I’m a literary scholar and writer, currently Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at NYU. My scholarship is rooted in modern Italian literature, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century polymath Giacomo Leopardi. I also write on topics ranging from horror studies and the philosophy of technology to the role of internet culture in American politics. Most of my publications can be found here.

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Ordinary Horror: The Aesthetics of Deformation from Leopardi to Ferrante (Forthcoming with Stanford University Press, September 2026)

My first book studies how “ordinary horror” — the horror haunting our world that we may encounter firsthand — manifests in our lives and literature, and unpacks its significance for our time. Drawing from phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy, I reframe horror as a common human experience tied to a sense of forced powerlessness, and analyze its presence in literary texts that are not part of the horror genre. I show that literature can convey horror’s experiential magnitude through what I call “aesthetics of deformation” — scenes where otherwise realistic texts depart from verisimilitude and embrace a more disquieting style. Upon shifting the focus from matters of genre to more experiential ones, horror appears as if hiding in plain sight across literary canons: centering on modern Italian literature, I show a tradition not typically associated with horror to be, in fact, rife with it.

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CV (December 2025)

andrea.capra@nyu.edu

https://nyu.academia.edu/andreacapra

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