Rebecca Falkoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian whose research on Italian and comparative literary and cultural studies focuses on entanglements of psychic and narrative economies. She has taught Italian and comparative literature at Berkeley, Northwestern, New York University, University College London, and Johns Hopkins University, and has led reading groups at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and the Providence Athenaeum.
Her first book, Possessed (Cornell University Press, 2021) traces a cultural history of hoarding from 19th century obsessions like monomania, bibliomania, and kleptomania to the diagnostic criteria of “hoarding disorder” included in the 2013 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Conducting an archaeology of the fraught materiality of the present across disciplines, she shows how the hoarder embodies the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity.
Her current book project, Industrious Skies: The Chemistry of Fascist Nature, proposes that the promise of nitrogen capture—that of making bread from air—defined Italian fascist strategy from the very outset of the regime and, more abstractly, changed the sense of the sky. She is also developing a project on illegibility that grows obliquely from Possessed, insofar as the hoard can be understood as an assemblage resistant to the abstractions that make communication possible.
She has published essays on Giorgio Manganelli, Primo Levi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elena Ferrante, and on topics in the medical, environmental, and theoretical humanities, and has translated writing by Gadda, Elsa Morante, and Anita Raja.