Isabella Villanova is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her current research project, AFROPEMOTIONS, explores the cultural and political implications of emotions in Afro-European women’s literature. The project has been awarded both a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders. It is therefore funded by the MSCA for the first two years (September 2025–August 2027) and by the FWO for the third year (September 2027–October 2028). Isabella has previously held postdoctoral positions at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth and in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. In 2023–24, she served as an Adjunct Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and, prior to that, was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Leeds. In 2021, she earned her PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua. 

Research Interests: 

• Afro-European literature
• African and Afro-diasporic literature
• Affect studies
• Contemporary women's writing
• Gender and queer studies
• Postcolonial and decolonial studies

EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) research project (current project):

• “AFROPEMOTIONS: Rethinking Emotions, Inequality, and Resistance through Afropean Women’s Fiction”

Publications (selected)

2026

Villanova, Isabella. 2026. The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance. Oxford: Peter Lang. [Forthcoming]

2025

Villanova, Isabella. 2025. “Identity, Sexuality, and the New African Diaspora in the United States: A Conversation with Bisi Adjapon.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 3: 400-412.

2024

Villanova, Isabella. 2024. “Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women.” Other Modernities—Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 31: 147-164.

2022

Villanova, Isabella. 2022. “Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Gender and the Affective Dimensions of Sex Trafficking in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street.” Il Tolomeo—A Postcolonial Studies Journal 24: 215-234.

Villanova, Isabella. 2022. “‘Voicing Creative Uprisings’: Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” De Genere—Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies 7: 91-105.

2018 

Villanova, Isabella. 2018. “Deconstructing the ‘Single Story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” From the European South—A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 3: 85-98.