Cristina Carnemolla

Cristina Carnemolla is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies specializing in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Duke University. Her interdisciplinary research brings together transnational literary studies, environmental humanities, and intersectionality to examine realism and naturalism in the Italian, Spanish, Peruvian, and Argentine traditions from a comparative and transnational perspective. Supported by an Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Development Grant, her current book project, Harvesting Truth: Southern Realism as an Extractivist Aesthetic, explores how realist literature shaped narratives of race, regional difference, and nation-building across southern Europe and Latin America.

At McGill, she teaches courses on Italian and Hispanic literature and culture, gender studies, environmental humanities, and nineteenth-century intellectual history. Her teaching and research are informed by a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and to the connections between literature, society, and the environment.

Dr. Carnemolla has published on realism and naturalism in Italy and Spain, women writers of the long nineteenth century, Antonio Gramsci, and ecocriticism. She was a finalist for the RnB4Culture ISSNAF Young Investigators Award in 2025 and a McGill Sustainability Education Fellow (2023-2024). She is a founding member and elected president of the Société internationale gramscienne–Canada / International Gramsci Society–Canada.

She is currently accepting graduate students interested in nineteenth-century Italian and Hispanic studies, environmental humanities, political ecology, and comparative approaches to literature and culture.