About

I am a scholar, writer, and public speaker with expertise in contemporary literature and culture. Below you can read more about me and see a short CV.

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Dr Diletta De Cristofaro

I am a scholar, based between Northumbria University in the UK and Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and a culture writer.

I write cultural criticism, both scholarly and for a general audience. I’m particularly interested in fiction, non-fiction, film, TV, and digital culture responding to twenty-first-century anxieties and crises. My research considers what stories about real or perceived crises tell us about our society, our sense of self, and of time. My essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from Salon, The Week, RTÉ, The Conversation, and Post45 Contemporaries, to Parallax, ASAP/J, Critique, and boundary 2 online.

I am also a public speaker and contribute to literary and science festivals, such as Durham Book Festival, the European Researchers Night, and the Being Human Festival.

I am an expert in the apocalyptic imagination. My book on the topic, The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times, is out with Bloomsbury. In this book, reviewed as “a landmark study of 21st century fiction” and “a theoretical tour de force”, I offer a critical model for our cultural obsession with the end by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel.

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Currently, I am the Principal Investigator of “Writing the Sleep Crisis”, a research project funded by the European Commission and the Wellcome Trust. In this project, which I am developing into a book, I explore representations of sleep in contemporary culture and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, today’s presumed widespread sleep deprivation.

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My research has been supported by the Wellcome Trust (Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science), the European Commission (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and Erasmus Mundus), the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Research Fellowship in the Humanities), and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence EU Scholarship at the University of Nottingham. I have held research and teaching positions at a number of universities in the UK and Italy – see the list of my academic appointments below.

I co-founded Contemporary Studies Network and, since 2018, I sit on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies – at present, I serve as the Association’s communications and website administrator.