Dr Sophie Maddison

I specialise in Franco-Italian cultural connections spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. My research is ecocritical and urban-oriented. I am also interested in the intersection of the environmental, health, and medical humanities.

My doctoral thesis was a comparative study of cities in the works of Matilde Serao (1856-1927) and Émile Zola (1840-1902), with a focus on Naples and Paris. My first monograph, Urban Interconnections: Ecocritical Readings of the City in Matilde Serao and Émile Zola, is under contract with Legenda. By addressing Serao and Zola in a way that looks beyond their most renowned work and their most frequently noted similarities, Urban Interconnections uncovers new lines of affinity between Naples and Paris during the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Serao and Zola are crucial to exploring such connections – not only from a literary-historical perspective, but also in the light of present-day urban and environmental challenges. 

I am currently working on a postdoctoral project titled ‘Occupation, Environment, and the Postwar City in French and Italian Culture’. This research counteracts a lack of comparative scholarship on French and Italian experiences of occupation during the Second World War, the role played by cultural production in our understanding of such experiences, and the environmental connections between occupied cities and postwar urban life. My postdoctoral research brings ecocritical analysis into dialogue with memory studies, trauma studies, and approaches to urban space stemming from the social sciences.

At Sheffield, I convene the second-year module ‘Understanding Gender and Society in France and the Francophone World’. I teach undergraduate modules on modern France, textual intersections, French literature and the environment, and comparative visual studies. I also contribute to postgraduate modules on advanced translation and transnational cultural  movements.