Associate Professor of Italian
Italian Program Coordinator
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Areas of Interest

Modern Italian literature, Italian cinema, Italian and European modernism, ecocriticism, animal studies, critical plant studies, crime fiction and film.

Bio

Deborah Amberson is Associate Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at UF. Her research and teaching focus on modern Italian literature and film, modernism, ecocriticism, animal studies, critical plant studies, Holocaust studies, and crime fiction. She is the author of Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature: Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda (2012), a text that investigates the titular trio of Italian novelists in the light of the critical classification of modernism, focusing especially on the troubled bodies that emerge in their texts. She also co-edited, together with Elena Past, Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (2014). Her published articles reflect these and other research interests. She is currently working on a book project exploring visions of the natural world in Italian literary modernism and a volume on Critical Plant Studies and Italy.

She teaches courses on Modern Italian Literature, Italian Cinema, Mafia Movies and Crime Fiction, Holocaust Studies, Animal Studies, and Plant Studies.