Simona is a PhD student at Ghent University.
Her PhD project, Narrating Migration in the 21st Century: A Posthumanist Approach to Anglophone Novels, examines contemporary novels of migration, looking at their formal and thematic innovations and employing a research framework that combines narrative theory and the critical posthumanities. The thesis is that contemporary fiction is committed to demonstrating how narratives of migration today are moving beyond conventional cultural, spatial, and identitarian themes to offer more complex and nuanced reflections on what it means to be on the move today.
Her research interests are narrative theory, new formalism, the critical posthumanities, literature of migration, ageing studies.
As part of the Horizon 2020 project “Crises as OPPORTUNITIES: Towards a Level Telling Field on Migration and a New Narrative of Successful Integration”, she has co-authored with her PhD supervisor prof. Marco Caracciolo the article "Narrative, Scale, and Two Refugee Crises in Comparison in the Italian Media" on Diegesis.
Forthcoming are the book chapters “Altered Narration: unreliability in narrators with Alzheimer’s Disease” in the edited volume Narratives of Non-Normative Bodies and Minds (Brill 2024), and "Reconsidering Identity Formation Processes in Fictions of Migration: Narrative Subjectivity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, The Divine" in Mobility, Agency, Kinship: Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood. (Palgrave 2025).
