Dr Alberto Tondello

IASH Affiliate 2023-24
Dr Alberto Tondello

Dr Alberto Tondello is Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (UKRI funded) at the Universities of Edinburgh and Bern. Alberto received his PhD from University College London in 2021 with a project focusing on inanimate matter in the works of James Joyce. His main research interests include modernist literature, literary theory, and ecocriticism. He has published articles on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Italo Calvino in literary journals including Modern Language Review, Humanities, Samuel Beckett Today and Joyce Studies in Italy.

I am currently working on a project titled ‘Inhospitable Modernism: The Ecological Value of Modernist Alienation’. The project analyses the depiction of inhospitable environments in the works of four modernist authors – James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, and Djuna Barnes. At the intersection of literary modernism, literary theory, philosophy, and the environmental humanities, my current research links modernist alienation to the concept of inhospitality, considered as both social exclusion and environmental hostility. The project demonstrates how modernist alienation is an effect of various kinds of oppression contributing to the creation of social and natural inhospitable environments. It claims that literary modernism’s unique archive of feelings (i.e. frustration, disaffection, hesitation...) is essential in uncovering the estrangement of certain categories of individuals from social contexts and broader environments.