Office Arts 3S6
Tel +64 3 479 8694
Email cecilia.novero@otago.ac.nz
Cecilia is an Italian-born, New Zealand-based scholar in the humanities. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and subsequently taught German Language and Culture, European Studies, and Women’s Studies at various higher education institutions in the US before moving to the University of Otago.
Her interdisciplinary research – with a focus on Visual Culture – has been awarded grants from Erasmus+, the Volkswagen Stiftung, and the DAAD, among others. She has presented at international conferences and published in fields as varied as Food Studies, Animal Studies, Avant-Garde Studies, Cinema Studies, Travel Literature, and Contemporary Art.
After the publication of her book, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Cecilia has edited and/or co-edited two journal issues on photography and three volumes, respectively, on German eco-criticism, the German Democratic Republic, and recently Germanophone Surrealism.
She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Avant-Garde Studies; Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture; The Animal Studies Journal; Junctures: The Journal of Thematic Dialogues; International Journal of Gastronomy; and Otago German Studies.
Research / Supervision Interests
Cecilia's research and teaching interests are the interdisciplinary fields of Food Studies, Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities. She pursues these interests by focusing on Visual Culture, mostly 20th and 21st-century European cinema and the art and texts produced by the historical Avant-garde and the Neo-Avant-garde movements. In her scholarship Cecilia has also explored the material role that nature and non-human animals play in literary and philosophical texts, in particular post-humanism. She examines all texts, whether art, film or literature, comparatively and cross-culturally. Cecilia has an abiding interest in the literature and art from the former German Democratic Republic, travel literature, adaptation theory, gender and queer theory, as well as critical theory – especially but not limited to the works of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno. She is an advocate of the public humanities, both as theoretical approach and as practice.
Cecilia has co-supervised several theses and dissertations, ranging from the work of individual authors or artists (Christa Wolf, Jean Cocteau, Franz Marc) to periods, genres, and/or theoretical issues (Weimar Republic fairy tales; GDR novels and the mother figure; masculinity and German contemporary novels; space and gender in film; graffiti art in post-1989 Berlin, among others). Cecilia welcomes postgraduate students interested in any of the above fields.
Cecilia's profile can also be found here