Dr Marta-Laura Cenedese | Associated Researcher

Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstraße 191, D-10117 Berlin
Email: marta.cenedese  ( at )  utu.fi Tel: +49(0) 30 / 20 93 70700
Website: http://https://www.utu.fi/en/people/marta-cenedese

Home Institution : University of Turku | Position : UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow (Guarantee for MSCA fellowship) | Disciplines : Literature |

Biography

Marta-Laura Cenedese is UKRI (MSCA Guarantee) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She studied at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and Sciences-Po Paris before completing a PhD in French and comparative literature at the University of Cambridge. Marta is a literary scholar specialising in postcolonial literatures, memory studies, critical medical humanities, queer death studies, and decolonial feminism. Her research has been published in Comparative Literature, Storyworlds, Thanatos, Journal of Medical Humanities, Modern and Contemporary France, and elsewhere. She is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021); editor of Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023); and co-editor (with Clio Nicastro) of Violence, Care, Cure: Self/Perceptions within the Medical Encounter (in press). She was the co-convenor of the SELMA Medical Humanities Seminar Series and coordinator of the study circle ‘Narrative and Violence’ (Nordic Summer University, 2020–2022). She is on the editorial board of Storyworlds. A Journal of Narrative Studies (University of Nebraska Press). Marta has been a visiting fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Humboldt University Berlin (2020) and at the Centre d’Histoire, Sciences-Po Paris (2023).

From “Small Stories” to “Communities of Care” With/In Narratives of Illness and Death (SMALLCOMM)

SMALLCOMM (https://medhumsplatform.org/labs/narrative-practices/projects/smallcomm/) explores how narratives of illness, death and bereavement are located at the intersection of community networks and narrativized by communities. How do communities narrate experiences of illness and death? What does community mean in this context–who and what is involved, and how? What narrative forms, structures and practices emerge? How do these narratives engage with and depart from larger cultural scripts? What are the wider cultural and theoretical implications of approaching illness and death narratives as a community practice? Focusing on the notion of ‘communities of care’ –complex human and non-human networks based on relational, reciprocal and emancipative affective practices– SMALLCOMM seeks to understand not only how these communities are built and how illness, dying and death may be mis/understood through narrative, but also how narrative shapes and mobilises practical responses to experiences of pain, loss and grief. SMALLCOMM contributes to a growing body of scholarship on illness narrative that seeks to account for greater complexity (of experience as well as of narrative form and context): (i) bringing death studies in to dialogue with critical medical humanities; (ii) focusing on the narrative products and practices of communities; (iii) developing a new analytical framework for collective narratives. It employs a mixed-method approach: (a) A hermeneutical- phenomenological study explores social and affective interactions, and the tension between experientiality and interpretation, in a selection of literary and visual narratives of illness and death (2014–2022); (b) A qualitative study using reading/writing workshops (built on narrative medicine and participatory design methods) addresses the ways in which people have come collectively to articulate difficult experiences of illness and death.
Publications

Cenedese, Marta-Laura and Clio Nicastro (eds). [In press.] Violence, Care, Cure: Self/perceptions within the Medical Encounter. London, New York: Routledge 

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2024. ‘The Other Side of Abortion: The Doctor-Writer in Martin Winckler’s La Vacation (1989).’ D. Carlini-Versini (ed.), ‘L’avortement dans la littérature et les arts français contemporains.’ Modern and Contemporary France 33:4 https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2024.2302812

Cheston, Katherine A., Marta-Laura Cenedese, Angela Woods. 2023. ‘The Long or the Post of it? Temporality, Suffering and Uncertainty in Narratives following Covid-19.’ K. Zeiler, A. Bredström and S. Morberg Jämterud (eds), ‘Medical Humanities and Covid/Post-Covid Challenges.’ Journal of Medical Humanities https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09824-y

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2023. ‘Gendered Cyberviolence in Myriam Leroy’s Les Yeux rouges (2019): Community, Agency, and Politics.’ Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 13:1 (2021), 117– 146

Cenedese, Marta-Laura and Miłosz Wojtyna (eds). 2023. ‘Making Sense of Violence in the Digital Age.’ Storyworlds: A Journal Of Narrative Studies 13.1 (2021), viii–xii

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2023. ‘Reimagining Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française: Circulation, Postmemory, and Reparative Reading.’ M. Gamper, J. Müller-Tamm, D. Wachter, J. Wrobel (eds), Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation/The Value of Literary Circulation. Berlin: J. B. Metzler, pp. 115–132 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-65544-3_8

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2023. ‘Reflections on the Feminist Archive: The Case of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.’ S. Myrebøe, V. Pàlma∂òttir and J. Sjöstedt (eds), Feminist Philosophy: Time, History and the Transformation of Thought. Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, pp. 127–144 https://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1762191/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Cenedese, Marta-Laura (ed.). 2023. Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)Constructions of Violence(s). Berlin: Logos Verlag (ISBN: 978-3-8325-5285-5) https://www.logos-verlag.de/cgi-bin/engbuchmid?isbn=5285&lng=eng&id=

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2021. ‘Home and Exile in Irène Némirovsky’s Novella Les Mouches d’automne’. Open Philosophy 4, 211–223 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2020-0172/html

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2021. Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. London: Palgrave Macmillan (ISBN: 978-3-030-44202-6)

Saramo, Samira and Marta-Laura Cenedese (eds). 2020. ‘Connective Histories of Death.’ Thanatos 9:2 (pp. 161, 6 peer-reviewed articles + introduction) https://thanatosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/thanatos-2-2020-final.pdf

Cenedese, Marta-Laura. 2018. ‘(Instrumental) Narratives of Postcolonial Rememory: Intersectionality and Multidirectional Memory.’ Storyworlds. A Journal of Narrative Studies 10:1–2, pp. 95–116

Cenedese, Marta. 2018. ‘Finding Home, a Multimodal Narrative of Syrian Refugees’ Everyday Life.’ entanglements, 2(1), pp. 89–96 https://entanglementsjournal.org/finding-home-a-multimodal-narrative-of-syrian-refugees-everyday-life/