Dr. Isabella Villanova

Short Bio

Isabella Villanova (PhD) is an Academy Fellow at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Vienna, Department of African Studies. Her first monograph, entitled “The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance”, will be published by Peter Lang in 2025. From 2023 to 2024, Isabella served as an Adjunct Professor of English and Anglophone literatures at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, and before this, was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds. In 2021, she earned a PhD in African women’s writing from the University of Padua, where she also gave lectures in African literature both while pursuing her doctoral degree and afterwards. In 2022, her PhD thesis was selected as a winner in the ‘Literature and Culture’ category in the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Isabella is also an editorial assistant for the international journal From the European South. Her research interests cover African and Black diaspora literature, contemporary women’s fiction and non-fiction, postcolonial literature, gender and queer studies, affect studies, feminist studies, intersectionality theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, and urban studies.

Selected Publications

• Villanova, Isabella. (forthcoming). “Identity, Sexuality, and the New African Diaspora in the United States: A Conversation with Bisi Adjapon.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
• Villanova, Isabella. (2024). “Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women.” Altre Modernità/Other Modernities—Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 31: 147-164.
• Villanova, Isabella. (2022). “Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Gender and the Affective Dimensions of Sex Trafficking in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street.” Il Tolomeo—A Postcolonial Studies Journal 24: 215-234.
• Villanova, Isabella. (2022). “‘Voicing Creative Uprisings’: Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” De Genere—Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies 7: 91-105.
• Villanova, Isabella. (2018). “Deconstructing the ‘Single Story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” From the European South—A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 3: 85-98.

Project Description

My project, entitled “Temporal Intersections and Affective Tonalities: The Contemporary African Bildungsroman”, investigates how the African Bildungsroman might act as a critical site from which to engage broader conversations about affect, temporality, and intersectionality. I will draw from studies on the African and postcolonial Bildungsromane, concepts on temporality, approaches to affect theory, and the intersectionality perspective to examine a selected corpus of fiction published in English in the twenty-first century’s first two decades and set in different African cities (i.e. Harare, Lagos, Lusaka, and Johannesburg).

In my analysis, I will first explore the affective components of the characters’ urban experiences and focus on their relations with their communities. By examining the affective temporalities that shape individual and collective stories, I seek to apply a novel and conceptually productive lens to the African Bildungsroman. Second, in analysing women’s narratives, I will draw on the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to investigate how different axes of identity and power (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and class), through their entanglements with affective temporalities, create complex affective-temporal landscapes. Therefore, I will show how the African female Bildungsroman helps strengthen authors’ efforts to claim women’s human rights in Africa and beyond.