Vorpsi’s Il paese dove non si muore mai’’, Scritture Migranti, vol.12 (2018 - [2021]) 167-190
• ‘Queering the Southern Border: Challenges to Italian Homonationalism in Emma Dante’s Via Castellana Bandiera (2013)’, Modern Italy, 25:2 (2020), 147-161
• ‘Tavola rotonda: visualizzare la razza e costruire la bellezza in Italia (1922-2018)’ (with Gaia Giuliani et al.), Italian Studies, vol.73.4 (2018), 1-29
• ‘Does Italy Need Postcolonial Theory? Intersections in Italian Postcolonial Studies’ (with Sandra Ponzanesi), English Literature, 3 (2016), 145-162
• ‘Anti-Southern Prejudice and the Gothic: Federico De Roberto’s I Vicerè as a Gothic Novel’, Compar(a)ison, I-II\2009 (2015), 187-203
• ‘In and Out Sexual Democracies: The Italian Scenario’ (with Renato Busarello et al.), Culture Health & Sexuality, Vol. 13, (2011), pp. S113-S114