Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University where she was appointed in 2008 after having worked at Basel University (2002-2005) and at Zurich University (2005-2008). She graduated in Italian philology at the University of Pavia where she also wrote her PhD thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio. She teaches BA courses on the history of Italian poetry, on chivalric poetry of the sixteenth century and on contemporary Italian prose. She also teaches MA courses on short story collection theory. Her main research interests lie in modern and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory, in particular short story collection theory. She is particularly interested in authors who have greatly influenced or shaped Italian culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all Gabriele d’Annunzio and Italo Svevo, not to mention Carlo Emilio Gadda. She is an active researcher on recent developments in contemporary Italian literature.