Dr. Lidia Radi

Dr. Lidia Radi has a dual research specialty in Early Modern French Studies and, more recently, in Italian Transnational Literature with a focus on the representation of women in the literature of the Albanian Diaspora. She earned her Laurea from the Università degli Studi di Verona (Italy), and her Maîtrise en Lettres Modernes from the Université Stendhal-Grenoble III (France) in 2000. She was a pensionnaire étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2003-2004. She received her dual doctorate from Rutgers University and the Université Stendhal-Grenoble III in French Renaissance Studies with a second specialty in Italian Studies in 2006.  

Dr. Radi has published extensively in the field of French Early Modern Studies, where she has examined the relationship between politics and religion, virtue and education, and the ethics of literature.  She is the author of the critical edition of Le Penser de Royal Mémoire by Guillaume Michel, dit de Tours (Classiques Garnier, 2012). She has co-edited two volumes, the first entitled Valeur des lettres à la Renaissance. Débats et réflexions autour de la vertu de la littérature (Classiques Garnier, 2016)  and the second Representing Heresy in Early Modern France (Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2017.) 

In the field of Italian Studies, Dr. Radi’s scholarship explores representations of women in the Italian works of female writers of the Albanian diaspora. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Vivere tra due mondi. La narrazione (al) femminile della diaspora albanese in italiano: Dones, Ibrahimi e Vorpsi. (Living-in-between. Female representation in the Italian works of the Albanian Diaspora writers: Dones, Ibrahimi and Vorpsi) examines Albanian culture and history in relation to the more recent mass-migration movement to Italy, as portrayed by Albanian-born women writers who write in Italian. 

Dr. Radi’s article “Scrittori senza frontiere: il caso di Elvira Dones,” appeared in the 2018 special issue of The Journal of Critical Multilingualism Studies. Her most recent essay, entitled “Albania Mon Amour: Tales of Female Love and Duty in the Italian Writings of Dones, Ibrahimi and Vorpsi,” is forthcoming in a volume entitled Fictional and Critical Stories in Transmigrations Through Italy, edited by Graziella Parati and Marie Orton with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. She has also contributed to the The Literary Encyclopedia with two entries on the literary works of Elvira Dones and Anilda Ibrahimi.  Dr. Radi’s work is at the intersection of Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Transnational and Intercultural Studies.

As a former political refugee from Albania, Dr. Radi’s scholarship in Italian Studies reflects her strong personal commitment to challenging inaccurate and harmful views about the “Other”, and to fostering an open and truthful dialogue between people of different backgrounds that allows for a more nuanced view of the world we inhabit.