On the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2026, author Patrizia Sambuco presents her latest book, Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing: A Reassessment (Toronto University Press, 2025), winner of the Premio Internazionale Flaiano d’Italianistica “Luca Attanasio” award in June 2025, on Thursday, 12 March 2026 at 17:30 at the Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh.
Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing discusses the relevance of food imagery in the writing of Italian women over a period of one hundred years, from the 1920s to the present day, while offering new ways to narrate women’s history and creativity. In this groundbreaking work, Patrizia Sambuco shows how food imagery in different historical periods challenge established political discourses by conveying unexpressed, alternative, or transgressive emotions.
About the Book
Through literary analysis, archival research and philosophical approaches to the senses, emotions and food, Sambuco’s book demonstrates how, in different ways over the decades, imagery related to food have expressed women’s emotions and identities in contrast with political ideologies and dominant patriarchal discourses. Sambuco’s work makes it possible to highlight the importance of the interconnection between recurrent forms of expression associated to emotions and the ideas of corporeality given by food imagery, proposing an alternative reading of women’s experience in relation to major political and social changes. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates that food imagery is not only a powerful expressive tool, but also a compelling means for reinterpreting and rewriting women’s literary history.
About the Author
Patrizia Sambuco is a specialist of contemporary Italian culture. Her current research interests focus on food history and food imagery in literature. Her recent monograph Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing. A Reassessment (University of Toronto Press, 2024) was awarded the International Flaiano Prize for Italian Studies ‘Luca Attanasio’ 2025. On the topic of food, she edited the Journal of Romance Studies Special Issue (2024) ‘The Taste of War’, and published several articles. She is the editor of two collected volumes Transmissions of Memory (2018) and Italian Women’s Writing 1800–2000 (2015). She is also the author of the monograph Corporeal Bonds (UTP, 2012) translated in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (Il Poligrafo, 2015). She has taught at universities in England, Australia and Scotland, and is currently a Study Skills Lecturer at GBS/Oxford Brookes University.
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