Chiara Fontana

Chiara Fontana is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Bologna. She earned her PhD in Arabic philology and literature from Sapienza University of Rome in 2018 and has since held roles at several national and international institutions, including Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Postdoctoral Fellow), the Orient-Institut Beirut (Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow), Columbia University (MESAAS, Project Research Associate), the University of Exeter (Collaborator, Leverhulme Project A Sorcerer’s Handbook), the University of Birmingham (Associate Researcher, ERC GlobaLIT), and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (Research Associate). Since 2025, she has collaborated with Freie Universität Berlin on the KALiMaT encyclopedic project on Arabic rhetoric and poetics. Active in the Arab world since 2014, she held a MIUR Research Fellowship in Tunisia in 2017. Her research focuses on Arabic rhetoric, prosody, and linguistics in premodern and modern literature, with attention to intertextuality and canon formation. She also serves as Orientation Delegate and is a member of the Communication Committee.