The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies, Italian Studies, and Queer Studies
Office Location
Filippo Trentin is a Lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies, Italian Studies, and Queer Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which he joined in 2016-17 as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick (UK) in 2014 he held academic positions as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry and as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.
Trentin’s research lies at the intersection of literary studies, film studies and queer theory, with a specific focus on 20th-century Italian literature and cinema. His first book project, Rome and the Margins of Modernism: Literature, Cinema and Biopolitics, is an aesthetic history of Rome’s modernity, from the end of fascism to the entropic mood of 1970s Italy. Focusing on the relationship between aesthetics, politics and the environment, the book argues that the process of urban modernization that affected Rome in the twentieth century gave rise to a materialist lineage of modernism in literature and cinema which ushered in a shift away from the inward paradigm that characterized early 20th-century modernism, and towards an immanent and corporeal aesthetics encrusted in Rome’s suburban margins.
His articles on modernist Italian literature, queer cinema and film theory have appeared in journals such as Screen, GLQ, Criticism, The Journal of Romance Studies and Modern Language Review among others. Trentin has also recently co-edited two special issues, one with S. Pearl Brilmyer and Zairong Xiang on “The Ontology of the Couple,” which appeared on GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Spring 2019), and another one with S. Pearl Brilmyer on the psychoanalytic work of Lou Andreas-Salomé, which appeared in Psychoanalysis & History (Spring 2022). This special issue featured the first English translation of Salomé’s 1916 essay “Anal and Sexual.”