Dr Vandi specialises in the study of Dante Alighieri, the contemporary reception of Dante, the twentieth-century Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, and satire. She also has strong research interests in 20th- and 21st-century Italian and comparative literature and culture, stylistics and rhetoric, reception studies, humour studies, and media studies. Dr Vandi's first monograph, "Satura. Varietà per verità in Dante and Gadda"['Satura. Truth through Variety in Dante and Gadda'] (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021), is the first comparative study on Dante and Gadda. It proposes a new critical category, satura, to investigate and connect the two authors' works. The original name of satire is used to extend beyond that genre two of its key aspects (variety of form and content and a mission to unveil the truth) and to identify them and their relation as fundamental structures in the works of Dante and Gadda. Whilst coming to a thorough reassessment of the traditional way of interpreting the relationship between these two cornerstones of Italian literature, Satura offers a reflection on broader matters in literary criticism, and in particular on the relationship between the formal structure of the text and its ethical-gnoseological potentiality. Her second monograph project, "'Eros and Priapus': Gadda, Fascism, and Truth", aims to reassess Gadda's controversial relationship with fascism, to investigate his use of satire and his related commitment to truth, and to place this discourse for the first time within an international context. After the 2016 publication of the original uncensored manuscript (1944-45) of Gadda's "Eros e Priapo", a psychoanalytical/political/historical/satirical treatise-invective, a comparison with its first edition (1967) allows for a new understanding of this uniquely complex text, by also considering it as a case study of the multiple duplicities which characterise the satiric genre and its truth claims. Dr Vandi is also currently developing a project entitled "Naked and Layered. Satire, Truth, and Power": an intermedial, comparative, and interdisciplinary investigation of satire's potential to shape human thinking, change human behaviour, and create community and/or barriers. The focus of the project is on the the intrinsic double nature of satire and on the ways in which these duplicities connect with the issue of unveiling the truth. "Naked and Layered" starts by considering Italy as a case study, acknowledging the centrality of the Italian peninsula for the development of this ubiquitous 'non-genre': from Latin fescennini and satura, Juvenal, and then Dante, Ariosto, up to Gadda, Flaiano, Fo, and political satire from 1994 to the present day, spanning from literature to theatre, cinema, TV, and social media.
