Alessandro CABIATI

Dr Alessandro Cabiati is Researcher (Assistant Professor) in English Literature at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies. From 2021 to 2024, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca' Foscari and Brown University in Providence, USA (2022-2023). Dr Cabiati’s Marie Curie research project MadLand – Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900 has investigated the connections and mutual knowledge-exchange between literary fairy tales and psychiatry in the nineteenth century. The project has explored how in Britain, France, and the United States medical interpretations of psychological abnormality and deviance influenced fairy-tale imagery, and how in turn fairy-tale representations of monstrosity served as a point of reference for the codification of insanity by early psychiatry.

Research Interests

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature; Victorian culture; comparative literature, especially French and Italian; fairy tales and children's literature; the Gothic, fantasy, and speculative fiction; decadence and modernity; deviance and monstrosity; history of medicine and psychiatry; gender and sexuality studies.

Education, Research Experience, and Awards

Before joining Ca' Foscari, Dr Cabiati was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Tutor in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Cabiati holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Edinburgh), a Master of Studies in Modern Languages with English from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor's Degree in English and French (Università Statale di Milano).

In 2019, Dr Cabiati was awarded the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for a critical essay on the fantastic.

Forthcoming Publications 

• Ogresses of Crime Narratives: Serial Infanticide and the Fairy-Tale Monster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2027)
• ‘From Syndrome to Self-Identity: The Metaphorical Use of Pinocchio in Medical Narratives’. In Strings of Imagination: Rethinking Pinocchio in the New Millennium, edited by Elena Emma Sottilotta and Pablo a Marca (London and New York: Routledge, 2026)
• [with Lucio De Capitani] (eds.) Stevenson and the (Un)Natural: Wild Transgressions in Late Victorian Culture, special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2028)
• [with Laura Tosi, Rachele Bassan, and Carolina Granini] (eds.) Disruptive Appetites: Non-Normative Consumption in Children’s and YA Literature, special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn (Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol.53, Issue 2, 2029)

Dr Cabiati's second monograph, Ogresses of Crime Narratives, will be published in the Cambridge Elements in Crime Narratives series in 2027. This book will investigate how, in the British and French press between 1860 and 1910, women suspected of serial child murder were framed as ‘ogresses’ and described using a range of fairy-tale textual and visual references. This study traces the evolving depiction of serial murderesses of infants in nineteenth-century true-crime reportage – which adopted crime fiction tropes by exaggerating crime scene bloodiness and violent details – to construct the feminine deviant type of the fairy-tale, child-killing ogress.

Dr Cabiati’s first book, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857-1912 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in March 2022 as part of the series ‘Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature’.

Conferences

Dr Cabiati has recently organised the following conferences: 

• [with Lucio De Capitani] (Un)natural Stevenson: Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender (Ca’ Foscari, 11–12 May 2026)
• [with Laura Tosi] Eating Indoors and Outdoors in Children’s Literature (Ca’ Foscari, 27–28 November 2025). Keynote Speakers: Diane Purkiss and Vanessa Joosen.
• [with Laura Tosi] Adaptation and the Fairy Tale: Alice Before and After, 10 November 2023, Venice (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia).
• [with Lewis Seifert] Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings, 7-9 June 2023, Brown University, USA. Keynote Speakers: Maria Tatar, Cristina Bacchilega, Anne E. Duggan, Laura Tosi. Reviewed here by the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

Recent invitations as Keynote Speaker:

• [with Lewis Seifert] ‘Presentation of the Special Issue of Marvels & Tales 39.1 (2025)’ at Troubling Wonder: A Fairy-Tale Studies Symposium (University of Cambridge, UK, 1–4 October 2025)
• 'Marvellous Abnormalities: Fairy Tales, Decadence, and Deviance in the Late Nineteenth Century', Decadence and the Fairy Tale, 24 March 2023, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Recording of keynote talk available on the conference website.