The Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto invites you to a book talk on the works of renowned Italian author Elena Ferrante.

Join authors professors Roberta Cauchi-Santoro, and Russell Killbourn, as they presents his latest work

Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality in the works of Elena Ferrante

From L’amore molesto to La vita bugiarda degli adulti

Thursday September 24, 2026 | 6:30 pm ET

Istituto Italiano di Cultura

496 Huron Street | Toronto

Free event – Registration required

To register on Eventbrite click here

The most fertile path open to Ferrante scholars is that of observing her work through the lens of a close analysis in which authors’ identities are diffracted and margins between texts are dissolved. This collection of essays, Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality in the works of Elena Ferrante, edited by Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Russell Kilbourn, remarkably meets this challenge, as Ferrante’s texts are examined in adaptation, outside the orderly narrative and interpretative frame that the author created through the invention of her name. Framing Ferrante fills a gap in Ferrante studies, providing the first scholarly collection of essays entirely dedicated to adaptations of Elena Ferrante’s novels: Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto (1995), Roberto Faenza’s I giorni dell’abbandono (2005), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021), and the television series: Saverio Costanzo et al.’s HBO adaptation of L’amica geniale (2018-2024) and Edoardo De Angelis’s Netflix series La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2023).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Roberta Cauchi-Santoro is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at St. Jerome’s, University of Waterloo. She has co-edited Ferrante Unframed (2021) and authored Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett (2016). She published articles on Ferrante, Anglo-Italian literary relations and experiential learning in the Italian classroom. Her research interests include psychoanalytic feminist criticism and Leopardi studies.

Russell J.A. Kilbourn is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. His books include: eminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media (2023), The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino (2020); W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption (2018); as well as books on memory studies and cinema. Upcoming projects are on Alice Rohrwacher and posthumanist memory.