Eleonora Maio
Eleonora Maio is pursuing her doctoral studies in the Humanities Department at the University of Palermo, Italy. She currently is a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. She holds a Master’s Degree (honours) in Modern Languages, Literature and Translation (English and French) from the University of Messina.
Her research interests center on the exploration of memory, identity, embodiment, agency, seen as sources of auto/biographical subjectivity. She engages with the conceptual frameworks of performativity, relationality and positionality, considered pivotal in the study of women’s contemporary life narratives (Smith, Watson, 2009).
She is working on her dissertation titled “Life-Writing ‘from below’: Sally Bayley’s Auto/Biographical Trilogy and the Experimental Constitution of Selfhood”, focusing on the works authored by contemporary British writer Sally Bayley. Drawing from a contemporary field of life-writing research, the spatial metaphor ‘from below’ refers to subjects usually positioned at the margins of autobiographical discourse (Ashplant, 2018). The study seeks to analyse the process of narrative identity formation within Bayley’s coming-of-age self-referential volumes, starting from the ‘subaltern’ status of her formative years to the empowerment and transition to artistic relevance in adulthood.
At the intersection of gender and cultural studies, the research aims to highlight how Bayley’s trilogy constitutes an example of a life narrative enacting the recovery of previously unheard and neglected voices, prominently manifested through the child-narrator perspective in the first two volumes and by the portrayal of the ‘hidden from history’ imaginary biographies in the third one. On a formal level, the study will show how the trilogy encapsulates the experimental nature of contemporary life-writing through its distinctive hybridity, multilayered intertextuality, metafictional stance, and elusive stylistic choices.
Some of her essays on Bayley’s works will be published in 2024 (University of Rome).
She recently chaired the conversation “Life Writing, Memory and Fiction” with writers Marina Warner and Sally Bayley. The discussion focused on prominent themes from Warner’s memoir Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir and Bayley’s trilogy.
Some results of her researches on innovative configurations within present-day life-writing practices will be presented at the upcoming ESSE International Conference “The Challenges of Auto/Biography: Old and New Trends” and at the ESSE Doctoral Symposium (Lausanne, 2024).
In addition to her scholarly research interests, Eleonora specialised in Teaching Italian as a Foreign or Second Language (CEDILS Certificate, ‘Ca’ Foscari’ University, Venice; MA in Teaching Theories and Methods, ‘Dante Alighieri’ University, RC), and she worked as a Language Centre Advisor and Tutor within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Greenwich, London.
