Michele Cometa

 Università degli Studi di Palermo (Italy)

The anxious storyteller: narrative as unburdening

2024–2025: Fall

Michele Cometa is a Professor of Cultural Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. His research interests include Aesthetics (especially word-text relations, iconotexts, and optical devices in literature), 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-Century literature and culture (German cultural history, the age of Goethe, Romanticism) and Biopoetics (cognitive bases of narrativity and picture-making, literature, and evolution). He has edited the Italian translation of many classics of aesthetics and literary works.

He has been a fellow of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2015) and of the Italian Academy (2015–2016) and held the “De Sanctis” Chair at the ETH Zurich (2022).

In 2019 he was awarded the city of Stendal’s Winckelmann Medal. In 2017 he was awarded the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize for the book Why Stories Help us to Live (Raffaello Cortina, 2016), which is the outcome of research undertaken at the Italian Academy in 2015–2016. During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will focus on the philosophical and cognitive meaning of anxiety for a theory of narrative.

Website: www.michelecometa.it