Matteo Zupancic

Matteo Zupancic is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor (RTT) in German Literature (GERM-01/B) at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa. He is also a Fellow at the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies and an affiliate of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH).

He earned his PhD jointly from the Universities of Pisa and Tübingen in 2022, following his studies at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore (2013–2018). His dissertation received the 2023 Colombaria Prize in Historical and Philosophical Sciences. From 2023 to 2025, he held research positions at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome and the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies. He held research fellowships at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach in 2019 and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar in 2025.

His research focuses on literary reflections on language and their connections with philosophical and religious thought in German-speaking modernism, with particular attention to mystical theories of language and literary depictions of the limits of representation. He also investigates the relationship between literary form and scientific knowledge, especially morphology, metamorphosis and biological thought in Goethe and early Romanticism. Further interests include genetic philology and digital scholarly editing, the epistemological dimensions of literature, and the relationships between literature and cinema.

He is a senior member of the international project "Goethes Venezianische Epigramme – Kritische digitale Edition", involving the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies, the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. He also participates in the international project "1933: Die “Zerstörung der deutschen Literatur” and the research group "Leben beschreiben" (Padova), which explores life writing from the Goethezeit to the twentieth century. His previous collaborations include the IISG projects "Il cinema tedesco occidentale in Italia (1949–1989)", with research on Werner Herzog, and "Le radici mediterranee dello spirito europeo".

He serves on the editorial boards of "Odradek" and "Goethiana", and is Corresponding Editor for eighteenth-century German literature at "The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies". He also sits on the coordinating committee of Officina della Germanistica. At Pisa, he teaches German literature and contributes to academic writing courses and teacher training.