Elisa Pagliaro

Elisa Pagliaro is currently a doctoral assistant at the Institute of Italian Studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. Her academic background reflects an interdisciplinary orientation: after earning a Master of Arts in English Languages and Literatures and Philosophy from the University of Fribourg, with a focus on American literature and twentieth-century philosophy of art (thesis on James Baldwin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, titled “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do”: James Baldwin’s phenomenological ethics), and a CAS in Dramaturgy from La Manufacture and the University of Lausanne, she was admitted in 2024 to the Master’s program in History and Theory of Art and Architecture at the Academy of Mendrisio. Previously, she completed undergraduate studies in English and Italian Literatures (BA, University of Fribourg), as well as in Philosophy and Social Anthropology (BA, University of Fribourg).

For several years, she has collaborated with major Swiss film festivals (FIFF, Locarno Film Festival) and multilingual theatre projects. She has also overseen editorial production for theatre festivals and contributed to international educational publishing projects.

She is currently completing a second Master’s thesis that investigates the genealogy and transformation of the rhetorics of the image and visual memory from the Renaissance to the present, with a specific focus on the relationship between image and text in Einaudi’s editorial graphic design.

As a doctoral assistant at ISI, she collaborates on the project 20th Century Italian Studies of Literature and Arts: An Archival, Intermedial and Digital Approach, while pursuing her own research on Mario Praz’s contribution to the study of literature and the arts.

Her research interests primarily lie in aesthetics, the history of literary and art criticism, design, architecture, and the visual arts.