Valerio Amoretti
Assistant Professor
- Education:
- Ph.D. Columbia University: English and Comparative Literature, 2019.
- M.A. University of York: Modern and Contemporary Literature, 2011.
- M.Sc. University College London (Anna Freud Centre): Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2010.
- B.Sc. University College London: Medicinal Chemistry, 2006.
Valerio Amoretti is an Assistant Professor in the English Department and a core faculty member of the Literature and Mind research center at UC Santa Barbara. His research is centered on the intersection of literary studies, psychology and neuroscience, bringing together insights from clinical psychotherapy and laboratory science in order to understand the unconscious and affective dimensions of our encounters with the literary arts.
As a literary scholar, he is interested in the novel from modernism to today, with particular emphases on experimental prose, the postwar period, European literature and auto-fiction.
He trained in chemistry and neuroscience at University College London before pursuing graduate degrees in psychoanalysis and literary studies at the Anna Freud Centre (MSc, 2010) and the University of York (MA, 2011). He completed his doctoral training in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (2019), where he was also a Fellow of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and part of the inaugural cohort of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. Between 2020 and 2023 he was a postdoctoral Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia, the first researcher from literary studies appointed to the program. He joined UCSB in 2025.
His current research branches into three areas: the entanglement of the concept of self and the act of writing; experimentalism as a mode of thinking; and mind-wandering as an act of resistance in the digital age. His work has appeared in boundary 2 and Modern Language Quarterly.
Research Areas
- c. 1945-present
- Cognitive Studies and/or Psychoanalysis