MSCA PF Fellow: Stefano Serafini


PDFProject:  TRAUMA - Traumatized Subjects: Mental Health, Violence, and the Fabric of Europe Between the Wars (1918-39)


Stefano Serafini

 

MSCA Fellow: Stefano Serafini

UNIPD Supervisor:  Matteo Millan

Department:  Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World

Total Contribution:  Euro 265.099,19

Project Duration in months: 36

Find out more: https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en

 

Stefano Serafini is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Padua. He received a PhD in comparative literature and cultures from Royal Holloway, University of London and held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Toronto and Warwick. He is the co-editor, with Marco Malvestio, of Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). He published extensively on the history of deviance and transgression in modern Britain and Italy at the intersection of literature, medicine, and criminal law. His MSCA project, conducted at the universities of Padua, Georgetown, and Hamburg, examines the transnational and trans-medial circulation of key discourses regarding mental health and violence that emerged in interwar Europe (1918–39). Analyzing various sources, such as medical and legal texts, novels, periodicals, war memoirs, and handbooks for soldiers, the project explores how mentally traumatized World War I (WWI) servicemen committing violence were represented in Britain and Italy. Due to their antithetical nature, nationally, politically, medically, and the opposite roles played by their veterans after WWI, these two contexts offer a unique window into the European experience of war trauma and its effects (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder; domestic violence) and allow to trace the cultural shifts and historical processes (e.g. the de-mythization of the soldier; the rejection of the war) that informed the socio-cultural building of Europe in the following decades.