A. (Alberto) Godioli, PhD

Alberto Godioli is Associate Professor in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen, and Programme Director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa; from 2013 to 2015 he was a Newton International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

His main research field is humor and satire across media. He has authored the monographs Laughter from Realism to Modernism (Oxford: Legenda / Routledge, 2015) and La scemenza del mondo (Pisa: ETS, 2011, Edinburgh Gadda First Prize), as well as several articles and book chapters on theories and practices of humor from the 18th century to the present.

His current work focuses on humor and free speech jurisprudence, in dialogue with stakeholders such as Columbia Global Freedom of Expression and Cartoonists' Rights Network International. In 2021 he was awarded an NWO Vidi Grant for his project 'Humor in Court' (original title 'Forensic Humor Analysis', 2022-2027). This interdisciplinary project aims to set the basis for a fairer, more consistent approach to humor in legal cases concerning freedom of expression, based on insights coming from humanities-based humor research. As part of his NWO project, Alberto has published the report Humor and Free Speech: A Comparative Analysis of Global Case Law (with J. Young, Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, Special Collection, 2023) and co-edited the HUMOR special issue Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests (with B. Adriaensen, A. Bricker and T. Laros, 2022).

Alberto is also the founder and co-director of the Forum for Humor and the Law (ForHum) and of the OSL research group Literature, Law and Society, as well as the Principal Investigator of the NETIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking project 'Cartoons in Court' (main host: Institute for Advanced Study CEU Budapest, 2020-2023). His research areas also include Modernism, Law and Literature, Posthumanism, Narrative Theory and Cognitive Literary Studies.

Founder and co-director, Forum for Humor and the Law (forhum.org), 2022-present
Expert, Global Freedom of Expression (Columbia University), 2023-present
Member of the Young Academy Groningen, 2022-present
Programme Director, Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), 2018-present
Board Member, Society for Pirandello Studies, 2018-present
PhD Board Member (Italian Studies), Ca' Foscari University, Venice, 2022-present