About
I am a scholar, writer, and public speaker with expertise in contemporary literature and culture. Below you can read more about me and find a short CV.
Read about
Dr Diletta De Cristofaro
I am an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in English Literature at Northumbria University in the UK 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 The Week, New Humanist, Salon, RTÉ, and Post45 Contemporaries, to Textual Practice, Parallax, 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. In 2023, I was shortlisted as a BBC New Generation Thinker.
I am an expert in the apocalyptic imagination, especially narratives about the climate crisis. 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.
Between 2020 and 2024, I was the Principal Investigator of two connected projects examining sleep and sleeplessness in the twenty-first century. The first is “Writing the Sleep Crisis”, a research project funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission. In this project, which I am developing into a book, I explored representations of sleep in contemporary culture and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, today’s presumed widespread sleep deprivation. As part of this project, I have also edited Sleep and Its Meanings: Sociocultural Investigations from Critical Sleep Studies, the first collection of essays devoted to the emerging multidisciplinary field of critical sleep studies for The MIT Press (out in May 2026). The second project I led was “Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders”, a public engagement project, developed in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded the Wellcome Trust, consisting in a creative workshop series and art exhibition. Click on the buttons below to find out more about these projects.
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. My research has been supported by the Wellcome Trust (Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science and Research Enrichment – Public Engagement), 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 co-founded Contemporary Studies Network and, between 2018 and 2025, I was part of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, including serving as the Association’s Co-Chair with Phil Leonard between 2023 and 2025.
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Dr Diletta De Cristofaro
Experience
Qualifications
2018
FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK)
2015
PhD in American Studies
University of Nottingham, UK
2010
Laurea Magistrale (MPhil) in Philosophy
Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, with an Erasmus year at Paris IV Sorbonne, France
2008
Laurea Triennale (BA Hons) in Philosophy
Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Academic Appointments
4/2023 – present
Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in English Literature
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, UK
7/2020 – 3/2023
Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, UK
9/2021 – 8/2022
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow
META (Social Sciences and Humanities for Science and Technology), Politecnico di Milano, Italy
9/2017 – 6/2020
Teaching Fellow in English Literature
School of English, Drama and Creative Studies, University of Birmingham, UK
1/2017 – 8/2017
Lecturer in English
School of Humanities, De Montfort University Leicester, UK
8/2016 – 12/2016
Teaching Fellow in British Studies
Harlaxton College, UK (the British Campus of the University of Evansville)
1/2016 – 6/2016
Associate Lecturer
School of English and Journalism, University of Lincoln, UK
1/2014 – 6/2016
Teaching Affiliate
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK
Selected Grants and Awards
2023
Shortlisted as BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker
2022
Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment – Public Engagement Award
2020
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
2020
Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science
2017
Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Research Fellowship in the Humanities, Harry Ransom Center
2012
Erasmus Mundus Visiting Research Fellowship
2011
Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence EU Scholarship, University of Nottingham,
Visiting Positions
8/2017
Research Fellow
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, USA
1/2012
Visiting Research Fellow
Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands