I’m a literary scholar, writer, and Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at NYU. Previously, I was at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows. My academic training, which focused on literary history, philology, and literary theory, took place at the University of Milan and Stanford University. 

My scholarship is rooted in modern Italian literature, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century polymath Giacomo Leopardi. I also write on topics ranging from horror studies and the philosophy of technology to the role of internet culture in politics. Most of my publications can be found here.


Ordinary Horror: The Aesthetics of Deformation from Leopardi to Ferrante
Stanford University Press, 2026 - [Introduction]

My first book studies how “ordinary horror” — the horror that haunts our world and that we may encounter firsthand — manifests in our lives and literature, unpacking its significance for our time. Drawing on phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy, I reframe horror as a common human experience tied to a sense of forced powerlessness and analyze its presence in texts that fall outside the horror genre. Literature can convey horror’s experiential magnitude through what I call an “aesthetics of deformation” — scenes where otherwise realistic texts depart from verisimilitude and take on a more disquieting form. Shifting the focus to experiential matters reveals how horror hides in plain sight across literary traditions even when not enshrined in a genre: reading major modern Italian authors through this lens, my book demonstrates the centrality of horror in a canon rarely associated with it.


Weird New World
(Under contract with Sellerio, scheduled for 2027)

This trade book explores the role of internet subcultures in the rise of the New American Right, analyzing how cyberspace is no longer simply leaking into the “real world,” but actively terraforming it. Blending narrative essay, media archaeology, critical theory, and memoir, Weird New World examines how imageboards like 4chan, online gaming communities, and internet thinkers have been reshaping contemporary political discourse and our collective imagination.