Leonardo is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. His research lies at the intersection of ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, and the theory of the novel. At the CEH, Leonardo is working on his dissertation, titled “The collective protagonist and the contemporary world-novel.” The “modern” novel, with its individualistic and nationalistic bourgeois roots, is often considered inadequate to represent today’s global crises, their temporal and spatial scales, their systemic forms of violence. Leonardo argues that certain contemporary novels, or world-novels, overcome these narrative constraints by replacing the single hero at the heart of the text with a more collective protagonist. In the effort to merge the recent debate on world-literature with the ecocritical analysis of Anthropocene fictions, he reads these world-novels as symptoms of the socio-environmental violence of capitalist modernization in various peripheral zones. By comparing novels that question the genre’s individualistic and anthropocentric paradigm, he tries to understand if their collective protagonists push them to envision new modes of multispecies solidarity and environmental justice. During his PhD, Leonardo has been teaching classes in Anglophone and Italian Environmental Literatures at Hunter College, NY and Queens College, NY. 

Contact
Leonardo Nolé
PhD Candidate | Dept. of Comparative Literature - The Graduate Center, CUNY
Teaching Fellow | Dept. of English and Dept. of Romance Languages - Hunter College
lnole@gradcenter.cuny.edu