Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Serenella Iovino
2026-2027
Home institution
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Earth, environmental and climate sciences; Literature
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Cultural Studies; Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Serenella Iovino is James G. Hanes Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US). Her research moves across literature, philosophy, and environmental humanities, asking how stories shape the ways humans understand and inhabit the living world. Beginning with the philosophical novel and concepts of nature in the age of Goethe, her work has expanded to ecocriticism, environmental justice, landscape studies, and multispecies thought.
Her books include Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2013, with Serpil Oppermann), Ecocriticism and Italy (Bloomsbury, 2016; Italian edition Paesaggio civile, Il Saggiatore, 2022), and Italo Calvino's Animals (Cambridge University Press, 2021; Italian edition Gli animali di Calvino, Treccani, 2023). Several have received major awards, including the Modern Language Association and the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prizes. In 2025, she received the Seres Puentes Award from the UNESCO-sponsored Humanities for the Environment North American Observatory at Arizona State University (US), recognizing her contributions to the environmental humanities.
Serenella is also co-founder and co-editor of Cambridge University Press's Elements in Environmental Humanities and a regular contributor to the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, where she writes on literature, philosophy, and environmental issues for a broad public.
Research Project
Arks of the Mind: Animals and the Deep History of Imagination
This project explores the deep history of the human imagination, asking how long relationships with animals helped shape the emergence of the human mind.
Bringing together literature, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary research, Serenella Iovino’s project investigates this question in depth. Early humans did not simply observe animals: they learned from them, imagined them, followed their traces, and eventually transformed these encounters into stories, cave art, and myths.
The project proposes that myths can be understood as repositories of ecological memory, preserving ways of perceiving, understanding, and living with the natural world across generations. Stories about migrating animals or the changing seasons, for example, may have helped communities remember not only practical knowledge but also ways of understanding their place within the living world.
By connecting the environmental humanities—the study of how culture, literature, and history shape and are shaped by the natural world—with research on cognition and human evolution, the project offers a new perspective on the origins of imagination and on the enduring role of other species in the formation of culture, memory, and the human mind.
Research Interests:
human imagination; animals; literature; archeology; anthropology; psychology; evolutionary research