Marco Maggi

Marco Maggi is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature. He is Co-Director of the Master in Lingua, letteratura e civiltà italiana and was Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society in the period 2020-2022.

After graduating in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan, he obtained a PhD in Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences from the same university, carrying out part of his research at the University of Geneva. He was a fellow of the School of Advanced Studies of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples (1999-2001) and of the Institut d'Études littéraires of the Collège de France (2005). In 2017, he was awarded the Italian national scientific qualifications as Associate Professor in Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature and in Italian Literature.

He is a member of the scientific committee of the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature (ASLGC/SGAVL), of the PhD programme in Visual Culture at the University of Palermo, of the journals ‘Arabeschi’ and ‘Walter Benjamin Studies’ and of the publishing series ‘Crossovers: New Perspectives on CompLit’ (ESCL European Society of Comparative Literature/Ibidem Press, Stuttgart), ‘Visioni periferiche’ (Carocci), ‘Campi di forze’ (Editpress), ‘Istituto di studi italiani’ (Olschki), 'Diomira. Studi teorici sull'intermedialità' (Duetredue Edizioni). He is curator of the Lea Ritter Santini Papers at the archives of the Fondazione Centro Studi storico-letterari Natalino Sapegno.

He was coordinator of the Cultural project of the Faculty of Communication, culture and society 2020-2022 Questioning images. He has curated documentary exhibitions, including Affioramenti (2018) dedicated to the archive of Lea Ritter Santini. He writes regularly for "L'Indice dei Libri del Mese" and "antonimie.it" and appears in local and national media.

His research activity initially focused on the literary theory of the Baroque, with particular interest in the work of Emanuele Tesauro, to whom he devoted critical studies and editions of unpublished works, including the library catalogue and a vocabulary of the Italian language. The study of the Baroque was later expanded in a comparative and intermedial key into a thematic criticism study on the myth of Aurora in European literature and the visual arts of the first half of the 17th century.

Since around 2010, the study of the relations between literatures and visual cultures has intensified in two directions. The first concerns the genesis of visual modernity between the 19th and 20th century, with studies on Walter Benjamin, Alessandro Manzoni and Guido Gozzano, among others. In continuity with previous studies, particular attention was paid to the seventeenth-century roots of the new verbal-visual regimes; here too, critical interpretation was accompanied by the edition of texts. The second line of research concerns the history and methods of interartistic and intermedial comparison, with studies and editions of texts by Rensselaer W. Lee, Mario Praz, Giovanni Pozzi, Lea Ritter Santini.

He is currently working on an intermedial ecocriticism project focusing on the presence of inscriptions in natural environments. The first outcome of this research is a two-volume collection of essays entitled Captioned Landscapes. Intermedial Combinations Beyond the Human.

His publications include the monographs Walter Benjamin e Dante. Una costellazione nello spazio delle immagini (Donzelli, 2017) and Modernità visuale dei «Promessi Sposi». Romanzo e fantasmagoria da Manzoni a Bellocchio (Bruno Mondadori, 2019); Forme intermedie. Percorsi di cultura visuale nell'opera di Guido Gozzano (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2025). He has edited texts, with a focus on the Baroque and early 20th century: Aurore barocche. Concerto di arti sorelle (Nino Aragno, 2005), Emanuele Tesauro’s Vocabulario italiano (Olschki, 2008) and Anacronismi e didascalie. Prose varie (1903-1916) by Guido Gozzano (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2023). He has edited anthologies and journal issues: «Selbstdenken». Atti della giornata di studi in ricordo di Lea Ritter Santini (Nino Aragno, 2020); Fototestualità (“Versants”, 2021); Walter Benjamin e la cultura italiana (Olschki, 2022); Prometeo, mito e intermedialità (“Arabeschi”, 2024). He also edited new editions of classics of inter-artistic comparison: Ut pictura poesis by Rensselaer W. Lee (SE, 2011) and Studi sul concettismo by Mario Praz (Abscondita, 2014).