Valentina Romanzi

@unito.it

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures
University of Torino

Valentina Romanzi


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https://researchid.co/vromanzi
Valentina Romanzi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in American Studies at the University of Torino and an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Verona. She holds a PhD in Transcultural Studies in the Humanities from the University of Bergamo. Her research interests lie in US speculative fiction, the posthuman and more-than-human in literature, and ecocriticism (with a focus on the Blue Humanities). She is also researching the interplay of video games and American culture, queerness and fandom, and has an invested interest in the application of Care Theory to literary studies. Her latest book is American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction (Peter Lang, 2022). She is an editor at Iperstoria: Journal of American and English Studies and collaborates with RSAJournal and ContactZone.

EDUCATION

PhD in Transcultural Studies in the Humanities, University of Bergamo, 2021
MA in European and Extra-European Comparative Literatures and Languages, University of Verona, 2017
BA in Foreign Languages and Cultures for International Commerce, University of Verona, 2014

RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

Literature and Literary Theory, Language and Linguistics, Arts and Humanities
9

Scopus Publications

28

Scholar Citations

2

Scholar h-index

Scopus Publications

  • Atlantic reckonings: (Capitalist) man vs. the sea in twenty-first-century disaster narratives
    Valentina Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies Global Currents, 2026
  • Reflections and refractions: Anglophone fiction and the Atlantic poetics of water
    Andrea Carosso, Valentina Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies Global Currents, 2026
    This volume situates the Atlantic within the Blue Humanities, reframing water as both material force and epistemology. Moving beyond terrestrial paradigms, the essays explore the Atlantic as a dynamic process of circulation, turbulence, and ecological entanglement. Drawing on theorists such as Cohen, DeLoughrey, Mentz, and Neimanis, contributors examine how Anglophone fiction reimagines the ocean as archive, infrastructure, and actor, foregrounding its role in globalization, empire, and climate crisis. The collection charts a trajectory from canonical re-readings of maritime imagination to contemporary reinventions of labor, catastrophe, and ecological precarity, culminating in feminist, posthuman, and archipelagic perspectives. Reflection and refraction serve as guiding metaphors, highlighting literature’s capacity to mirror entanglement with the sea while refracting meaning through liquid instability. Ultimately, the Atlantic emerges as both cradle of modernity and site of its deepest wounds, compelling renewed ecocritical attention to water’s imaginative abundance and ethical urgency.
  • Play Me for a Fool: Horror-Inducing Madness from Edgar Allan Poe to The Dark Eye (1995)
    Valentina Romanzi
    American British and Canadian Studies, 2025
    Madness often serves as the driving force behind the actions of Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonists, making their psyche a central component of his horror stories. Theme, however, is only one element that contributes to the horror affect/effect in Poe’s oeuvre: his talent for evoking horror through narrative structure and tone (Punter 1996) positions form as another crucial aspect of his poetics. When adapting Poe’s tales for a different medium, authors and artists need to confront both the thematic clusters that Poe favored and the stylistic choices that he deployed in conjunction with his themes. This contribution explores how the 1995 video game The Dark Eye adapts several works by Poe, focusing on the transposition of madness-induced horror. The game is of particular relevance because it approaches Poe’s stories in four different manners: first, the game adapts three of Poe’s best-known stories (“The Cask of Amontillado,” “Berenice,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”) for interactive gameplay. Second, it features full or abridged versions of Poe’s poems and stories (“Annabel Lee” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” recited, and “To Helen” and “The Premature Burial,” in written form). Third, it constructs a framing narrative which retrieves Poe’s themes, merging several stories, and proceduralizes his horror-inducing style for the video game environment. Fourth, it makes ample use of Poe’s Gothic atmosphere to induce horror and terror not only narratively, but also visually and aurally. The contribution thus argues that The Dark Eye serves as an all-encompassing attempt to adapt Poe’s madness-related stories beyond the mere thematic dimension, showing that Poe’s innovations can persist across different media.
  • Editors’ Note: American Narratives and Video Games
    Francesca Razzi, Valentina Romanzi
    American British and Canadian Studies, 2025
  • THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: ANIMAL VALUE(S) WITHIN AND BEYOND NECROPOLITICS IN THE ONLY HARMLESS GREAT THING
    Valentina Romanzi
    Enthymema, 2025
    This essay investigates the conflictual and oppressive relationship between humans and animals in the context of late capitalism in ‘western/ized’ societies and how speculative fiction can imagine and inspire alternative ways for interspecies coexistence. It focuses especially on the representation of animal labor, i.e. the way animals are involved in the contemporary production system. The essay takes Brooke Bolander’s 2018 novella The Only Harmless Great Thing as a case study, analyzing it through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003), and arguing that the author provides an attempt at ‘necropolitical and post-necropolitical imagination’ that, despite not always being successful, shows how to envision an alternative future without straying too far from the present.
  • Beyond Human-Centric Play: A Review of Commercial Video Games to Inform More-than-Human Serious Game Design
    Federico Bonetti, Linas Gabrielaitis, Simone Bassanelli, Federica Gini, Philip Chambers, Riccardo Belliato, Ian Marco Gallegos Carvajal, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Valentina Romanzi
    Engineering Educational Games for A Sustainable Society Play Learn and Transform, 2025
  • Parental Androids An Analysis of Non-normative Care Discourse in Contemporary Televised Science Fiction
    Franceschi, Valeria, Romanzi, Valentina
    Iperstoria, 2023
    About forty years ago, feminist scholars formulated several independent definitions of an ethics of care (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Noddings 1984), suggesting the need to reframe human collective and personal interactions. However, care theory fails for the most part to consider the lived experiences and the needs of marginalized subjects (Gary 2022). This study observes care theory from a linguistic perspective in three audio-visual texts featuring examples of non-normative care. The sci-fi TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, and Raised by Wolves will be considered, with a focus on androids acting as caregivers. The linguistic analysis, following a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), will focus on discursive strategies relating to the parties involved, their relational ties, care behaviors, and the androids’ adequacy as caretakers. The emerging perspectives may be mapped onto current discourse on minority groups’ access to fostering or adoption and their reproductive rights.
  • Let the Plan(e)t Speak for Itself Agency, Empathy, and Subjectivity in Sue Burke’s Semiosis
    Romanzi, Valentina
    Iperstoria, 2022
    In Sue Burke’s 2018 novel Semiosis, a small group of humans leaving a decaying earth to colonize planet Pax discovers that it already has an ecosystem and is inhabited by sentient plants. The narrative unravels over the first century of human presence on it, across seven generations. It is told entirely in the first person by eight different narrators: seven humans and one plant, the rainbow bamboo. In this essay, I will explore the ramifications of the use of a first-person non-human narrator, commenting on how this allows us to better understand the agency and subjectivity of the character itself within the narrative. Relying mainly on Suzanne Keen’s understanding of narrative empathy (2006) and on Rosi Braidotti’s “becoming-earth” formulation (2013), I will also argue that the bamboo’s perspective situates the reader in a privileged position to consider and discuss these topics, and that the interaction between the human and non-human narrators shows that relinquishing an inherently anthropocentric view of a given planet might lead to a more balanced ecosystem, one that will thrive rather than wither away.
  • God says ‘gay rights’: queering Christian theology in the Good Omens fandom
    Valentina Romanzi
    Culture and Religion, 2021
    In this essay I investigate how fandom discourse comments on, adapts, and reinvents existing theology. Using a selection of Good Omens fan works and ‘meta’ online posts as a case study, I argue that they welcome instances of queer theology while moving forward issues pertaining to the LGBTQ+ liberation movement. In expanding and altering the source material, fan fiction authors retrieve Biblical myths to legitimise the inclusion of queer individuals in Christian theology – the stated intent of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement. Additionally, they often offer a revisited, inclusive depiction of God as the ‘ur-ally’, framing them/her/him as an ‘ineffable’ figure made of encompassing and all-accepting love. Moreover, Good Omens fan fiction situates the binary forces of Heaven and Hell as the antagonists to the much more nuanced and queer-coded protagonists, who embrace humanity and reject notions of hard-set dichotomies. This celebration of queerness as opposed to strict dualisms fits into the purported goals of queer theology, which has no direct interest in finding a place for queer people within the existing Christian tradition, but rather works towards the dismantling of harmful dualities.

RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • Playful Literature, Literary Play:(Video) Games and American Fiction
    V Romanzi, S Schubert
    2026
  • Reflections and refractions: Anglophone fiction and the Atlantic poetics of water
    A Carosso, V Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies, 1-6 , 2026
    2026
  • Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. Sarah Ensor
    V Romanzi
    Iperstoria , 2025
    2025
  • Atlantic reckonings:(Capitalist) man vs. the sea in twenty-first-century disaster narratives
    V Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies, 1-13 , 2025
    2025
  • Beyond Human-Centric Play: A Review of Commercial Video Games to Inform More-than-Human Serious Game Design
    F Bonetti, L Gabrielaitis, S Bassanelli, F Gini, P Chambers, R Belliato, ...
    Engineering Educational Games for a Sustainable Society: Play, Learn and … , 2025
    2025
  • Apocalyptic Narratives: Science, Risk and Prophecy
    V Romanzi
    Utopian Studies 36 (1), 356-359 , 2025
    2025
  • Editors' Note: American Narratives and Video Games
    F Razzi, V Romanzi
    American, British and Canadian Studies 45 (1), 1-6 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 1
  • Play Me for a Fool: Horror-Inducing Madness from Edgar Allan Poe to The Dark Eye (1995)
    V Romanzi
    American, British and Canadian Studies, 157-179 , 2025
    2025
  • Le distopie anticapitaliste da Philip K. Dick a Cory Doctorow
    V Romanzi
    Immaginari distopici contemporanei.-(Studi storici e politici; 17), 161-174 , 2025
    2025
  • The Elephant in the Room: Animal Value (s) within and beyond Necropolitics in The Only Harmless Great Thing
    V Romanzi
    Enthymema 37 (37), 1-17 , 2025
    2025
  • La letteratura nell’Antropocene. Il progetto “Narrare il cambiamento climatico”
    V Romanzi, A Giacosa, M Mamone
    LEND. LINGUA E NUOVA DIDATTICA 1, 20-32 , 2025
    2025
  • Mattia Petricola, I mondi dell’Oltremondo. Dante e la Commedia dal fantasy alla fan fiction, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2023, pp. 143,€ 15, 00
    V Romanzi
    Status Quaestionis , 2024
    2024
  • Tarantino, mitopoiesi e retrotopia
    V Romanzi
    C'era una volta (uno scrittore) a Hollywood, 86-100 , 2024
    2024
  • Staying human in the post-apocalypse: The frontiers of individualism in the last of us and its sequel
    V Romanzi
    JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRIAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES 4 (2), 311-330 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 2
  • Parental Androids: An Analysis of Non-normative Care Discourse in Contemporary Televised Science Fiction
    V Franceschi, V Romanzi
    Iperstoria 22, 215-239 , 2023
    2023
  • An Interview with Jenny L. Davis and Four Poems from Trickster Academy
    V Romanzi
    Iperstoria 22, 409-429 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 1
  • Love Is a Thing with Feathers: Posthuman Metamorphoses in “This Is How You Lose the Time War”
    V Romanzi
    RSA JOURNAL 34, 137-155 , 2023
    2023
  • The Fractured States of America
    V Romanzi, BWR Toscano
    JAm It!(Journal of American Studies in Italy), 5-15 , 2022
    2022
  • JAm It!(Journal of American Studies in Italy), Núm. 6 (2022): The Fractured States of America
    V Romanzi, BWR Toscano
    JAm It! Journal of American Studies in Italy , 2022
    2022
  • Da distruttore di mondi a salvatore dell'umanità. Le due facce della scienza in The Oppenheimer Alternative di Robert J. Sawyer
    V Romanzi
    What's Popping? La storia degli Stati Uniti nella cultura popolare del nuovo … , 2022
    2022

MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • Ready Player One: Levels of Reality
    V Romanzi
    JAm It!(Journal of American Studies in Italy), 163-173 , 2020
    2020
    Citations: 9
  • American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction
    V Romanzi
    Peter Lang , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 7
  • Staying human in the post-apocalypse: The frontiers of individualism in the last of us and its sequel
    V Romanzi
    JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRIAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES 4 (2), 311-330 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 2
  • Let the Plan (e) t Speak for Itself: Agency, Empathy, and Subjectivity in Sue Burke's Semiosis
    V Romanzi
    Iperstoria 19, 346-360 , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 2
  • La cultura selfie in uno stato diviso tra interessi economici e sorveglianza
    H Giroux, V Romanzi
    Iperstoria , 2015
    2015
    Citations: 2
  • Editors' Note: American Narratives and Video Games
    F Razzi, V Romanzi
    American, British and Canadian Studies 45 (1), 1-6 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 1
  • An Interview with Jenny L. Davis and Four Poems from Trickster Academy
    V Romanzi
    Iperstoria 22, 409-429 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 1
  • Coin-operated doors and pirated toasts: reflections on capitalism from Philip K. Dick’s Ubik to Cory Doctorow’s Unauthorized Bread
    V Romanzi
    Bibliomanie 54, 1-12 , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 1
  • God says ‘gay rights’: queering Christian theology in the Good Omens fandom
    V Romanzi
    Culture and Religion 22 (1), 64-83 , 2021
    2021
    Citations: 1
  • Plural Identities in Sam J. Miller's Blackfish City
    V Romanzi
    ContactZone: Rivista dell'Associazione Italiana per lo Studio della … , 2020
    2020
    Citations: 1
  • The Testaments
    V Romanzi
    The Literary Encyclopedia , 2019
    2019
    Citations: 1
  • Playful Literature, Literary Play:(Video) Games and American Fiction
    V Romanzi, S Schubert
    2026
  • Reflections and refractions: Anglophone fiction and the Atlantic poetics of water
    A Carosso, V Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies, 1-6 , 2026
    2026
  • Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. Sarah Ensor
    V Romanzi
    Iperstoria , 2025
    2025
  • Atlantic reckonings:(Capitalist) man vs. the sea in twenty-first-century disaster narratives
    V Romanzi
    Atlantic Studies, 1-13 , 2025
    2025
  • Beyond Human-Centric Play: A Review of Commercial Video Games to Inform More-than-Human Serious Game Design
    F Bonetti, L Gabrielaitis, S Bassanelli, F Gini, P Chambers, R Belliato, ...
    Engineering Educational Games for a Sustainable Society: Play, Learn and … , 2025
    2025
  • Apocalyptic Narratives: Science, Risk and Prophecy
    V Romanzi
    Utopian Studies 36 (1), 356-359 , 2025
    2025
  • Play Me for a Fool: Horror-Inducing Madness from Edgar Allan Poe to The Dark Eye (1995)
    V Romanzi
    American, British and Canadian Studies, 157-179 , 2025
    2025
  • Le distopie anticapitaliste da Philip K. Dick a Cory Doctorow
    V Romanzi
    Immaginari distopici contemporanei.-(Studi storici e politici; 17), 161-174 , 2025
    2025
  • The Elephant in the Room: Animal Value (s) within and beyond Necropolitics in The Only Harmless Great Thing
    V Romanzi
    Enthymema 37 (37), 1-17 , 2025
    2025