Elena Sottilotta

• Affiliated Researcher, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge

Dr Elena Sottilotta is an Affiliated Researcher at University of Cambridge, MMLL Faculty. A Fulbright alumna, she obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge with a research project in women's studies, folklore and fairy-tale studies. In 2024, she was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and a Fellow of the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities in New York.

Her areas of expertise encompass women's and gender studies, the history of folklore, fairy-tale studies, children's literature, comparative literature and intermedia studies. She is the author of Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her monograph centres women's roles as collectors, compilers and tellers of folk and fairy tales in European peripheries during the long nineteenth century.

She also has a keen interest in the poetics and politics of adaptation of fairy tales and children's literature in contemporary media. She has presented her work at numerous international conferences and has been invited as guest lecturer in several universities in Europe and in the United States. Her broader interests include Italian, Irish and Anglo-American literary crossings and oral history from the nineteenth century to the present, translation studies, language pedagogy and Mediterranean island studies.

She co-edits the Utah State University Press series Wonder Tales: Critical and Creative Approaches with Cristina Bacchilega and Veronica Schanoes. She serves on the Scientific Committee of the European Fairy Tale Route (Council of Europe) and acts as a consultant for the International Fairy-Tale Filmography (University of Winnipeg, Canada).

• –present Research Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge

MENAFN22092026000199003603ID1111697607