Dr. Elio Baldi is assistant professor of Italian Studies and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He studied History and Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, followed by a six month stay in Bologna to study Italian History and Literature. Thereafter, he went on to do a Masters in Literature and Cultural Criticism at the Utrecht University and a Research Masters in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. From 2013 to 2016 he was a PhD-candidate and part-time teaching assistant at the University of Warwick.

Dr. Baldi's broader research interests include:

• (The reception of the works of) Italo Calvino
• (Italian) Science Fiction
• Science and Literature
• Interdisciplinarity
• Translation and Reception
• The 'Rebirth of the Author' in media and paratext
• Feminist Utopia, Ecofiction and Science Fiction
• Authorial personae (escpecially in the works of Fernando Pessoa)
• Metacriticism/ Discourse Analysis applied to Literary Criticism
• Church bells and Urbanization

The 2020 monograph The Author in Criticism: Italo Calvino's Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom focuses on the reception of the works of Italo Calvino in a comparative perspective. By combining insights from paratextual studies, discourse analysis, metacriticism, reception theory, Bourdieu's sociology of culture and celebrity studies the research investigates the dynamics of modern authorial representation and self-representation, which is especially relevant in the case of Italo Calvino, who besides being a respected and quickly canonized author, is also well-known as critic, editor and journalist. This multiplication of roles has provided him with a quasi-omnipresent voice in Italian literary criticism which is highly significant; investigation thereof sheds light on the way even dead authors (as well as The Dead Author) can shape their authorial image by contributing directly or indirectly to it through different media. Moreover, on a more general level, the research is aimed towards a better understanding of the factual ways in which reception, canonization and institutionalization take place.

The 2023 edited volume Circulation, Translation and Reception Across Borders: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities Around the World, co-edited with Prof. Cecilia Schwartz. The volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world.   The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications.

In 2023 a new Dutch translation appeared of Calvino's Le città invisibili, co-translated with Dr. Linda Pennings.

Among the published articles are also analyses on Dante, Shakespeare, Carmelo Bene, Giacomo Leopardi, Fernando Pessoa and Behrouz Boochani.

• Teacher of the Year University of Amsterdam 2018-2019
• Teacher of the Year Humanities UvA 2018-2019
• BKO (Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs) (2017)
• PGA Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (November 2015)
• HRC Doctoral Fellowship (February 2015) for conference on Short Story cycles (February 2016).
• Thesis Prize WIS (Dutch and Belgian Society for Italian Studies) for Master Thesis on Calvino, 07-11-2014
• Nomination for the Horst Frenz Prize at the ACLA conference, March 2014
• 2 week stay in Rome for research at the Royal Dutch Institute in April 2014; one month in March-April 2015