Maria Anna Mariani

I am a specialist in Modern Italian Literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century). The relationship between memory and literary form lies at the heart of my scholarship. It informs my work on autobiography, Holocaust testimony, fictional accounts of historical catastrophe, and memoirs of terminal illness. Across these works, the same questions recur: the affinity between storytelling and memory’s shaping of time; the unsettling relationship between testimony and survival; the ethics of representing historical catastrophe; the narrative shape of personal trauma; and the limit cases of what can be thought and shown.

I have explored these questions in four monographs. Sull’autobiografia contemporanea (Carocci, 2011) examines contemporary autobiography through the intertwined lenses of memory and mimesis. Primo Levi e Anna Frank: tra testimonianza e letteratura (Carocci, 2018) investigates the complex interplay of testimony and literary form in the works of Primo Levi and Anne Frank.

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander (Oxford University Press, 2022), winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, examines the overlooked figure of the bystander in modern Italy. Drawing on Seamus Heaney’s dictum that “there is no such thing as innocent by-standing,” it argues that Italy’s distinctive combination of historical implication and political powerlessness reshapes the role of the sidelined intellectual in the Nuclear Age. The Italian edition, L’Italia e la bomba: letteratura nell’era nucleare, was published by Il Mulino in 2025.

My most recent monograph, As I Write Dying: Memoirs of the End (Cambridge University Press, 2026), traces the emergence of a striking new literary form: the real-time memoir of terminal illness. Since the 1990s, writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Sacks, and Jenny Diski have chronicled their dying in serialized essays for major periodicals including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. These “memoirs of the end” challenge the longstanding philosophical claim that one’s own death cannot be narrated while revealing how modern medicine and contemporary media reshape the experience of mortality. Unlike traditional illness memoirs centered on survival, they confront the approach of death itself, transforming autobiography into autothanatography. Bringing literary criticism into dialogue with philosophy and cultural history, the book argues that this emerging genre gives narrative form to dying and restores mortality to the center of literary and public imagination.

Throughout my career, I have sought to reach a broader readership by publishing books and articles that bridge academic and non-specialist audiences. In the fictionalized reportage Dalla Corea del Sud (Exòrma, 2017), I recount five years spent living in a South Korean dormitory for international university faculty, reflecting on how “negative nationality” fosters an affective bond among global resident aliens. Voci da Uber (Mucchi, 2019) explores the distinctive conversational world of ride-sharing, where small talk shades into confession. Composed of micro-narratives drawn from conversations during Chicago Uber rides, the book offers storytelling as a counter to the reifying logic of ratings and evaluation that defines the sharing economy.

• As I Write Dying: Memoirs of the End (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
• L’Italia e la bomba: letteratura nell’era nucleare (Il Mulino, 2025).
• Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander (Oxford University Press, 2022). 
• Voci da Uber. Confessioni a motore (Mucchi, 2019).
• Primo Levi e Anna Frank. Tra testimonianza e letteratura (Carocci, 2018).
• Dalla Corea del Sud (Exòrma, 2017).
• Sull’autobiografia contemporanea. Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi (Carocci, 2012).