Isabella Villanova

External Contributor • Scholar

Isabella Villanova is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her current research project, AFROPEMOTIONS, examines the cultural and political implications of emotions in 21st-century Afro-European women’s fiction (2003–2023). It is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2025–2027; grant no. 101212133) and a Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship (2027–2028; grant no. 12AE626N).

Isabella is currently a Visiting Scholar at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. She has previously held postdoctoral positions at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth and in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. In 2023–24, she served as an Adjunct Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and, prior to that, was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds. She earned her PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua in 2021.

Her research interests include Afro-European literature, African and diasporic literature, contemporary women’s writing, postcolonial literature, gender and queer studies, affect studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial and decolonial thinking.

Selected publications

Monograph

Villanova, Isabella. The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance. Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2026.

Peer-reviewed articles

Villanova, Isabella. “Identity, Sexuality, and the New African Diaspora in the United States: A Conversation with Bisi Adjapon.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 3, 2025, pp. 400–412.

Villanova, Isabella. “Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women.” Altre Modernità/Other Modernities—Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, no. 31, 2024, pp. 147–164.

Villanova, Isabella. “Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Gender and the Affective Dimensions of Sex Trafficking in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street.” Il Tolomeo—A Postcolonial Studies Journal, vol. 24, 2022, pp. 215–234.

Villanova, Isabella. “‘Voicing Creative Uprisings’: Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” De Genere—Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies, vol. 7, 2022, pp. 91–105.

Villanova, Isabella. “Deconstructing the ‘Single Story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” From the European South—A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities, vol. 3, 2018, pp. 85–98.

Contact

Email: Isabella.Villanova@vub.be 

External links 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5355-9455 

Institutional webpage: https://clic.research.vub.be/isabella-villanova-0 

Academia webpage: https://vubirelec.academia.edu/IsabellaVillanova 

ResearchGate webpage: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabella-Villanova?ev=hdr_xprf