Main Focus
- History of Italian Modern Art
- Landscape Studies
- The dialogue between visual and literary studies
- Difficult Heritage
Research Project
Curriculum Vitae
Virginia Magnaghi is an art historian whose interests lie primarily in the
history of Italian modern art, with a particular focus on the history of
Fascist visual and written culture. She received her PhD in 2024 from the
Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, where she defended a dissertation on the
visual and written representations of the Italian natural landscape between the
two wars. This is also the subject of her current book-length project.
In addition to exploring the dialogue between visual and literary studies,
she is interested in their possible intersections with the formation of
national identity, and in the topics of ecocriticism and difficult heritage. Also,
she works as a critic on contemporary dance and theater for the magazines Stratagemmi and La
Falena.
She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento
(2024–25). During her doctoral studies she was a research fellow at the Center
for Italian Modern Art in New York (2021) and at the Environmental Humanities
Laboratory at KTH, Stockholm (2022). In 2025-2026 the Bibliotheca Hertziana –
Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte will support her new project
dedicated to how Italians represented Libya, and in particular its landscape,
both natural and built, during the 1930s.