Ana Ilievska

Ana Ilievska holds a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago (2020), and a B.A. and M.A. in Romanistik and Comparative Literature from the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2011, 2013). Prior to joining Stanford, she was Humanities Teaching Fellow in the College and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago (2020-2021) and Adjunct Lecturer at the Università degli Studi di Catania in Sicily (2020) where she was also a Fulbright doctoral scholar. Currently, she is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center as well as board member and membership secretary of the Pirandello Society of America.

An Italianist specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, Ilievska’s teaching and research focus on the relationship between literature, the industrial revolution, and technology from a Southern perspective, especially in the works of such authors as Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, Carlo Collodi, and Matilde Serao, in dialogue with the Futurists. She has broad training in Portuguese, Brazilian, and Luso-African literature, and regularly writes about nineteenth-century English and French literature as well. Her research is theoretically and philosophically grounded in what Franco Cassano had called “pensiero meridiano” (“Southern Thought), drawing on such thinkers as Giambattista Vico, Ortega y Gasset, Carlo Michelstaedter, Albert Camus, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Roberto M. Dainotto, but also Heidegger, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt.

Her first book project analyzes human-machine interactions in novels written during the Second Industrial Revolution. In “The Machine in the Novel: Fictional Human-Machine Interactions at the European Periphery,” she outlines literary models for alternative attitudes towards technology in the works of Carlo Collodi, Luigi Pirandello, and Eça de Queirós through a comparison with novels by Mary Shelley, J.-K. Huysmans, Jules Verne, and Émile Zola. At Stanford, she is elaborating what she calls “The Pinocchio Project,” a study of Collodi’s “myth concerning technology” (Massimo Riva) as a foundational myth and evolutionary model for AIs and for our understanding of what it means to be human.

Ilievska is also cultivating her longstanding interest in poetry (especially Eugenio Montale and Fernando Pessoa) and is currently co-editing and translating a bilingual anthology of contemporary Sicilian poetry for Italica Press. Ilievska regularly translates from Italian, Portuguese, German, and Macedonian, and has published several peer-reviewed articles and invited book chapters on Italian as well as Portuguese and Luso-African literature. Her work has received recognition by the Fulbright Program, the U.K. Society of Pirandello Studies, the Fundação Eça de Queiroz, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.