Ana Ilievska is a recent graduate of the department of Comparative Literature and a Humanities Teaching Fellow. Ilievska's work focuses on Italian and Lusophone literatures and on the reconstruction of a wider technological Southern European imaginary (“pensiero meridiano”). She is particularly interested in the ways in which new literary protagonists (machines, things, children, peasants, workers, refugees) enter the world of fiction and are given a voice, destabilizing accepted notions of what it means to be alive and human. While her MA-thesis focused on the voice of the child-hero in the contemporary novel, her dissertation traces the “voices” of technology by studying human-machine interactions in novels from Italy and Portugal written during the Second Industrial Revolution. In “The Machine in the Novel: Human-Machine Interactions at the European Periphery (ca.1870-1914),” she outlined literary models for alternative attitudes towards technology by studying comparatively works by Mary Shelley, Émile Zola, Carlo Collodi, Eça de Queirós, Franz Kafka, and Luigi Pirandello. Ilievska is a Fulbright alumna (Sicily, 2018-2019) and is fluent in several European languages.
Selected Publications:
“A Thing About Machines: Eça de Queirós’s Technological Twilight Zone.” Journal of Lusophone Studies 4:2 (2019): 243-260.
“’two legs, a torso, and, on top, a machine…’ A Posthumanist Reading of Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio.” Pirandello Studies 40 (forthcoming in 2020).
Selected Teaching Experience:
“What it Means to be Human: Introduction to English Literature from Beowulf to the Romantics” (Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy: Spring 2020)
“Literature and Technology: Machines, Humans, and the European Novel from Frankenstein to the Futurists” (The University of Chicago, Winter 2018)
Beginning Italian and Alphabetization for Refugees, at the Centro Astalli, Italian Office of the Jesuit Refugee Service (Catania, Italy; Winter 2019)
First Year Italian (The University of Chicago: Spring 2018)
Portuguese for Speakers of Romance Languages (The University of Chicago: Summer 2017, Summer 2018)
Research Interests
History and philosophy of technology; sound studies; noise; the voice; ecocriticism; being human and Posthumanism; literature and Artificial Intelligence; liminality; mimesis; narratology; history and theory of the novel; the 19th century novel in Europe, the US, and Brazil; the contemporary Luso-African novel; Italian women writers; contemporary poetry; Mediterranean and Balkan studies.
Education:
MA, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2013
BA, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2011