Luna Sarti

Luna Sarti is a 3rd -year graduate student in the Italian Studies program of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research addresses the post- human attempts to rewrite animal subjectivity and vegetable living, with a special focus on literature and cinema. She is also interested in issues related to the representation of the Italian landscape, particularly regarding the complex relationships between the aesthetics of tourism and the exploitation of material sites. In preparation for her dissertation, she is working on a project of waterly reading that addresses the nature and depiction of water in the arts and in the sciences, focusing on three important sites in Italy: the Tiber river, the Arno river, and the Venice lagoon. Her focus is on the differences associated with the aesthetic reproduction of the water flows and the biology of the actual water, its contents, its mistreatment, its course of movement and other elements that remain on the margins of representation and that are ‘hidden’ in both visual and literary representations but reemerge in the sciences.