Ana Ilievska is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, focusing on Italian and Lusophone literatures, and currently conducting dissertation research in Italy on a Fulbright fellowship (2018-2019). She is particularly interested in the ways in which new literary protagonists (machines, things, children, peasants, workers, refugees) enter the world of fiction and receive a voice, destabilizing existing hierarchies in literature and society alike. While her MA-thesis focused on the voice of the child-hero in the contemporary Western 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 “Voices of Flesh and Steel: Human-Machine Interactions in Novels from Italy and Portugal during the Second Industrial Revolution,” she is outlining literary models for alternative attitudes towards technology, and is working towards the reconstruction of a wider, technological, Southern European imaginary (“pensiero meridiano”). The project is ultimately a contribution to the strengthening of the relationship between literature and technology both through the study of machines in fiction and through the application of methods form the digital humanities. Ana is fluent in several European languages, and has taught Italian, Portuguese, and German at the graduate and undergraduate level. Further research interests include: philosophy of technology; sound studies; noise; thing theory; ecocriticism; posthumanism; actor-network-theory; literature and Artificial Intelligence; liminality; Petrarca and Boccaccio; the 19th century novel in Europe, the US, and Brazil; the contemporary Luso-African novel; and Balkan studies.
Teaching Experience:
Intensive Portuguese for Speakers of Romance Languages (Language Assistant, Summer 2017/18)
Beginning to Intermediate Italian (Language Assistant, Winter 2016)
Advanced Portuguese (Language Assistant, Spring 2015)
Elementary and Advanced German (Language Assistant, 2008-2009, Brescia, Italy)
The Nuclear Age (Course Assistant, Fall 2017)
Machiavelli (Course Assistant, Spring 2017)
Brazilian Avant-Gardes (Course Assistant, Winter 2017)
Renaissance Demonology (Course Assistant, Spring 2016).
Literature and Technology: Machines, Humans, and the European Novel from Frankenstein to the Futurists (Instructor, Winter 2018)
Italian 103 (Instructor, Spring 2018).
Education: MA, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2013; BA, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2011.